Glenda the Good Witch

look Dad, no teeth!

Slide Ranch Harvest Festival

climbing a tree with sophie and george

Harvesting Manzanita Berries

Goodbye Luna

Luna is dying today. She can't eat anything, which is a very bad sign for a dog who devoted her life to eating. She used to eat my Dad's dirty jogging socks. Sometimes when he went jogging with her, he'd see something hanging behind her like a second tail and would have to pull one of those partially digested socks out of her and carry it all the way home, holding it gingerly like some rotten, dead thing. She once ate through a corrugated cardboard UPS box to get to a 1 lb box of Van Duyn's chocolates, and then proceeded to eat the box of chocolates whole -wrappers, packaging and all. She ate entire bags of sliced bread, giant Costco bags of potato chips, Dorritos - oh how she loved Dorritos. If she was a super-hero, her super power would have resided in her mouth, and she would laid villains to waste left and right - they'd never know what had hit them, they would never would have had a chance.

She ate seat belts. Well, I guess she didn't really eat them, but she chewed through them like they were paper and was dubbed "scissor lips" for her efforts. I imagine a considerable amount of money and engineering smarts have been expended in the effort to make seat belts strong. Automobile engineers probably utilized technologies developed during the Apollo space program, but reducing the interwoven space-age materials to confetti was just a mild diversion for that dog. It took Luna less than 30 seconds to get through a seat belt. I know because at the peak of her private battle with the greatest safety innovation in the history of motorized transportation, I busted her in mid act. My Dad was so sick of the routine. He was spending hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with her habit, so when Laura and I took her down to the beach house for a week one Summer, he warned me not to leave her alone in the car for a second. So when we did leave her alone in the car outside the Bell Buoy seafood store in Seaside, I lingered about 10 feet from the car - just inside the glass door of the store with my eyes locked on that willful, big blond head. She looked out the car window for the first minute or so, watching us as we went inside. I stared at my opponent through the glass door, waiting for her to make her move. When the big blond head with its giant mouthful of shark-like teeth finally did dip downwards, I immediately sprinted to the car, flung open the door only to find that she was about halfway done already. I was no more than 10 feet from the car - I watched her head disappear, the whole thing took less than 15 seconds and she was half way through the seat belt.

A couple of years ago when we were driving Luna down to Berkeley, I had two pounds of smoked salmon from Carla's Smokehouse in the back of our family van. I love smoked fish and Carla makes (or made, I think she retired this year) the best smoked fish on the West Coast in her ramshackle smokehouse in Rockaway Beach, Oregon. Given the gist of the stories I'm telling here, I suppose I hardly need to say what happened. The amazing thing about it though, was that the salmon was intentionally buried as far away from Luna as possible. She was riding on her bed near the front of the van, and the Salmon was in the back corner. It was completely barricaded with heavy luggage. I spent a little bit of time thinking it through and placing big duffel bags weighing 50 lbs each in an interlocking pattern to block all possible approaches. Further reinforcements in the form of large corrugated boxes full of Christmas presents and skillfully placed car tools made what I thought was an impenetrable barrier. We left her alone in the car for various gas station and restaurant stops as we made our way down the coast. She never showed any sign of having left her bed - but sure enough when I unloaded the car in Berkeley, the barricade was fully intact, but all that was left of the Salmon was the kraft bag it had been in. I have to conclude that she opened her door, walked around to the back and popped open up the hatchback - how else could she have pulled off this Houdini-like trick? Maybe she willed it out of it's corner, and it levitated across the car, hovering briefly near her mouth before surrendering itself to her, swallowed whole in one of her famous, guttural, wolf-like gulps.

She ate one of my most valuable records. When I say record, you might think I'm talking about a legal record, like a piece of paper. Dogs have been known to eat paper. No, I mean the vinyl kind that plays music. I collect records and own, err, owned, one of the holy grail records of country rock collecting - the first pressing of Gram Parson's International Submarine Band record. There were a 1000 copies of this record in the entire world - now there are 999. I found it at Django Records in Portland for $5 and it was in mint condition. Even in the 90's when I bought it it was probably worth 100 times that amount- it was shiny and new as the day it was made in 1966. It was one of the greatest coups of my record collecting career. She ate the record - not just the cover, but she chewed the vinyl itself. What was on that record - did I touch it with pizza fingers at some point? What nutritional sustenance could she have possibly gotten from 40 year old cardboard and hydrogenated petroleum? Why couldn't she have chosen the Roseanne Cash record that was right next to it and was worth about a dollar - at least it has that glossy 80's coating on the cover that is probably some kind of corn starch derivative. It was marginally more nutritious than the old, plain cardboard that held the Gram Parsons record.

