Dogs with Diarrhea

Fatty McButter-Pants

This week we have been babysitting our daughter’s Labrador, Fatty McButter-Pants. Fatty, who is now too old and feeble to live up to her name and steal butter off the countertop anymore, is normally no trouble whatsoever. As long as she has her stick and her pillow, she’s quite content.

But last night she got sick and kept me up all night with repeated bouts of explosive diarrhea. And she wasn’t alone. If there is anything worse than a dog with diarrhea it is TWO dogs with diarrhea.

Georgia

It was a long, long, slippery, slimy night. 

First they’d cry and pant to be let out and then I’d yell at them to go lie down and let me sleep. Then one or the other would lose it all over the floor and I’d leap out of bed to let them out. I’d clean up the mess, cursing myself for being an idiot, vowing that they could stay out all night if they were going to do this. Then I’d go back to sleep.  

And after a while they would start whining their plaintive little, please-let-me-in cries, and it was raining. I felt bad for them. So I’d let them back in just to have them turn around and cry to go out again.

All. Night. Long.

It is hard to come up with anything witty to say after a long night of running back and forth letting diarrhetic dogs in and out and then swabbing the literal poop deck up after them.

Then it occurred to me. Family shit on my blog, dog shit all over my floor. God is obviously trying to tell me something important.

So, as I was slopping up runny poop in the middle of the night (just one more reason I will NEVER willingly go so GREEN that I have to live without paper towels), I began to consider whether there was in fact some sort of synchronicity at play. Was I, as Susan says, having some sort of Divine Appointment?

Carl Jung defined synchonicity as the coincidental occurrence of events that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality.  It also happens to be a really cool song by the Police, and, even though it isn’t Monday, I think we should stop for a minute and take a Sting break.

Maybe life doesn’t have any meaning at all. Events happen, cause and effect, and in the end we all just die.  Maybe it is just as simple as two Labradors got into the trash and made themselves sick all over my kitchen floor. Or maybe not. Maybe the shit that’s been inside me so long is now out, lying around my blog waiting for the giant Paper Towel of Life to clean it up.

To make it feel more scientific, I’ve come up with my own synchronicity schema to help illustrate my point:

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Remember? I didn’t get enough sleep last night. But there seems a certain poetry to all this crap going on right now.

I went to see the Pastor of a church today and talk to him about what going there might look like. Yes, I know. I said I wasn’t interested in ever going back to church. Yes, I only said that like four days ago.  But my husband really wants to go back to church, and, since he’s the guy who butters my bread, on both sides, I really want to make him happy. He needs church. Since life has to work for both of us, I’m going to try to find a way to make it work for him.

Normally I’d have gotten dressed up, or at least dressed in real clothes, but I was too wiped out from cleaning up diarrhea all night long and writing about all this family shit all day long to really care. I was too tired to make myself look nice or even brush my hair. I was fussing over the fact that I look maybe just a little bit hungover when I figured, “He’s going to have to take me just as I am.”  haha

I got there and told the Pastor upfront that I’m a broken vessel that can’t hold water anymore. I’m of absolutely no use whatsoever. I told him I’m unfit for ministry and that I do not know that I ever will be fit again. He said I could come anyway. I told him I’m not a Republican and I won’t become one or pretend that I am one. He said I could come anyway. I told him that I think Glenn Beck is an idiot. He said that was okay with him.  I told him that all I have left is this teeny, tiny baby faith and that it wasn’t worth very much. He told me he doubted that was true. I told him that I hate Meet & Greet and I won’t do it. He told me they’ve discontinued it. Then I told him I write this blog. He told me he’s read it. Okay, so I guess I’ll try to go back to church. We’ll see. I told him I might write about his Church. He said that was okay with him. I told him I’ll probably cuss. He said he knew that; he’d read my blog.

So there it is. I can’t wait to tell my husband. It will make him very happy. And I live to make him happy. Right away I don’t have to go this Sunday because I work. But I’m going to try.

And for those who are worried, I’m feeling a lot less frightened and anxious today. I think that when we lay down memories in the tracks of our mind, we also lay down the feelings and emotions that we’re having at the time. Bringing up those memories from my childhood couldn’t help but bring up the feelings I had as a child.

I did want to talk about a little piece of information I dug up about Waverly Hills Sanatorium where my grandfather died of tuberculosis when he was 24 years old.

Years ago my grandmother was telling me about my grandfather and she said something like, “And after he died they just tossed him down the body chute.” She was rather bitter about it when she told me.  I always had in my mind that the “body chute” was like a laundry chute or something, or maybe something she’d just imagined. Well, it wasn’t. The Body Chute was actually a 500 foot long windowless tunnel used to carry the dead bodies out to the hearses so that the other patients wouldn’t have to see them.

My grandmother wasn’t making it up. My grandfather was taken down The Body Chute after he died. While it makes me sad to think he died young and alone, at least he hasn’t been forgotten.

About these ads