Ken and Our Heavenly Pup

 

    I'd like to think that my dog Olivia, who passed away nearly 2 weeks ago ago, was more attached to me than my husband. Pictures like this one taken on one of our road trips clearly suggest otherwise. Olivia would regularly step forward from the backseat and onto the console between our two front seats to be hugged and kissed by my husband while on the road.

    I also would like to think that I am more "spiritual" than my husband, although on so many occasions, it doesn't appear to be true. But what is true is that my husband who used to teach math at a university and is one of the more cerebral souls I know seems to be connected to a world other than the one we walk around in which might be the one Olivia now inhabits.

    Yesterday I was feeling depressed, but mostly sad. We're back to living our lives, so Ken is gone on occasion and it just feels so lonely. I never realized what a good companion that four-legged brown eyed blonde puppy was to me. Ken had been gone about an hour when he called to say that the place where he used to go to practice golf no longer allowed walk-in golfers. It had become a high-end training facility Lesson learned there was when you're gone from a place for a year you better call before making assumptions they're still open.

    While he headed out for golf, I was going to go to the beach for a walk, but my car wouldn't start. So once he got home we spent the afternoon dealing with AAA, discussing batteries versus starters, before the car was towed to Goodyear for servicing.

    So we were both feeling a little bit bummed and decided to walk around the neighborhood as the sun set. Here in Florida during the holidays there's a lot of those inflatable Christmas creatures like dogs with wreaths around their head or chubby gingerbread man trios or your basic puffy Santa and his sleigh. But the weird thing is that during the day they're all deflated. So I stopped this woman and laughingly asking her what the deal was. She went on to inform me that the inflatable's are powered by electricity, so people are just trying to conserve and only inflate at night. 

    This woman turned out to be the neighborhood association president and we stuck up a friendly conversation like I'd been her neighbor for six years. She told me that she sold her own wildflower honey from her backyard. So my husband and I walked with her to her house to pick up two bottles. My husband then took the honey home get some cash to pay the woman and then returned to our walk on an electric bike. We finished our "walk" (yes, he cheated a bit) in the dark, admiring all the now inflated Christmas characters, all lit up. We were in better moods.

    However, right before bed last night, my husband remembered to tell me that when he came home with those two jars of honey and as he approached the kitchen he heard what he could swear, was our dog. Barking. Like she used to bark towards the end when she couldn't hear anymore, and would be legit startled by seeing us magically appear. My husband was so puzzled by the sound and a little freaked out that he actually walked around the house looking for our dog.

    I so hope that's true. I want to believe that's true. And I wish that crazy dog would "visit" me either by inserting herself in a picture, by barking when I enter the house or by showing up in the middle of night when I get up to get a drink of water.

I guess the two of them were way more tight than I imagined.

Or maybe my nearly 70 year old husband needs to be seen by a professional lol