Human relationships are often forged in short, intense periods. The relationship that follows that initial period can sometimes seem like an epilogue. College roommates who haven't seen each other for years, and immediately fall into familiar, intimate banter; childhood friends, first loves ... It's as if that relationship always exists in that original time period, even if the epilogue extends decades longer, as soon as those two people get together they're back in that time. My time with the big blond dog was defined by the first six months I knew her. She loved me in those days because whenever I visited my parents and Claire in Portland, I took her out hiking. And while food was always her true love, at that time exercise and spending time in the woods was a close second. I was the only one in our family that took her out into the woods, so she was devoted to me and used to get very excited when I'd start lacing up my hiking boots.

Our very first hike together, on the French Pete Creek trail near the McKenzie River on Memorial Day weekend of 1995 or 1996, was almost our last. This area was the site of a bitter logging dispute a few years before we visited it. A small amount of old-growth forest was spared the axe and I was eager to check it out, but there weren't any real trailheads or marked trails. We made our way up the "creek" which was really more like a river in the lower section, and we ran out of the river-side trace that was passing for a trail after about two miles. I left Luna standing at the edge of the river a few feet away and walked out on some floating logs in three or four feet of water to look across the creek to see if the trail continued on the other side. The floating logs formed a solid, boardwalk-like platform and I heard a noise behind me and turned around to see Luna climbing up on a log and making her way towards me. Dogs aren't very good at balancing on things like logs, and almost as soon as she got on the log she fell in. I panicked because she was just a young dog and hadn't had much practice swimming and could easily have gotten trapped under the solid platform of logs. I laid down quickly on the logs and plunged my hand into the cold, dark water and found the furry body and yanked her up by her collar. I felt like crying when I dragged her back to shore and held her, squeezing her, saying her name over and over.

A few months later I came up to Portland to babysit Claire, who was about ten at the time, for three weeks. Claire and Luna were like twins. I know that might seem like a ridiculous thing to say about a dog and a girl, but they really did have the same kind of light energy and spirit - they we're inseparable and they just had a twinish vibe to them. They were about the same size and weighed the same amount, they were both blond .... OK, I know those are superficial similarities, and I guess if I'm going to spend time describing those kind of similarities I should also point out that one talked a lot and the other didn't at all, but they really did sort of look like each other.

Claire and Luna saved me. I was in my mid-twenties and a little sad and at loose ends. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I had just broken up with my girlfriend of a couple of years and didn't seem to be able to make relationships work. I was playing in a band that wasn't going anywhere, I had given up on going to graduate school and my half-hearted attempt to pursue an academic career. The only thing I knew I liked was the hiking and the outdoors and the world of wild plants that I was just discovering, but I didn't know how that was ever going to lead to anything. I just didn't know who I was or where I was going in life. They made me forget about all my self-involved worries. I was just there to take care of them. I was sucked out of my mid-twenties anxious malaise and into their bright world of the here and now ... Claire's friend Sophie losing her pet rabbit, walking around the neighborhood looking for him, peeking in people's back yards ... taking Luna up to Riverdale to hit the tennis ball with the baseball bat- over and over, teaching her to fetch - "drop it Luna, droooop, yes, droooooop" - will she ever get tired, how can any creature have that much energy? ... Singing "That thing you do" with Claire, singing Beatles, we sang whenever we drove around in the car together, claire and I were always singing ... Taking Luna hiking for the day - oh how that dog loved hiking and so did I. I was so hungry for nature, so excited about plants - I was falling in love with the thing that would become my career, my life, but I didn't know what it was then ... scrambling up a hillside off one of those Columbia Gorge trails to harvest Devil's Club root, Luna right beside me, digging with my gardening shovel, pulling up a big, fibrous root, the spicy smell of Devils Club root suddenly exploding in the air and Luna looks at me quizzically at me, her face right nest to mine, such human eyes ...

