And the Oscar goes to…Dolly La!
Birth date, unknown.
Adopted, December 5, 2015.
Barking with the Angels, March 6, 2018.
Birth date, unknown.
Adopted, December 5, 2015.
Barking with the Angels, March 6, 2018.
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This is a guest post from the Dog Ma, letting you know, with great sadness, that Her Holiness the Dolly La Ma left this incarnation Tuesday evening, March 6th 2018, at around 10 PM California time. It happened at home, was sudden, unexpected, and her period of suffering was dramatic, but mercifully brief.
The cause was a “Hemmorragic Pericardium Effusion”.
For now there are no words. I will follow this post shortly with a video tribute.
May she rest in heavenly peace.
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Many people have a tradition this time of year to make a gratitude list. Around Thanksgiving and into the winter holidays, people reflect, and consider all they have to be grateful for. And this is a wonderful practice. I, like many, even went through a period when I kept a daily gratitude journal, jotting down what I was most grateful for every night before bed.
But this time of year also has a way of reminding us of winters past, and marking clearly in our minds what we have lost. Some people are facing their first holidays without a loved one who has died. Others must confront their first holiday after losing their houses to wildfires or natural disaster. Or their first holiday being divorced, broken-up, unemployed, ill, or alone. For many of us, among the losses this year has been the loss of a faith in government, or even a confidence in fundamental public decency. News from many parts of the world is deeply troubling, and for some a sense of certainty or hope has been lost. For many, it has been a rough, painful year.
In this season of list making, I bristle a bit at the idea that a “best of” list has more value than a “worst of” list. More and more as life takes its toll, my idea of optimism is not to “focus on the positive”, but to love, as Zorba the Greek said, “the full catastrophe.”
I think there is a way of looking at loss that can have almost the same result as a gratitude list. It’s a different route to the same destination. Here’s what I mean.
One New Year’s Eve, I was performing in a musical show. Sitting in the dressing room as we applied our make-up, the actress next to me said, “I can’t wait for it to be next year.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because,” she said, studying herself in the glass, “next year will not be the year I got divorced.”
Some events are so challenging, they come to define us. There was before, and after, and we are forever changed. And sometimes, as the year wraps up, we feel as if we will drown in the choppy waves of that change. As with my stage colleague, we may not deny the fact of a horrible event, but we are ready to let go of who we were in the face of it. And there is truth in that. Whatever recovery is yet to come, whatever new trials and tribulations next year will bring, it will not be the year _________ happened.
Sometimes, when tragedy strikes, you have to take it head on, and say look at that horrible, horrible thing that happened. You can’t not dwell on the horribleness of it. It was so, so, horrible, wasn’t it? And in that way, looking at loss can force you to come face to face with something no gratitude list can give you: a realization of your own strength. Because the more horrible the loss, the more strength you summoned. Your losses may have been horrible this year, unthinkable even. But if you’re reading this, you survived them. Yes, you did. And as we say in the theatre, bravo!
This holiday won’t be the same as other years. It just won’t. Will it be happy? Sad? Tiring? Confusing, miraculous, or gratifying? All or none of the above?
I suppose none of us knows.
Whatever it will be, and whatever losses you are facing, I wish you well, for your first holiday without _____________.
Love,
LisaWritten in loving memory of my cousin, Greg Walsh,
and my friend, Frank Poletti.
This was the year we lost them.
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Just a quickie here, starting with some TV Stuff I’m tired of:
Opera playing in the background of the villain’s scene. Opera fans, in my experience, are not always serial killers and sociopaths. Sometimes, but not always.
Women in power portrayed as emotionless bordering on cruel. I.e. the Dragon Lady.
The use of children as victims because it isn’t p.c. any more to constantly portray women being victimized, but kids can’t speak up to protest their portrayal, so that makes it OK. NOT!TV Stuff I’m loving:
Increased use of landscapes and vistas in murder mysteries, shamelessly pilfered from Scandanavian shows but welcome nonetheless. The beauty of nature helps contrast and give time to process the violence of the story.
The celebration/normalization of weird. Because I’m a freak, you’re a freak, and we’re all just freak, freak, freaky. Yay.
The ability to binge. This is the Easter Play come full circle. One must pause only to get food, walk the dog, or go use the pissing pot. This is how we are meant to absorb stories. To dive in and let them wash over us. To read them by the fireside as the days pass away. To marvel at them, ponder them, and shout out when they finish: AGAIN!
Happy Watching.
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And then life happens.
Thought I’d be back sooner, dog-blogging, but guess what? The Dog-Ma brought home another dog!
