Dogs Never Lie

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

~ W.H. Auden

Madison would be freaking out right now if she were here to see this flood.  She would be tempted to get in the creek but she would hesitate; tuned into the water’s raging energy; connected to the heightened turmoil around her.  She was sensitive like that; dialed in before others even knew. 

 

Like the time she made a big fuss of dragging her blanket and pillow around to my side of the bed so she could sleep next to me.  I noticed the change right away, and I wondered out loud if perhaps I had cancer, or some terrible malaise, because I had heard about dogs that can sense these things.  A few days later I learned that I was pregnant.  She continued to drag her bed around to my side for weeks until one day she didn’t; and, again, I wondered out loud if everything was okay with the baby.  A few days later I miscarried.  She didn’t drag her bed around to my side after that, but she stayed close and loved me through my tears.

 

One time she charged to the edge of the yard and scared the dickens out of our neighbor.  She could be intimidating with her stocky frame—almost 100 pounds and mostly muscle—but Madison just wanted to say hello.  We knew her approach could use some work; still, she went too far that time and she knew better, so when her daddy scolded her bad choice she put herself in time-out; cowering on the little mat in front of the soaking tub in the master bath, shaking and shivering in her remorse.  She wanted to do right, she really wanted to do right, and it killed her to think that she had disappointed us.

 

But she could never really disappoint us, not for long anyway.  No matter the infraction, just one look at her cute little mug and soon we were laughing at her heartfelt expressions.  She could be a real drama queen sometimes.  Mostly, we just loved her and cherished every minute we shared. 

 

Before I came along she was her daddy’s best friend, but she welcomed me with loving paws and big wet kisses.  She even let me paint her toenails in my favorite shades –“Party-in-my-Cabana” pink for the summer and “Fa-La-La-Luscious” for the holidays.  From the way she watched me beautify, I imagined that she secretly wanted to join me in my primping.  And when she walked down the aisle as the honorary ring bearer for our New Year’s Eve nuptials, wearing a big red flower behind her ear, I couldn’t have loved her more if I had given birth to her myself.  I hope she knew that.

 

When she left her condo in the city for mountain dwelling, we teased that she was living the high life in her new retirement home.  More than bacon and eggs—more than anything—she loved being outdoors, and she moved freely between meditations in the sun, chasing sticks and mindless rambling by the creek.  Madison taught me so much about living, about the joy of routine and unconditional love, about seizing each moment and never being afraid to ask for what you want.   I envied her life.

 

Sometimes I still hear the tap of her nails on the hardwood floors and I turn to call her name.  Then I remember.  But like the whispering wind that moves the trees and urges the water downstream, we’ll carry her loving spirit in our hearts forever. 

______________________________

Photos by Lori Kennedy Photography.  (c) 2012 Lori Kennedy.  www.lorikennedy.co

 

The Bright Side

Promise Yourself . . .

To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.  

To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.

To make all your friends feel that there is something in them. 

To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.

 

To think only of the best, work only for the best and to expect only the best.  

To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others are you are about your own.

 

To forget the mistakes of the past and to press on to the greater achievements of the future. 

To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.  

To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.

 

To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

~The Optimist Creed, Optimist International

I once quit the Optimist Club because it was too negative!

New to the Gulf Coast of Florida, I had looked for a good civic group to join that would be meaningful, engaging, and helpful in learning about my community while meeting like-minded others.  Hey, I’m an optimist, I thought; what better group to join than the Optimist Club!  Then one day, a few months in, the President of the chapter came up with this “brilliant” idea to increase membership:  we would take turns carrying around a brick until each member brought in at least one new member.  Now I’m sure this doesn’t represent all chapters of this wonderful club, but WOW!  What a heavy load!  I barely knew anyone in town—part of the reason I had joined the group in the first place—and after an unsuccessful attempt to get a waiver from this dismal approach, I quit.

Not entirely surprising because I tend to run from the negative, choosing instead those friends and associations that lift me up and inspire with positivity.  A bit of a dichotomy, really, when I consider the way that I have to approach my work as a lawyer—looking at the contract, deal or business strategy with a critical eye, which allows me to consider all potential outcomes—good and bad—and advise my clients of the consequences of their decisions.  Yet for much of my life, when making personal decisions, I brushed aside anything negative, focusing only on the great and wonderful outcomes that would surely follow my next great step.  This is a poor business plan and a terrible life strategy because when things run amok, as they sometimes do, instead of working out as I envision, I have a tough time adjusting to the reality.

I read somewhere that having an over-abundance of optimism in the “it-won’t-happen-to-me” sort of mindset can be detrimental to our sense of wellbeing, and as harmful to longevity as high blood pressure and cholesterol!  In fact, studies have shown that those who operate with extreme optimism experience more difficulty rebounding from set backs, which I have experienced first hand, because we get stuck on a mental track of “I can’t believe that happened to me!  Why me?”

So a little worry can be helpful when channeled into productive action, like having a Plan B or creating a Will or making peace with getting older while you’re still young, or allowing your thoughts to follow the chain of "what if" while maintaining faith that no matter what happens, you're going to be okay—all great building blocks for our peace of mind; and very different from dwelling in the negative, which we know causes excessive stress, impacts our health and affects our mind and spirit in often undesirable and unintended ways.     

