For a little dog, Gus left a long shadow. We think of him often, we smile every time we think of him. He has inspired me to learn about small dogs and write about them, and he has inspired Maria and I to get another Boston Terrier from Robin Gibbons, Gus’s breeder.
In recent weeks, I have been talking to my editor – editors don’t talk to writers much these days, unless it’s about puppies – and we agreed to change my next book, The Lessons Of Bedlam Farm, and change the title and focus.
The book doesn’t have a new title yet, we are re-working the structure to focus on Gus, his life and death, on my efforts to heal him, and also on the next puppy we hope to get from Gus’s mother Hannah.
So I’m re-converting my book around Gus and what we hope will be an uplifting and hopeful end to this story when we get our new puppy in September, if all goes well.
We think she is pregnant, we will find out for sure on June 13, when she gets an ultra-sound at the Cambridge Valley Vet. Robin has invited me to come along.
Some dogs – Rose, Red, Orson, Lenore, Frieda – are like this, they cast a long shadow, longer than themselves.
They are spirit dogs, they come and go and mark the passages of our lives. They come when they are ready and needed, they leave when their work is finished.
A shaman once told me that when spirit dogs die, they go home, to a land filled with blue and shining lights on a hill by a stream. I believe it. They wait to be called to another person, another family, another home.
I call these dogs Lifetime Dogs, they mark our lives in a particular and transformative way. They shape our lives rather than simply slipping into them. Rose helped me survive on the first Bedlam Far, Lenore kept love alive, Red guided me into my therapy work, Gus brought joy and laughter into our hard-working home.
Taking care of Gus when he was sick was a transformative experience. For awhile there, I thought I could save him. I learned much about love and limits, I learned once more to respect life. We don’t get to choose who lives and dies.
I can’t wait to see what this new dog bill bring to me and to us. I can’t say yet that Hannah is pregnant, you can never know the future, but I feel good and strong about it. And I look forward to writing about it in this book, Gus will be the main figure. It will be published sometime in the next year.
I see his shadows almost every day.