Goblin is recovering from her latest and hopefully last surgery on her leg. The other times, her convalescence was weak and accusatory but now she has done it all before and just seems bored by the inactivity. Otherwise, her spirits are fine but it will be months before she is allowed back to her normal routines. That’s like years to a dog. This has already been going on since Christmas and by the time its over will have affected almost one-eighth of her life, which is sad to contemplate but all we can do is keep her as happy as possible at any given time.

Something else that is sad to contemplate at this late date is a prayer I just remembered I used to say as a child. Yes, I was not always the raging atheist you see before you. The mythology of Catholicism was shoveled into my head early and often. Not that I carried this to any extreme; I was not an altar boy or a sacred mime. Indeed, the reason why this prayer comes to mind now is that is not an appeal to god but an affirmation of dogs.

This is the prayer I made up and said every night, probably until I was about six or seven if I’ve got the dog chronology right:

Smokey, Sammy, Puddles, and Tippy
You will always be my favorite dogs
I will love no dogs more than you
Amen

This is extraordinary for a number of reasons that are less obvious than the obvious. Smokey was the first dog I remember having. He got run over by a car when I was about six, at which time we got Tippy, a rambunctious German Shepherd mix we named after a taco restaurant in Laurel, Maryland. Sammy was a dog my parents had in some vague unspecified time before I was born; likewise, I never met Puddles, who belonged to my father when he was a child. How did these strangers get to be my favorite dogs? How could I pledge eternal love and allegiance to them and only them when the beautiful likes of Toby, Zoe, and Goblin Foo Uvula were waiting in the wings?

This probably bears more analysis, along with the idea that somehow in my young catechism I got the idea that instead of god, it is dogs that make everything all right in the world. If it was my dyslexia acting up, it is to date the most accurate mistake I have ever made.