What kind of bricks are you carrying?  

An Unlikely Pair

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.

~Abraham Lincoln

“You listen here girl, I don’t know what kind of little lawyer games you think you’re playing, but you’re running with the big boys now!”   He boomed through the phone in response to my letter requesting that he produce certain documents to support our client’s deal.  Red-rage raced through my body, from the scalp down, touching my ears, and setting my chest on fire.  How dare he speak to me this way, this two-bit, good old boy lawyer!

Only two years out of law school, I had been thrown into the fire with this deal to help my client purchase a restaurant and nightclub from a well-known business owner represented by none other than this J. Don Ridell, Esquire, now on the phone yelling at me!  What I wanted to do was rip that guy a new one!  Jump up and down and pound him on the head; tell him that I was a lawyer just the same as he and defend my right to vigorously represent my client. 

Perhaps because we didn’t have the luxury of time to dicker over such trivial things, and I didn’t want to get fired, somehow, I found the will to simply restate my request.  “No games here.  My client wants to buy your client’s business and they want to close fast.  Now my guy wants me to give this deal my blessing and I’m not going to do it until you turn over those stock certificates and the corporate books.”  Click.  He hung up on me. 

I seethed.  I knew I wasn’t over-lawyering this stock purchase.  If anything I wanted to slam on the breaks, take our time; what’s the rush?  But they had an agenda and I knew I would be committing malpractice if I didn’t do some basic due diligence.  So I stuck to my guns and called my client to tell him where we stood. 

An hour later Mr. Ridell begrudgingly called back and told us to be at his office by noon.  I had heard stories of this J. Don Ridell and other rogue lawyers who had had the run of the place long before it became a resort town with high-rise condominiums, nightclubs and top law firms.  A criminal lawyer by trade, he was stepping up to handle a stock purchase for his best client, but until that moment I had never met him or had any dealings with him.  Intimidated, I packed my briefcase and headed to his office.

I saw his boots first, wingtip leather all shined up with some fancy studs on them; and as my eyes traveled up to the top of his six foot-five head, I saw his jeans with matching studded belt buckle and bolo tie—the consummate cowboy, this one—made evermore complete by a headful of white hair and small strips of surgical tape in the corners of both eyes supported by bruised, swollen pockets beneath.  I relaxed a little, breathed deep, somehow comforted by the idea that this big bad man had just had a little cosmetic surgery.  He sized me up in my expensive little lawyer suit and off we went to his conference room, with barely a word between us.

As it turned out, his client didn’t own the stock after all because he had transferred it all to his 20-some grandchildren who were scattered, along with the stock certificates, all over the country.  We wouldn’t be closing any time soon, that was certain, but for the first time, appearances and judgments aside, we began working together to make this deal happen.  

Later, we walked downtown to discuss pay-off of the business loans with the bank, only to return to a locked office.  Brilliant!  What now?  My briefcase and car keys were inside, so I had to stick around and help him break into this one-story-brick-ranch-styled-home-turned-office.  Sure, the ice had thawed between us that afternoon, but I wasn’t prepared to shove his Wrangler-wearing butt through the conference room window.  

There he was, stuck and distressed, bossing me around from that awkward bent-at-the waist-crunch position he was sort of hanging in with one leg touching the office floor and the other bent at the knee, jammed in the window sill by that wingtip boot.  I tried to contain myself but soon lost control to my laughter.  I was laughing so hard and crying and pretty much useless to help this guy.  Then he started laughing too…and farting…there, stuck in the window, which made me laugh even harder; him too.  Yet something in his jolly laughter dislodged him from the window and he fell to the conference room floor.  Within minutes I was in the office collecting my things and thanking him for an interesting afternoon.

We closed the deal—everyone was happy—and a real fondness had grown between Mr. Ridell and me in the process.  But I never saw him again until the year that I served as president of the local bar association, hosting an event for our judges and winding up my tenure there.  He made me cry with his compliment, he actually praised my mind and told me that working with me on that deal had changed him.  He apologized for being such a jerk.

This fabulously crazy encounter between a cowboy barrister and a little lawyer girl became one of my great lessons, again reminded that things are not always as they seem.  We think people are one way and they turn out to be quite different.  We make quick judgments based on superficial things and think we know all there is to know about each other, but we don’t.  Yet if we’re open and willing to be surprised, and laugh at our differences, we just might find ourselves part of an unlikely pair.

____________

** Names have been changed.

Don't Forget the Whiskey Whore

I had an inheritance from my [grand]father,

It was the moon and the sun.

And though I roam all over the world,

the spending of it is never done. 

~Ernest Hemmingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

(Artwork by A.L. Childress - year of creation unknown)

My friend Tim took one look at her hanging on my wall and said in his most dramatic, southern drawl, “Well she’s nothing but a whiskey whore…” summing up the scantily clad woman reclined against the sofa with a half-empty bottle of booze on the floor in front of her; and so she became known around our house.  But to my grandfather, she was an erotic gem; painted on a canvas torn from an old World War II military jeep and hidden beneath a bland landscape painted in gray, given to my grandfather as collateral for a $2 loan he made to the artist after the war. 

