Throwing It Out There

     Have you ever done that, just "thrown" something out to the universe?  My wife and I did just that the other day, looking at a few pictures of our dogs from months and years past and "asking" them to keep an eye out for another dog that might be ready for a home.  While we weren't quite "ready" since our other dog had only been gone for a few months, we did miss having a dog in the house.  Now if asking the universe to do something like that sounds a bit kooky to you, let me back up a bit.  My wife and I are believers in thinking that for our our animals (and others really), it is the quality and not the quantity of life that matters.  And so 2 months earlier we made the decision to put down our rescued dog, partially because of his pannus (a hereditary disease which left him almost completely blind) and also because his rear legs were rapidly failing; with winter and the resulting ice already here, his first slip on the outside ice caused him to be quite fearful of going out at all.  I had been walking him for over a month with a support strap under his belly, giving him some sort of mobility; but his "walks" were growing more and more infrequent.   And it was no life for him, at least not from a point of things possibly getting better.   Despite our cats having loved all the extra attention they received with our house now dog-free, my wife and I had to admit that while not much time had passed, we missed having a dog.  So the quandary...would we, could we, ever find a dog who would check all the boxes? 

     Two days later, the woman who works at the rescue group CAWS, emailed me that she had been thinking of us for a few months and, while she knew that we might not be ready, she did have a foster dog which she thought deserved a peek.  Bear in mind that we hadn't heard from her in nearly two years (although I did let her know that we had to put down Bear, the "unadoptable" 12-year old German Shepherd we had gotten from her group some 19 months ago).  Along with her email came a few photos and a short history of the new dog she had in mind, and before long we were put in touch with the family fostering the dog.  We asked all the questions that a dog had to meet in order to fit in with our menagerie...was it good with cats (yes, the foster family had several cats and the dog had no problem when they rubbed against him); did it get along with people and other dogs (yes, they also had four other dogs on their farm); was it aggressive (no, it barked only when the other dogs barked but otherwise wasn't interested); did it have any medical problems (a slight heart murmur but then almost all of the animals we rescue come with medical problems); did it walk and run, since we wanted to possibly take it hiking with us (yes, it chased balls all day with the other dogs on the family's 5-acre property).  I should note that the foster family mentioned that the dog seemed to bond more with a female rather than a male but then my wife had been wanting a dog that would be hers or ours, vs. one which bonded almost exclusively to me (like the last two dogs, likely because they needed help being lifted into the doggie wheelchair or needed that support strap -- no big deal unless you're dealing with dogs nearing the 90-lb. point).  Check, check, check, and check...and off we went to see the dog, safely nestled some 45 minutes away..

     So now here he is, 90 pounds and going strong at our house, adopted and settling down once again after 2+ months in a shelter (he was found wandering the streets) and 2+ months at the foster family's farm..  Nearly a dozen neighbors and dogs have met him (no reaction on our dog's part); he does indeed ignore our cats; he isn't bothered by the doorbell; he sleeps through the night; he walks by our side without pulling; and he loves riding in the car.  If we went looking, we likely would have never found a dog to check off so many of the boxes on our list, much less finding all of that in a rescue dog; and certainly not from a dog which had spent so much time in a shelter and with a foster family.  But in a short 3 days, this dog settled into our home and lives.  So how did this happen?  Did our "asking" the universe result in our previous dogs putting it together?  Okay, don't leave yet, shaking your head and casting us out into the world of "nutters."  Some may call it fate, or an answered version of prayer, or just pure luck.  But from our viewpoint, the timing sure seemed as if this dog was "meant to be."  Which brings me to how we, as humans, like it or not, often cast our fate to the wind.  

     02/22/2022, or 22/02/2022, however you want to display it, the date came and went into the annals of numerology (note the twos-day aligning with the recently passed Fat Tuesday of Mardi Gras).  We've had them before those matching numbers that sometimes make people flock to Nostradamus and the world of psychics and astrologers.  Said a piece in The Conversation: The brain has evolved a fantastic capacity to find meanings and connections.  Doing so once meant the difference between survival and death.  Recognizing paw prints in the soil, for example, signified dangerous predators to be avoided, or prey to be captured and consumed.  Changes in daylight indicated when to plant crops and when to harvest them.  Even when survival isn’t at stake, it’s rewarding to detect a pattern such as a familiar face or song.  Finding one, the brain zaps its synapses with a little shot of dopamine, incentivizing itself to keep finding more patterns.  When a number sequence seems to jump out at us, this is an example of apophenia: perceiving meaningful connections between unrelated things.  The term was first developed to characterize a symptom of schizophrenia...nearly a quarter of Americans say 7 is lucky.  The article by social psychologist Barry Markovsky goes on to imply that mathematicians can link almost any book or coin to predicting historical events, even a book such as Moby Dick (what??).  The recent issue of The London Review of Books noted another coincidence: The appearance within a few months of each other of two books about the same four women is a bit startling, but on reflection the topic is so natural and interesting that one might even wonder why it hasn't been treated before (the author notes that at the time these women attended Oxford no more than 20% of the students could be women).  Said the same magazine, the "widely used Latin term for astrologers" was mathematici...

