Valentine's Day, Then and Now

Here is a partial post I wrote sometime during the first week of February 2022 and never before posted:

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[February 2022] …COVID. No kidding! Despite being triply vaccinated (both of us were), the Artist came down with one of the new strains. It was very early in the wee, dark hours of Wednesday morning, and he could not get a good, deep breath, no matter he tried. We were both scared, but COVID did not occur to either of us. He thought he must be having a panic attack. We waited, watched, tried different things. Finally I got dressed, and when he said he “felt better” having me dressed to leave the house, I knew it was time to call an ambulance. 

 

(This was four weeks after our farewell to Peasy, three weeks after the stroke that had previously sent sent David to the ER. I may need something good to happen on a Wednesday soon, or I might start getting superstitious.)

 

Tests were done, vital signs monitored, fluids given, oxygen administered, and by 3 p.m. my husband had been admitted to the hospital and installed in the COVID wing. Where I could not be with him! 

 

He was doing well the next day, however, and with hospital beds at a premium the doctor thought he could go home by Friday morning with supplemental oxygen. Good news! The hitch with morning discharge turned out to be that the oxygen supply people are in such high demand that they couldn’t get to the hospital until 8 p.m., so we had a long day of waiting and anxiety, all of which I could make into a very long story, except that I have other fish to fry here today. Bottom line: The Artist is home now, we are together again, he is doing well, feeling good, and we are looking to the future once more.

 

One of our top current obsessions and by far the most cheerful and pleasant, though I have good reason for calling it unbelievable, continued to be: “Will we ever love another dog as much as we loved Peasy?” The Artist thinks that won’t be a problem. I’m not so sure. But he and I are nothing if not fools for love, and who in the world can resist a puppy? -- And is there any other word in the English language as adorable and appealing as the word puppy?

 

We are not gods, but we must surely be crazy! I’m certain you think so! Or maybe you think that our love for Sarah and for Peasy could not have been all that deep, after all. Think what you will. I don’t care. We don’t care. We have welcomed into our life and our hearts a little Aussie girl from Tucson. She was named Juliet by the breeder, and I won’t drop that name but have added to it, so that she will be our Sunny Juliet, and we will call her – of course! – Sunny.

 

What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!

 

 

Unbelievably, it was only the day before the most recent medical emergency developed that I drove to Tucson to meet Juliet and her parents and her brothers and sisters and cousins and their owner, so the day after the emergency I was afraid to breathe the word puppy on the phone when the Artist and I talked on our phones, looking at each other through his hospital window as I stood outside in the cold shade, afraid he would say a puppy was the last thing he needed at this juncture. Not so! He brought it up himself! “I’ve been looking at pictures of the puppy,” he said, unprompted by me (I had texted him the photos on Tuesday), “and she’s very cute!”

I loved her looks when I first saw a picture but needed to meet her to assess her personality. She was not timid or fearful, but neither did she jump all over me, nipping and pulling at my clothes like some of the others. Instead she stood back from the fray and waited as the other puppies competed for attention. Then, after I had picked her up a couple of times, she was happy to come to me on her own. Calm and confident, she was also ready to engage in tumbling puppy play with the others, until they wore themselves out and collapsed into a puppy pile.  

 

Sarah was already four months old when we had the great good fortune to find her after she spent only a single night in the Cherryland Humane Society shelter. It was obvious that her previous owners, who couldn’t keep her for whatever reasons, had given her a good start in life. She already knew basic commands and not to make messes in the house. She was confident and unafraid. And her life continued rich and full and happy with us. She was truly a lucky dog! Nothing terrible ever happened to her in her entire life! 

 

Peasy, as you all know, was not as fortunate as Sarah. We have no idea how long little Pea was homeless and had to survive by his wits before those long, bleak months in the pound. That poor boy had hard knocks aplenty. 

 

We want to give Sunny is the kind of life Sarah had, the life we would have given Peasy if only it had been possible … a life where nothing bad ever happens to her … a life in which she is sheltered and feels secure and knows herself to be loved … a life in which she meets and makes new friends every day … a life of play and adventure but never want or fear … the kind of life every dog deserves to have … the life our Peasy should have had, right from the beginning.

 

When I asked the Artist that question about whether we would ever love another dog as much as Peasy, my next question to him was what Peasy would think of our having another dog. His response was that Sunny will be our “dog of atonement.” My sister (bless her heart!) didn’t like the sound of that. She feels we have nothing to atone for. Maybe not rationally. I’m pretty sure most people would say we made the right decision about Pea and have “nothing to regret.” But emotionally? It’s just not that easy. 

 

I heard on the radio today that Daniel Pink has a new book called The Power of Regret. Rather than chiding human beings for feeling regret, Pink looks at the emotion in terms of its positive value. His subtitle is How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. And that’s our idea with Sunny, our dog of atonement: going forward together into the happiest tomorrow we can create together.

 

A short while later, despite subsequent events (all very complicated), we were still moving ahead, negotiating the potholes in life’s road and looking to the future – for the Artist, making beautiful paintings and sculpture; for me, looking forward to my 29^th summer of bookselling and working on my small writing projects; for the two of us, integrating little Sunny Juliet into our household and social and public life. 

The two of us have had a lot of emotional and medical “rain” at the beginning of this new year – another siege since I drafted this post -- but our personal future is once again looking bright, and we look forward to seeing you in Northport sometime before Memorial Day!

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That’s it. You know the sequel. On Valentine’s Day 2022 I gave my husband a book of Billy Collins poems, and he gave me (he was already hospitalized again, awaiting further surgery) his paperback copy of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Storm clouds soon moved in again with a vengeance, and Sunny Juliet and I had to return to Michigan that spring without her “daddy.” It’s been almost three years now since he died, but “Love returns always.”