Appreciation

     After re-reading my last post---yes, I am my own biggest fan--- I realized yet again how much I have in my life. I also came to recollect something I learned many years ago: You cannot appreciate something unless and until you have experienced the opposite. For example, if you've never been lied to you cannot fully appreciate the truth. Until you've been broke, you cannot appreciate wealth. Unless you have been broken-hearted, you cannot appreciate love. We can understand things in conceptual terms but without experience this is simply knowledge; not appreciation. I can understand, in theory, the love a parent has for a child but can't understand the actual feeling. Just as someone may understand the unconditional love given by a pet, until that person has shared her home with an animal, she will never truly understand the bond between animal and person.
    People think my dogs are the luckiest in the world because of how I treat them, whereas I think of myself as the lucky one to be in a position to have these wonderful beasts in my life. For those of you who have never had a dog, you are missing out on so much. I've been in many, what I thought to be life-long relationships(more then I'll admit here), but never have I been greeted with such love and excitement as when my dogs hear me come up the driveway. When I'm sad, they know. When I'm happy, they know. When I want to play, they play...and the list goes on and on. Several years ago my dog, who was born in my bathroom and lived to be almost 15, died in my arms. I was lost for many weeks. She could never and has never been replaced. Instead, adhering to the natural cycle of life, I came home one day with a 25 pound baby who I named, Reddog. She rescued me as much as I rescued here. Sometimes we all need to be rescued; those with 2 legs as well as those with four. Due to the fact that our society is filled with...well, irresponsible jerks...there are so many dogs that need homes. And I don't believe for a second that there isn't someone reading this who isn't in need of some rescuing. For those in Phoenix, we have a wonderful no-kill shelter here named the Arizona Animal Welfare League. I don't have their web info at hand but you can Google them or find them on Facebook. They can get you in contact with any one of the numerous shelters in the Grand Canyon state. The National Humane Society can give you information nationwide. Just something I want everyone to think about. As part of the human race, we are all responsible for the domestication of animals. Thus it is now our responsibility to care for them. So the next time you come home to an empty house, think of how great it would be to put your feet up on the couch with a dog on your lap. Then, you'll have something new to appreciate.
   On the lighter side of appreciation; this is for all of you youngsters out there---I'll let you define yourselves. You have all been born into the computer age and I'll wager to guess have never experienced the typewriter. Oh it was quite a joy. First, you had to load the paper---one sheet at a time---evenly onto the roll. Then of course was the challenge of carbon paper. My favorite part was when you made a mistake. You had 2 options: find the eraser ribbon or use the eraser itself. For those of you giggling right now, you know the one I mean; it looks like a pencil and you had to unroll the paper and try to erase while the paper was still in the typewriter. If you managed to do this without tilting your paper, you continued to type only to find that you had erased a hole right through the paper...and were instead typing on the carbon.That being said, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the machine I am typing on at this very minute...with Reddog by my side.