Unconditional, lifelong comitments

"... until death do us part."

Sounds great and when we say it in the wedding vows, we really mean it, don't we. But down the road of life, stuff happens and we change. The break up comes, and somehow we move on.

But some commitments, with no vows or artifice attached, truly are unconditional and lifelong. What got me thinking about this was that our sweet 3-month-old puppy , Spenser, got hurt on Friday. I was playing tug-of-war with him as usual and I guess I got too rough, or bad luck rode in, because all of a sudden he yelped and then would not walk on his left hind leg. I took him to the Vet right away and they said they did not think it was a ligament tear or broken bone. They gave him a shot and sent us home.



He's still limping around today and we're going to see the Vet tomorrow, but I have been totally bummed out since the injury: I shouldn't have played so rough; why does this have to happen to him; he's so innocent; what if he has to have surgery, and so on.

All this in turn led me to remembrances of when my two wonderful children were growing up. Wenona, now an accomplished high-level manager at EPA and mother two wonderful grandkids, and Jesse, a senior analyst at Time Warner in Manhattan. I could give you pages and pages of times when they got hurt (Wen being attacked by a St. Bernard at age 6 and literally having part of her scalp ripped off, or Jesse being hit by an Oakland cop car in front of our house when he was about 8), but in all such instances, horrible to small, something primal and visceral happened to me. It was a feeling like "kill me Lord, rip out my guts, make me listen to Kenny G. for the rest of my life, but just let my child be OK." Same kinda deal with my little puppy the other day.

That got me further thinking about all the things my kids did that were pretty awful while they were growing up, which I will not mention here because my children deserve their privacy. But I'm sure that all of us who are parents know exactly what I'm talking about. But the cool thing, looking back, is even though I was ready to blow a gasket in most of those instances, I NEVER stopped loving them and forgiving them, and vice-versa, even though that was far from apparent in the throes of any given crisis. The same cannot be said for marriages, despite the opening line of this post. Why is that?

Even today, with Wen being almost 39 and Jesse being 34, I STILL worry about them all the time. It's burrowed in the back of my mind like some inevitable worm that keeps me from ever forgetting about them for very long.

So, I'm holding my puppy on my lap now, enjoying him licking and biting my hands when I pause to compose my thoughts in mind, and realizing that there really is a higher power in us all, isn't there.

Peace, out:

~ tom