missing

i have been increasingly disturbed by my inability to find things that are important to me the past few days. For starters, I suddenly remembered that, last Christmas, when we took that spontaneous drive up to the Redwoods, we had taken our brand-new video recorder with us. We had created not one, but several short recordings on that trip: Murray and M. sleeping in the back of The Daz, Murray and Jazzmine exploring ethereal pathways through the redwoods, Murray and Jazzmine running on the beach, Murray and Jazzmine exhausted in the motel room, Murray and Jazzmine examining those icy ponds at the Drive Through Tree. All of these adventures captured on high quality video, just waiting to be transferred to the laptop. But when I went to find the disk, it was gone. All of it.

I spent a good part of the day today searching for a specific photo album. I knew it would not be in the forefront of the albums because it was not an album that featured Murray predominantly. In fact, there was only one picture of my baby in that album. The album was called ‘Toby’s Baby Book‘ and it was a collection of all of the pictures of the retriever that I once shared with my then husband. But the one picture of Murray was, and is, an important one. It is the very, very, first picture that I ever took of my little boy. It was taken the day that we were moving into our new house… the house that we had chosen based on my insistence that the smelly little nose, peeking through a knot-hole in the fence was a sign… a sign that this was where we were supposed to be. On that day, Toby, the gangly retriever pup who had outgrown our small apartment, ran gleefully out into the yard and instantly became bewitched by that curious little nose. as luck would have it, the camera was not packed away, but in easy reach and I snapped a shot of their first meeting.

and after searching all day, in a box on the very top shelf, in the far corner of the garage, I finally found it… the forgotten baby book of the dog that was NOT destined to be mine, with the very first picture of the boy who was.

my baby's little nose

Murray was sick in this picture. He was so matted that, if you wanted to touch his skin, anywhere on his body, you had to literally dig beneath the mats to do so. He smelled. But even in this picture, you can see the stunning beauty that is born in those eyes and radiates all the way around him. He was hungry and mistreated. But he was breathtaking. I don’t know if other people could see this about him. I always just assumed that the whole world saw this beautiful creature the way I did. But looking back, I don’t know if that is the case.

And a bit over a year later, this filthy, smelly, mangy, hungry, beautiful boy was brought to my doorstep. And on that day, we spent $500.00 in vet and grooming bills. But when we brought him home, we took this picture:

And this picture opens that abyss in my chest and brings instant tears to my eyes. When I look at this picture, I see a boy, so so proud to be so clean and beautiful. I don’t know if he had ever been that clean in his life, up until then. But from that day on, he was almost obsessive about his grooming. Even in the end, when we were carrying him out to the yard to go potty, if he accidentally got any pee on his little feet, and if we didn’t realize it and wash them immediately upon our return to the house, he would maneuver himself about on his little bed so that he could lick himself clean. He had known life as a dirty dog, and from this day on, he was indescribably proud to be clean and beautiful.

Another thing that brings tears to my eyes is how thin Murray was in this picture. Most people never really saw Murray as a thin dog. They always thought he was such a big dog. But the truth was, shaved down, he was always a trim, healthy boy. And, in this picture, I imagine most people would not see an emaciated dog, much like I don’t know if that is what people see when they look at the pictures taken in the final days of his life. But he was nearly emaciated here, as he was in the end. When you felt his sides, his ribs protruded dangerously. You can see it in his cheeks and how they are sunken. He had lived a miserable life, up until then, and frankly, so had I.

but on this day, Murray became my boy. He saved me and I saved him. We have not ever, ever been apart since, with the exception of times that I was in the hospital, and the two nights that he spent in the hospital when his stomach flipped.

…and now

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