Rascal and Lady

Sometimes I am such a blubbering idiot.  I just watched a movie, "Marley and Me", and it just ripped my heart wide open again.  It's about a bargain sale puppy purchased by newlyweds who made their life an adventure. Through love and sorrow, loss and gain, and the birth of their three children this couple shared a life with a dog with abnormal tendencies.  In the film the husband, John tells the vet that Marley is not really a dog, he's basically more than that, as Marley had sat nine hours beside his sick son, never leaving his side.  I know that if you've ever owned a pet, he or she becomes an integral part of your family, and goes through each moment like a child, a brother, a sister, a friend.  One who asks for nothing but gives us unconditional love and comfort when we need it most.

I've had to say goodbye to many friends in my family's lifetime, and memories are very hard.  My last pets, Rascal and Lady, border collies abandoned in a dumpster in an alley behind my daughter's home, found their way through a broken board in the fence and into our hearts. We spent so many years roaming the hills behind my home in El Rancho, near the San Ildefonso Pueblo, me running trying to keep up with them as they gave a neighboring jack rabbit the run of his life.  He outsmarted those gals more than once.  I think it made his day more than it made theirs.  I believe he actually looked forward to the daily jaunts with these two characters and laid in wait each day. When we moved to Chimayo those two gave the neighboring wildlife more than a little grief, but I remember two days without being able to find them, which was the scare of my life.  They reappeared, covered in mud, but obviously happy to return home.  I never knew where they were or how they got there. I only cared they were home.

When I said good - bye to them it was with the thought I'd see them soon, as I was going ahead to my new job, but I never saw them again.  They were given to a local farmer, I'm told, who had two children in the truck with him.  Lady and Rascal, I was told, jumped up into the truck bed, accepting their new life, hopefully a wonderful one.  When I returned to New Mexico I looked for them, and over the years when I heard of two wild and free border collies being seen in the area they were taken, I wished for a chance to run with them again.  Once I was driving down the road, and I saw two older dogs who resembled them, and I actually got out of my car and chased after them.  As it turned out they were not my friends, but it warmed my heart to see the owner loved his pets so much.  I hope I'll be able to rescue another dog or dogs one day, as a part of my heart has been missing since that day.  Another misfit toy, I imagine, and definitely, a kindred spirit.