Goodbye to You

I'm considering changing the name of this blog to My Golden Now Year or Year of Change. But not really. I'd prefer the blog name to match the URL, which it currently does, it just seems like all I ever feel urged to post on falls under the category of My Golden Now Year.

Today we put my dog down. He's been with us for ten years now, born November 8, 2000, received Christmas day from our neighbors (We still paid for him, but due to my brother being best friends with their son, and the fact that we were neighbors, we only paid $300 for a pure-bred lab. That's pretty unbelievable.) My daddy said when he picked the pup he was looking at the pile of puppies and one wedged his way out of the middle of the stack, went to the edge of the pen and did his "business", then returned to the pile and dug his way into the middle.

He was also the fattest.

But I'm getting off track.

In spite of the habitual urge to great my biscuit as I come home, and in spite of the lack of safe fur to nestle my face in, I feel nearly unaffected. Of course, now, sitting here pondering over it my eyes are watering, and I have been a little off-kilter today (and I trace that back to the turmoil of a deceased pet), but I really feel.... at peace.

And it made me think of my golden now year because it's the very same feeling I had upon learning Jason Mraz is engaged; not that the death of a pet is equivalent to celebrity engagements, but to me both things are very life-altering, and I somehow feel indifferently at peace. I accept it without dragging myself through the sludge of pity to acceptance. I left for home this morning, my ill sad dog at home trying to throw up food that wasn't there, and I felt okay. I really felt like, just as I said about Mraz, like it's just a chapter of my book closing. It's another thing necessary for my golden now year to bring me all the growth it's meant to. It's another opportunity to embrace change.

And I'm sure it'll take me a few weeks to stop looking for a squishy doggy face, and my heart may break whenever I find a black hair at the edge of my dinner plate, but I feel it's best for both of us he's gone. He wasn't taken so I could grow, that's not what I'm saying. But it's almost as if both he and I, me and my Tank, needed him to depart this earth now for our own cosmic reasons. I just hope the pooch found his mum in heaven. Because it sure is quite around here without him.