Mornings with Dinah (Or, Serenity WOW!)

 

• Dinah by Thelonious Monk

The song Dinah was named after -- it captures her little personality so well!

I try to do yoga every morning, and these days it has turned into quiet time with Dinah. When I first started, toward the end of my time in New Mexico, I still had all three dogs.  Even though I wanted them to hang out during yoga time, that proved an impossibility.  I don't know if you've ever tried to lay on the floor when dogs are in the room, but they lose their shit.  "Oh my Gawd, she's on the floor!  Let's go put our snoots in her face!"  Of course, this never happened when I wanted to sleep on the floor with them -- they'd trot off to their respective beds.  But if I got on the floor with any sense of purpose (crunches, yoga), it was like feeding time at the koi pond.

Anyway, I can still hear Dinah's little paws on the yoga mat.  They made this hollow sound that the other two dogs were too heavy to make.  When I'm doing my morning yoga routine, my mind usually wanders off to New Mexico and Dinah's paws.  It's a good way to start the day.

As serene as that sounds, my mind usually ends up in the land of wiener dog races, and I can't help but laugh.  You know how dogs get feisty sometimes and then sprint on an invented loop in the house for what seems like no reason?  Well, when Dinah did it, she'd hunker her rear end down like a motorboat.

• The Race (Remastered Club Mix) by Yello

If you know what's good for you, you'll press play while you read the next bit.

One day I came home from work when she and Rocky were in mid-chase.  Dinah came flying out of the hallway with the crazy-eye and her tongue flying, with Rocky right on her tail.  As they crossed the living room, I thought they would turn around in front of the coffee table. BUT NO!  Dinah leaped onto the table, over the bottom cushions of the couch, and then  -- turning her body in mid-air -- banked off the back cushions and ran back from whence she came!  EGADS! And Rocky, being more potato-y than Dinah, followed suit only without the acrobatics -- his paws clobbered every. single. surface.

Of course, Boots could see that this was lots of fun and wanted to join in.  But she was even bigger and more lumbering than Rocky. All she could manage was to bounce her front paws a few times in the direction the other two just ran before they turned and were headed back toward her. This effectively turned her back half into a pivot, and she just hopped her front half back and forth barking her head off as the other two dogs whizzed by. 

Suddenly, the claw marks on the coffee table made sense, and the mystery of how stacks of student papers ended up strewn all over the living room was solved.  OH MY GAWD, those dogs were so damn funny together.  They didn't do this very often when I was home -- I certainly never saw the ninja couch turn -- but they obviously spent a lot of their time alone entertaining themselves this way.  I miss them all!

Dream Girl

I dreamed of Dinah two nights ago, and I was very happy for the visit. In the dream, she just sort of trotted around this corner and came running to me...but I woke up or something happened before I got to pet her. I remember saying in the dream, "Hey, there's Dinah!" and feeling like she wasn't really gone after all. But there she was, exactly as cute and happy as I remember.

Strangely, when I woke up I was only a little disappointed that it was only a dream. I mean, of course I'd love to have her back. When I was still raw and in the denial stage, I wished for there to be some kind of magical way for her to come back to me, but I'd have to keep it a secret from the rest of the world, like in some sort of dark comedy. You can imagine my breakdown tearful reaction to the pilot for Pushing Daisies, right? (Seriously, I would have made that deal.) But somehow waking up from that dream made me feel happy to have gotten to see her again, even briefly.

At the risk of sounding completely insane, I will say that I think our furry friends visit in dreams after they pass. I'm fairly certain that our one dog, Bubba, visited Boots almost every night in her dreams to play with her. She adored him, and went into a deep, deep depression after he died. (I can't think of anything more tragi-comic than a depressed Basset Hound.) Boots would frequently run and bark in her sleep -- I can only imagine that she was dreaming of playing with Bubba.

Anyway, I'm missing Dinah and Bootsie terribly again/still.

Time to put on some sunglasses and go for a run.

Gutsy Means "With All My Heart"

I had planned to write about athleticism and elaborate on "gutsiness" this week, but I'm going to postpone that a bit.

Today is Dinah's anniversary.

I don't want to get too morose, but I do want to say this:

Even though losing her was the worst heartbreak I've ever experienced, I know that having loved her that much and making the decision I made was gutsier than any of my impulsive cross-country moves, any of my solo adventures, any of the out-of-control mountain bike descents, rock climbing leaps of faith, or vomit-inducing sprints I've ever made.

I think that even with the pain, giving all of my heart to her was worth it and ultimately the very thing that kept her loss from destroying me completely.

It's been a while since I listened to the song she was named for, but here it is again. Click here to read the backstory.



Dinah by Thelonious Monk

(For some reason, my Firefox is doing weird things with this, but it seems to work okay in Explorer.)

A Sunny Place at the Top

A week ago today, I spread some of Dinah's ashes at the summit of Bear Peak outside Boulder, CO. (It's the pointy peak on the left -- elevation 8461 feet.)

She always liked laying in the sun, and on this peak she will have plenty of sun and a gorgeous 360-degree view. And she'll apparently have visitors year-round!

I have to say, this was a TOUGH hike. Climbing 3000 feet in 3.5 miles was made worse by by the utter lack of oxygen (I've been at 650 feet for the last eight weeks). Good grief!

So I cried when I got to the top, and I'm not sure if I was crying from exhaustion or for Dinah -- I'm sure it was a little of both. We spent about an hour at the top for lunch and a brief memorial.

Of course, going up was the "easy" part. My legs trembled the entire way down. I worried that my legs would buckle and I'd take a nasty fall. Happily (though "luckily" is probably more accurate), I made it back and even managed to _run_ (wha-!?!) the last two minutes to the car to make it back before 3:00.

So I'm back safe and sound, though I managed to fall into a little pit of despair these last couple days. I made it through Monday and Tuesday without crying for Dinah (two whole days out of the last three weeks), and then fell off the wagon yesterday and today. I know it's been almost three weeks, but I just miss her so much and sometimes the reality that she's gone hits me like a truck. I guess the comeback trail is kinda bumpy.

Anyway, school starts on Monday and I already have 400 pages to read BEFORE then (wtf?). I'm hoping the outrageous workload will help pull me forward through this lingering grief. I also hope it will return my inner blogger so I can post something interesting soon. I'll try to get back to commenting, too.

I'll Miss You, Little Girl

Dinah

(2004-2007)

I feel so much sorrow right now, I can barely type. I love this little dog and I'm going to miss her so much. She had a long weekend of seizures with no recovery...and I finally had to make the most impossible decision I've ever had to make.