Knowledge of Good and Evil

Yesterday, I took Hoover to the vet because he has a swelling on his left shoulder blade. The x-ray showed a mass consistent with either osteosarcoma or chondrosarcoma.

Damn.

He's the same dog he was two weeks ago when he wrote this essay, before I saw that x-ray and heard those big ugly Latin words. He is still happy, loves to go for walks in the spring sunshine, and clearly has a lot of life in him.

But every time I look at him now, I want to cry. And feed him bacon. And ice cream.

And scratch his butt until he collapses in ecstasy.

From all we know right now, we have two options. Option #1 We could have his left leg and shoulder blade amputated and treat him with chemo. This might give him another year. Option #2 We could give supportive care as the cancer metastasizes. The average life expectancy would be about four months in this case. Given that his cancer does not appear to have metastasized yet, he might have longer. The vet emphasized that there are lots of medicines and supportive care to keep him comfortable and happy.

Unless the orthopedic surgeon has another more hopeful option, we're leaning toward Option #2. Neither George nor I want to make Hoover's last months of life miserable, and while young dogs handle amputation very well, old dogs have a much tougher time.

Death is inevitable for all of us. We don't want to think about it until we have to because the illusion that we are immortal is precious. We can't imagine what comes next, in that last undiscovered country. We sweep it under the rug, deny the possibility, work hard to ignore it, try to cheat it however we can.

I don't think this is smart. Our last dog, Shemya, didn't give us a chance to fight her death because her heart gave out suddenly, in the span of hours. She died at home, with me by her side. She made it easier for us because we didn't have to watch her suffer and we didn't have any decisions to make or long-term care to provide. But the shock was so very hard.

George and I are working on a Bucket List for Hoover. What are the things that he loves, and how can we make them happen for him in the time he has left? We know and accept that he can't be with us forever, so we're determined that when his time comes he has as much dignity and love as we can give him.

Having knowledge of the evil mass on Hoover's scapula sucks. It changes how we look at him, and I hate that. How can we turn that to good? How can we make the right decisions for him? It's tough, but we'll do our best.

Because he's a very good dog. Our furry golden sunshine.

Gratitude Journal #36

Today, I am grateful for...

*Three days in a row of sunshine

*Walks around the neighborhood with my family in the sunshine

What are you grateful for today?

Words, Words, Words from a Four-Year-Old Boy

"To touch the moon, you have to have a very big mountain. And when you touch it, you can bring it in your house and it will glow in the bathroom. The moon glows in the bathroom. Isn't that cool?!?" Nick Raihala, 2003

Where would you put the moon if you could touch it? Would it be the comforting nightlight in your bathroom or the soft glow out your window on a dark and stormy night? Would it shine over your dining room table on friends and family gathered there, or out of your fireplace in the den, or in your stove as bread baked?

I would put mine in our Library, where the soft white glow would make every book enchanted and light the scenes of our imagination as I read to my boys.

Choosing Books

“When I get a little money, I buy books. If there is any left, I buy food and clothes.” Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1535)

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I spend a substantial portion of my life at Barnes and Noble Booksellers breathing in the heady smell of paper and ink and glue. (And drinking mochas. With whip cream and caramel drizzle. But that’s a totally different essay.) I also volunteer a few hours a week at our sons' elementary school library. But I don’t have to go to Barnes and Noble or a library to be surrounded by books. Plenty of books live in almost every room of my house.

This is our Library. It’s supposed to be a sitting room/parlor/living room, but in our house, it’s the Library. The two book shelves on the left are mine, and the ones on the right belong to George. I’d love it if this room were decorated with real wood furniture rather than laminated particle board, but we spend too much money on books to afford nice bookshelves.

Wow, looking at this picture gives me so many ideas for other essays. I hadn’t noticed how many cool knick-knacks with interesting stories there are on these shelves. In more ways than one, these books are the backdrop of our lives.



These are the shelves to the right of the television in our family room. Most of these are George’s books, and the “grown-up” DVDs are shelved here, too.


These are to the left of the television. Obviously, the kids’ DVDs and some games are here, but the bottom three shelves are mostly my books.


Here’s the bookshelf beside my bed. It’s mostly novels and essays and a few devotionals. The stack of hard covers beside the bookshelf consists mostly of Anne Perry mysteries (a few signed by Perry herself), with some random stuff on top. The set of red books is a 1920s children’s series called Book Trails I read as a child. I love them.

George has a matching bookshelf full of military stuff, spy novels, and triathlon magazines as well as four shelves in the family room (not pictured) of cooking magazines and cook books. I don’t use those except under dire circumstances. We have more bookshelves in the basement, and of course the boys have their own bookshelves in their rooms.

Books make me happy. Their physical presence is a comfort I can carry with me anywhere…to the pool, into the tub, on a plane, to a waiting room. They keep me company, don't fuss when dog-eared, and wait patiently for me to pick them up when the spirit moves me.

So why the heck would I want a Kindle?