    It's indeed hard to deny the role astrology played in ancient civilizations (think Stonehenge or the Pyramids); noted Wikipedia: Astrology, in its broadest sense, is the search for human meaning in the sky; it seeks to understand general and specific human behavior through the influence of planets and other celestial objects.  It has been argued that astrology began as a study as soon as human beings made conscious attempts to measure, record, and predict seasonal changes by reference to astronomical cycles.  Along with harvest moons and solar eclipses, early astrologers appeared to provide guidance to the masses.  But is this review from The London Review of Books a bit more in line with today's thinking: Who pays attention to astrology?  In 1953, Adorno published The Stars down to Earth, a critique of the astrology column in the Los Angeles Times during the previous year.  Adorno reckoned that the main audience consisted of women, usually white, middle-aged and socially reclusive with obsessive-compulsive tendencies: astrology wasn’t a powerful and mysterious ancient science but a psychological crutch for a disappointed and ageing middle America.  After the New Age boom of the 1970s, it declined in influence, and for most of us, the horoscopes in newspapers and magazines are a light diversion, or something to be ignored altogether.  Yet astrology remains sedimented in the popular imagination: even the most hardcore sceptic knows their star sign, and recently, it has enjoyed a resurgence among millennials, especially in the United States.  As with feeling comfortable singing a song from Hair, we are once again in the Age of Aquarius (or a version thereof)...

    Another take on all this came when my wife and I belatedly watched Jupiter Ascending, a sci-fi movie which depicted our world as but one of many "farms," a planet where humans were allowed to roam as freely as cattle, little realizing that other worlds indeed viewed them as such.  Indeed, there may be worlds both out there and here on Earth that will continue to defy predictions (so much for some of the predicted Ukraine scenarios in the last post).  What will happen to the stock market, Bitcoin, oil?  How much of this actually matters when you're simply trying to get your family to safety, joining a queue that is miles long.  As with immigration questions in general, their world, a world and life unimagined and little predicted, is now real, as real as it is distant to most of us.  What will we discover as the James Webb satellite peers deep into our cosmological beginnings, asked Smithsonian; indeed what will we discover in ourselves as other satellites peer down on our own planet and see buildings and lives being bombed. 

     A review of Antoine Wilson's book in The Week talked a bit about unexpected interventions by fate:  Wilson's latest novel, Mouth to Mouth, explores another troubling question about morality and justice, said Ari Shapiro in NPR.org.  The book's narrator rescues a drowning stranger, then comes to realize that the man he saved isn't a very good person.  The book's twisty plot, which was inspired by another incident in which Wilson stopped a stranger from stepping in front of a train, surprised even its author: "I didn't mean to write a thriller," he says.  But he acknowledges that the novel is also about the unexpected incidents that shape our lives, and the ways we come to justify them.  "I've always been interested in fate's forks," and how we conjure them into being after the fact, he says.  "It's really, a lot of the time, repackaged serendipity, right?  We look back and we create that story of our lives."

     But then explain these other stories from the same magazine. On December 17, 2021 it wrote: Massachusettes native Alexander McLeish was recovering from open-heart surgery on Thanksgiving when he opened a card to find lottery tickets sent by a longtime friend.  He began scratching one ticket and revealed the first three letters: AWM, his initials.  McLeish kept scratching the crossword-themed ticket until he reached a word in the bottom left corner: "heart."  The ticket won him $1 million.  On January 21, 2022 it wrote: When police in Lebanon, N.H. responded to a report of a German shepherd on a snow-covered highway, they thought it was a stray.  Then, the dog ran away from them and led them into Vermont, where it stopped near a broken guardrail and its owners wrecked pickup truck.  "It quickly became apparent that Tinsley led [police] to the crash site and inured occupants," the New Hampshire State Police wrote on Facebook.  Then on February 4, 2022 it wrote: A New York woman whose dog who went missing five years ago was reunited with her after she turned up 1,000 miles away.  Jen Costa of Wantagh said her English bulldog, Azzurra, was identified at a shelter in Henderson, Tenn., by a microchip.  When she got the news, Costa said, "I just started crying."  Officials at the shelter were also stunned at the dog's reappearance.  "You just want her to be able to talk and tell you what happened," said one.

     From our viewpoint, what happened with us being suddenly blessed with a dog we weren't expecting was something we can't explain.  Upon contacting the shelter, we discovered that the dog had been captured in September while wandering down one of our busiest city streets.  No tag, no chip, wearing only a collar.  After 2 months and nobody calling to claim him, the dog had opened a lick wound and the shelter contacted a rescue group which sent the dog to a foster family (this would turn out to be the 47th dog they would foster, a wonderful couple who raised alpacas and chickens, had 4 other dogs and several cats); needless to say the dog's wound healed quickly as he ran and ran with the other dogs over this couple's 5-acre farm.  And then out of the blue, another member of the rescue group contacts us to let us know that we might want to consider this dog.  

    We are lucky, not only in the way things worked out with the dog but in so many other ways.  And we are also well aware that things are not working out for so many in the world.  And yet, there is so much kindness in the world...kindness from the couple who fostered our dog; kindness from the thousands of people who foster other abandoned or unwanted animals; kindness from the thousands who foster and adopt children; and kindness from the countries who take in people just wanting a return to life.  And while I don't have the answers or the explanations for why things are the way they are, or why they turn out as they do, I did want to end with this bit of brightness in what can seem to be a darkening time, to spotlight an uplifting video from the Australian site, The Dodo.  The world is full of mysteries, and sometimes something as simple as an unexpected moment or addition to our lives can leave us with a sense of both awe and happiness...to all of the people and animals whose lives are being uprooted, a hope that they, too, will find some comfort on the fork in the road ahead.

Photo by Douglas Croft (San Jose, CA.) one of the National Wildlife Federation's photo contest winners.