For years the Whiskey Whore had been concealed beneath that drab landscape, stashed in the basement of my grandfather’s house.  Then one day as we discussed art, I confided that many pieces in my personal collection were erotically inspired from cultures around the world.  He couldn’t resist the temptation to share his secret.  “There’s an erotic painting under there…” he whispered, pointing to the dull gray landscape.  I was certain that I had misunderstood. 

But I hadn’t.  Eager to share his treasure, my grandfather had placed the framed painting face down on the table and removed the back with a screwdriver, gently pulling the layers of canvas apart to reveal the vibrant Whiskey Whore underneath what appeared to be so dull and lifeless.  That’s when he told me the story of how he had won her by default for an unpaid debt.

He gave me the painting that day; he made me carry it out the back door, up the hill and round the house to my car so that my grandmother wouldn’t see.  But she had been looking out the kitchen window as I schlepped through the yard with the painting tucked under my arm and she knew straight away what I was hiding.  A bit of drama followed:  “Why Karl Mason!  What kind of grandfather gives a painting like that to his granddaughter?  I’ve never heard of such!”  Grandpa calmed her down as only he could while I quietly placed the painting in my car.  We never discussed it again.

Yet this controversial work of art has become so much more to me than paint on canvas.  It reminds me of the many layers of life waiting to be revealed—the vibrant colors of the soul—and the gentle wisdom my grandfather shared with me so freely in the time we spent together.  And though I’ve traveled the world and discovered my own great fortunes, this simple painting on tattered canvas hangs above our fireplace as a gentle reminder of the depth and breadth that is life.

It has also become a metaphor for remembering what matters most—is it the painting or the story behind the painting?  As my sweetheart reminds me from time-to-time when I get caught up in the chaos of life:  Don’t forget the Whiskey Whore!

COMMUNION

If ever there was a symbiotic relationship . . .

you know, like leaf hoppers and meat ants. . .

each of which thrives because of the existence of the other,

it's me and you, babe.   

Include me in your every thought, as I do you. 

P.S. - You have something in your teeth,
Love,

The Universe

(Mike Dooley, Notes from the Universe)

I’ve been thinking a lot about these symbiotic relationships or, more specifically, the mutualistic type where two organisms of different species “work together” to exist, each benefitting the other in some way and from the relationship as a whole. 

Consider the flower and the bee.  Furry winged friends buzz about from flower to flower, checking things out, gathering nectar, which they make into food, and collecting pollen, the flower’s great sperm, carrying it on their furry little bodies to the next flower.  The bees get yummy nectar to eat and the flowering plants reproduce.  It’s a win-win situation.

Or ponder the relationship between bacteria and humans.  It’s everywhere, really, and kind of gross, I think.  But in many ways this bacteria helps us along, like the intestinal kind, aiding us in digesting food that we couldn’t digest on our own.  The bacteria get to eat and we get help in breaking down the food we’ve already eaten.  Everyone’s happy!

In many environments, in fact, these mutual relationships between animals and plants are critical to the healthy organization of life and its processes.  Still, scientists say, no species acts completely altruistically towards another.  Instead, their relationships evolve when their paths cross and one manipulates the other for its own benefit.  True, both might benefit in the end, but it begins with the selfish motivation. 

We’re not so different, are we? 

My friend’s therapist swears that all of our relationships exist—and the way we operate within them—on some level, because we’re getting something out of it.  I resisted that thought at first. I prefer to believe that I do things like volunteer or help my neighbor because I’m a good person.  But truth be told, I do get something out of volunteering.  It elevates my mood, it gives me perspective and, ultimately, I feel better about my own life.  Not exactly manipulative behavior, I suppose, but not entirely altruistic either.

The same is true when I help my neighbor.  Sure, I extend a hand whenever I can and I’m glad to do it—we have a great relationship with our neighbors—but having helped, it frees me up to ask for help, like on those days when we can’t get home fast enough to let the dog out, or when we’re traveling and want to be notified straight away if someone starts loading our things into a moving van in the driveway.

Then I think of the selfless acts of daring and rescue initiated by people who have no relationship or connection to those they seek to defend.  I dare say that Good Samaritan family who rushed from their restaurant to help injured runners during the Boston Marathon bombings acted from anything other than their desire to help.  They knew nothing of the injured; they owed them nothing.  But they helped them all the same. 

Still, I wonder:  aside from these random acts of kindness, in our day-to-day relationships, do we act from purely altruistic motives?  Giving our time or resources, expecting nothing in return?  Helping even when we don’t benefit in some way?  Extending ourselves to those we love, work or socialize with without etching marks on some mental scorecard to remind us of who did what for whom and when?

As we peel away the winter layers and warm into spring, I challenge you (and myself) to explore those underlying motivations that spur action.  Why do you do what you do?  Why do you commune with certain individuals or groups to the exclusion of others?  Then do one thing each day in May that benefits another without also benefitting yourself. 

Let me know what you discover.  I'd love to hear from you!