At the YMCA pool recently, a woman sat on a folding chair six feet from splashing children reading (if you can call it that) something on a Kindle. She kept putting the Kindle down, like she was embarrassed, or maybe bored. Then, a few minutes later she picked it up and read a bit more. Then, she put it down again. I started wondering what sort of book would cause a person to keep putting it down. Was she reading something boring, or uncomfortable, or naughty? I was hoping for naughty.

And then I realized the most important question in this situation was “What sort of person takes a $300 electronic gadget to read by a pool? Full of splashing children?” She’s a mom (her kids went to the same preschool as mine), so presumably she knows that children, water, and electronic gadgets should never, ever be within a quarter mile of each other.

And then I realized that I was spending way too much time paying attention to what this woman was doing. It really was none of my business.

Given my Luddite tendencies, I think Kindles and Nooks and other strangely-named electronic books are signs of the coming apocalypse. They, along with television screens in grocery store checkouts and medical waiting rooms and minivans, are reinforcing our screen culture. My son is buying into this and it scares me. He daily attempts to negotiate (or sneak) extra time on the Wii and wants a portable DS so he can look at a screen all the time no matter where he goes.

When I was his age, I looked at books all the time. I would eagerly open them, read, turn the page, read some more, and always regret the need for putting them down. My imagination sparked, my brain engaged, my heart soared and plummeted with the hero’s fortunes. I couldn’t wait to turn the page to see what happened next, but I wanted to make each page last as long as possible because it was so fun. That tension created a frisson of pleasure at the turn of each page that held me captive just as it has held curious and literate people captive since the first story was captured in ink.

More hip and tech-savvy people might ask how my walking around with my nose in a book was any different from Nick wanting to walk around with his nose buried in a DS. Clearly, these people need to read more books.

I already know all the arguments for electronic books and even admit that for certain situations (traveling, heavy college textbooks, people who don’t have space for large libraries like ours) they make sense.

I do, however, wonder how this will change people’s relationship with books. In particular, how will people choose books to read? In my experience, friends recommend books, favorite authors publish new books, reviewers on NPR praise books, and I stumble across books in books stores. These things prompt me to buy. I’ve never gone trolling online for books. I always looked at brick-and-mortar stores first, and then went online.

To illustrate this point, I pulled three random books off my bedside table and thought about what made me buy each. One thing all three purchases had in common is that I stumbled across them on shelves while browsing at Barnes and Noble with a mocha in my hand.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. This one grabbed me because I liked Kingsolver’s novel Pigs in Heaven and also her essay about the Rock Bottom Remainders (a charity band that included Kingsolver, Dave Barry, Stephen King, Amy Tan, and others). I’d also read around in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (a book about where our food comes from), so the subject matter seemed interesting.

Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph T. Hallinan. There’s a deliberate typographical error on the happy orange cover that immediately grabbed my attention. (Well, I was a professional proofreader.) Then there’s the subtitle: “How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average.” Could you resist exploring that one? But never, ever judge a book by its interesting cover. I’ve done that before and been wrong about the writing. (For instance, The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. It takes dull prose to a whole new level.) I’d never heard of Hallinan before, so I picked up the book and read the introduction. Not only was the quality of the writing good, but his ideas were fascinating.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda. I grew up watching M*A*S*H, and after checking to make sure Alda could, indeed, write readable prose, I bought this one for a laugh and got much more. I reread it recently (the reason it was on my bedside table). This second reading was sparked by seeing the spine of the book on the bookshelf near my bed: a bit of serendipity that gives me joy.

Perhaps the process of downloading books to Kindles and Nooks and such will be as pleasurable as roaming shelves of a bookstore or library, but I doubt it. I do hope that people read more with the electronic book’s combination of screen appeal, compactness, and ease of book purchase. If people like looking at screens so much, perhaps it would be better to read a book than to play a mindless game. But will people make that choice? The lady at the YMCA pool sure seemed to be having a hard time getting into her book.

Certainly iPods have made it easier for people to listen to music, buy music, and carry music around with them. But I worry that too many books will languish unread in the memory chips of Kindles, which will break, get dropped, get wet, get stolen, and eventually grow obsolete.

I think I’d have a depressive breakdown if I lost all of Jane Austin in a freak pool accident. As it is now, if Pride and Prejudice gets soaked in my bubble bath, I’ll just run to Barnes and Noble, get a mocha, and search for another copy.

Who says you can’t buy happiness?

Weekly Giggle #14, Part 2

Okay, Dooce is funny, but so is my son. The following sentence was uttered with complete sincerity by Nick, my 10-year-old, at the dinner table:

"I want a work-free job."

George nearly spewed beer on me.

Weekly Giggle #14

Dooce is a bit of an edgy mommy blogger (especially compared to me, the Queen of Let the Sun Shine), but I love her. Dooce makes being a klutz funny, even when she's broken her tail bone snowboarding. This post, in which breaking her toe is only incidental, had me rolling!

Exhibit A

Gratitude Journal #35

Today, I am grateful for

*my family's health

*George's orange-ginger chicken

*the peace of yesterday's church service

*this coat, given to me by my sister, because its spring color lifts my mood on these gray winter days



What are you grateful for today?