That dog knew I was sad. Every night she'd sleep on the bed next to me. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and the big, blond furry body was there. I'd squeeze her and she'd make comforting, cozy noises and lick my face. I was just crazy about that dog. I know she knew I was sad because she performed the same service other people in our family. That was her great emotional talent - she was always drawn to people who were sad, and always offered her tremendously healing, comforting presence. If she was on the show "Dogs with Jobs" she would be a therapy dog. She would just sit next to the person who most needed her, and be there for that person - licking their face, offering herself up to be hugged and held. She would work her magic without you ever knowing she had done anything. Suddenly you just felt better. How can a dog know you're sad?

Luna lived with us for a couple of years near the end of her life. Even in her mentally and physically diminished state, she and my little girl bonded quickly. I often thought about the fact that she started her life with a little blond girl, and, fifteen years later, ended with another one. We had to give her up when the stairs at work and home got to be too much for her. She hasn't lived with us in over a year, but when Jane draws pictures of our family, she still always includes Luna. We sat down with Jane tonight to tell her Luna was dying. "Do you know what dying means?" ... "yes" ... "what does it mean?" ... "it's when the body doesn't move anymore, and it stops breathing and just stays there" ... "yes that's right, and it means she isn't here anymore, her spirit lives on but, but next time we go up to Nonna and Baba's she won't be there anymore" ... It's such a hard thing talking with a kid about death. I didn't want to pretend like it wasn't happening. I didn't want it to be a secret. Death is part of life and I think it's just better to make it normal and not hide it or make it some secret bad thing. But of course we all know that it never really is normal. We never really understand it. So I see Jane wrestling with this concept and I think about how she'll spend the rest of her life trying to understand this strangest of all parts of life. It's the most normal part of life really, the only thing in life we can be certain of is that we will die someday, and yet at the same time it's the one thing we can never, really understand. The one concept that our brains reflexively reject and steadfastly refuse to believe. A pet is obviously the best of all possibilities for a child to learn about death. So we sat around at dinner time and passed pictures of Luna around and told stories about her. We talked about why we loved Luna. Jane said she loved Luna because she was furry and was like a friend. And then we lit a candle and held hands and were quiet for awhile. And the quietness worked it's magic and made it real - all of Janes nervous, twitchy behavior she had been displaying for the past hour turned to quiet stillness, and then tears. She's such an amazing little girl that one. I see her sitting there in her chair, holding hands with her mom and dad, the candle light flickering in her thoughtful eyes, thinking quietly about Luna. That's just the hardest thing you can ask anyone to do, to sit quietly with the most difficult of all things, death. You never know what the right thing to do is when you're a parent, you just sort of do what feels right. And it breaks my heart to see her trying to understand that Luna is gone. But she's a very brave girl, and that's what she does - she sits there quietly and still, and then the tears well up as it becomes real to her. And she cries real tears about the real thing that's making her sad - "I'm going to miss Luna" ... "I'm going to miss her too, come her honey, let me hold you" ...

Some dogs have a human like spirit. I'm forty two years old, and I've known and loved all sorts of dogs. But I've only known two other dogs aside from Luna with that strangely human-like quality. Pat and Felicity's old dog Sky - Sky who never had time to play with other dogs because she was always interested in what the people were up to ... such deep blue, soulful eyes ... she sat there under the maple tree when we played ultimate frisbee, ignoring the squirrels and other dogs, sitting upright, attentively watching us and waiting. Greta's part-coyote dog Jack in Arizona - he wandered into her house from the mountains - "cow on the left Jack" Jack looks left, "Cow on the right" without hesitation, he looks right. You could talk to that dog and you really felt like he knew what you were saying. He just sat there next to you and listened to you talk, and again, the deep, soulful eyes ... By all accounts Laura's childhood dog Lass was just that kind of dog. That dog is worshipped like a god in their house in Mill Valley- watercolors and pictures of her everywhere, and stories half whispered of a dog with emotional depth that puts most humans to shame. Luna was one of those kind of dogs.

Luna you were part of our family - we love you and will always remember you. Goodbye sweet, big blond dog.

video from my brother John and my Mom ...