Putting my dog down, paying it forward and other ramblings.

Hey all.

I've been scarce... my bad, so I wanted to say happy new year to you even though it's nearly the end of January. Hope you've had a good one!!!

Today’s post is not gender orientation inspired, it’s more just life inspired. I guess, I just need to write about my dog, because I put him to sleep yesterday. You can say all you want, he was sick, old, he had cancer, he was suffering (all true), but this morning, I have things at the back of my mind:

• Who gave me the right to play God?
• I went and asked a man to kill a dog. 
• I have got to help my children through unbridled grief at the loss of their dog. 
• I couldn’t bear to see my dog suffer, but if I had asked him if he wanted to be euthanased, what would he have said?

With the last, I tried to put myself in his place. If someone asked me if I wanted to be euthanased as opposed to suffer on and try to find a cure, some way of life.. knowing that I was old and that the chances were good I’d suffer for a while longer and then die.. I think I’d want to die. But the article is not about his death. It’s about his life.

My dog didn’t care if you were gay, straight, lesbian, trans, black, white or Chinese. He cared if you scratched his belly, and he loved you if you did, or if you didn’t.

He didn’t have to earn money, or base his happiness on his riches. He didn’t actively set out to help people, but he DID help people – and animals. It was just a by product of who he was. He was a pitt bull, and by being the most loving dog that we ever had, he helped people overcome their fear of pitt bulls, and dogs in general. He even helped my other dog, who we rescued from a bad situation, come to the understanding that not all other dogs were going to eat her alive. Most of all, he stuck with my family for his entire life. He didn’t desert us, unfriend us, leave us or hurt us. He gave us himself.

After reading an inspiring post this morning on what John Lennon would think if he were alive today and saw the future he imagined, I got to thinking that if we aspired to live like dogs, the world would be much more wonderful. Homophobia would be gone. All dogs have equal rights – so everyone would be able to marry, be priests, live how they want. Nobody would judge you. Nobody would break your heart. Normally when you say “I live like a dog” you mean you don’t live very well. Or “it’s a dog’s life” means it’s a kak life. In my case, if I say I live like a dog, it means I’m giving you my all. And “it’s a dog’s life”, well if your life was like Buller’s and you were loved and fed for every moment, then it’s not such a bad life after all.

So then how do we begin to live like a dog? I don’t have all the answers to that, but I do know that if we just begin to pay it forward, things improve. My hubby is one of the most caring people I know. (that’s why I married him). So we happened to have a little money the other day, because we got paid for a big job we’d just completed. And there was a guy standing outside the filling station, begging. I live in South Africa, so we have so many beggars on our streets that it’s impossible to give to them all. The common practice is to give to a charity instead, because sometimes, by giving money to people on the street, you are feeding a drug or alcohol habit. Anyway, we could see the guy was hungry. So my hubby went into the shop and bought the guy a sandwich. This may not seem like a big deal, but the gratitude on his face was etched. And as we drove away, I thought to myself that it’s possible my hubby could have just prevented a crime – a robbery, hijacking or mugging. In any case, what he did do was bring happiness, by a simple act, not only to the hungry man, but to me, and to our children who saw what he did. Paying it forward is quite a simple thing, if we look around us. There are opportunities everywhere.