Here we go again. This happened to me once before. First, she puts me in the car and we go to a weird place, and I meet a dog. You know, sniff his butt, hang out for a bit, nothing major.
Next thing I know, that butt I sniffed is coming through MY front door!
Hello? Excuse me? Do I get a vote here?
Do we live in a democracy, or what?!
That was Gadget. Now it's one month since the other new guy got here, and there’s too much to tell. Frankly, I’m a bit exhausted, so I’ll give over the rest of today’s blog to the new kid and let him tell you his story.
See you round,
Dolly La
Hi!
I like you, do you like me?
Hi!
I know I said that already, but that’s just my personality.
Hi! There, I did it again.So I’m running around, right? I’m like sniffing, and peeing, and looking for stuff. I’m super-hungry. Like, ribcage showing, “can we get a dog a snack or what!” hungry. My fingernails are getting way filed down by all this running around. I’d love to find more grass somewhere.
I’m trying to stay out of the way, but there are cars everywhere. I’m in traffic, out, so I grab some sidewalk and start running.
Then out of nowhere, this car stops, and a lady hops out.
“Hi Sweetie!”
She says it in this super-happy voice, and I’m like, “Do I know you?!”
And she’s like, “Good boy! Good doggie! Hi Sweetie!”
This was confusing, but not in a bad way, so I stopped running.
Next thing I know, the lady’s gone to her car and come back with something in her hand. She breaks off a piece of it and throws it at me.
I back away, because ya know, maybe it’s a bomb. But then I catch a whiff.
Peanut Butter!
I’m down for that and slink forward and gobble it up and start to run away again.
“Hey, Sweetie, GOOD boy!” This lady is really excited, and she lobs another peanut butter bomb in my direction, so I’m like, “OK, if you’re throwing it away.”
We go on like this for a while. Meanwhile, the lady has jumped into her car to put on blinking lights and there are still all kinds of cars whizzing by, but we’ve got kind of rhythm going with the peanut butter thing.
She gets out a plastic thing that doesn’t smell like it would taste very good, and starts talking to it. “Where? How far is that? OK. Thanks.” She doesn’t use her happy voice for the plastic thing, so I’m starting to feel special.
But then, wham, the lady tosses this rope-string thing over my head and gives it a tug, and tries to pull me towards her car. The nerve of some people! I buck like bronco. “Whoa!!!” I tell her, “I thought we were friends!” She drops her end of the torture device and goes back to giving me peanut butter and bits of bread. “Well alright then,” I say.
The lady sits down on the back seat of her car, so I have to get a bit closer to get the peanut butter. Then she’s like reaching all around, I don’t know what she’s doing, but then she finds something. Fruit I think. And starts crunching on it. Apple! She takes a bit and feeds it to me. I’ll tell you a secret about me, I love apples. Carrots are OK too, but apples are friggin’ awesome.
So now I’m really into getting closer to the car, because she keeps moving further onto the back seat so eventually I just climb in so I can get more apple. I’m nervous, but more hungry than nervous.
She slams the door behind me, and I’m like “Cool, it’s quiet in here, kinda cozy, and I can eat in peace. The lady starts rubbing my ears, and I’m like, “Nice!”
She drives me to a place nearby, all the time talking into the plastic thing, and the plastic thing is talking back now, “Take a left and go 200 meters, then take a right.”
I give her a big kiss and then she leaves me at that place.“Hayward Animal Shelter,” it’s called. I’m there for two weeks, which is alright, but no picnic. Even though Emma and Vanessa, I think that was their names. They were super!
Then the lady came back with these two other dogs. A German Shepherd who’s a little standoffish but smells divine, and a young frisky guy I could see might be
pal-material. He’s just a few months older than me.
Me? I’m coming up on one year of life. I am filled with youthful exuberance. YEAH!
So, the lady took me home.
It’s been a month now and I have to say, mostly it’s been awesome! Treats like you wouldn’t believe. Kibble three times a day! Walks all around. Dog park. I jump on the bed and the lady chases after me screaming. It’s great, except I don’t know what is up with those laundry room stairs, but I am not going down there. Nuh, uh.
The little guy’s scrappy. We play dawn to dusk. The shepherd and I go for tandem fetch, but she still won’t play one on one with me, even though I’m making an idiot of myself bowing to her all the time. But she’ll come around. They always do, because I’ll tell you one thing about me: I’m loveable.
That’s just how it is.
My name?
I’m Hayward.
Nice to meet you.
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Oh how Gadget loves the Sun.
The Sun.
The Sun.
On his face.
His face.
His face.
And on his back, too.
The Sun.