Things my family taught me. The list is extensive. The problem with the list is that most of it is hidden to my conscious world. They are things that I learned without knowing I was learning them and while many are wonderful, certainly not all of them are perfect and some are possibly less desirable. I observed again one of the things that I learned that is simultaneously a blessing and a pain in the butt. It happened while cleaning up after the puppy again, again. The second again is not a typo, cleaning up after him is all of my life right now (or so it feels). I will be in the middle of cleaning and think to myself, The other dogs were not this much trouble. They never made this kind of mess. And there were three of them. Granted, Tank outweighs all three of the other dogs combined that weve owned at this age. He is predicted to continue with this trend. Dont get me wrong, I have no buyers remorse. Tank is my dog and I will damage anyone who tries to change that. But why is he so much more trouble than I remember? Or is he? And thats when I understand the gift of my family. You see, the first three puppies were a disaster. They ate a couch. THERE IS NO EXAGGERATION IN THAT STATEMENT. For weeks, they would go out to poop and the collection of couch cushion in our yard would increase. My wife and I would have contests every day to see who could stay at work the longest so we didnt have to clean up. Why didnt I remember that? Why does this seem harder? It happened to me at the dinner table. The family would come home and gather around the table. They were hard workers working hard in the S Florida sun. They were tired and some of them smelled a bit, even after showering. But we ate together and they would tell stories. They found the humor in the worst part of their days. It was like they went out to have the roughest day possible so they could have stories to tell. I learned to collect the humor of this world and to carry as much of that with me as I could. I gave very little room to misery in my sack of sharable experiences, though there is still some in there. Even those stories that are most obviously coming from a place of pain and despair, I will tell with an eye to making you laugh. That is one gift of my family. I seldom have anything bad happen, I just collect funny stories. I rarely let a bad experience keep me from doing something. I just forget how rough things can be sometimes until I get into them. If I were to tell you all the rough things of puppy ownership, it might take me a few minutes. The worst is letting them go at the end. No humor there. But if I was to start telling you stories about my dogs, youd laugh. A lot. Id try not to make you pee yourself, but theres no guarantee of that. Im not Steve Martin after all. So now the question is this. What gifts am I giving to my family? What gifts are you giving to yours? You are giving them something, whether you mean to or not. Are you teaching them to pile up sorrows? Are you teaching them to sift through the dirt of this world to find diamonds to share with others. Whatever you teach them, teach them first to love. Mom especially taught me that one, and its the one gift that makes the others worth having.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 15:20:15 +0000
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