Gidget and Sophie Reunion
Anything dogs can do, we can do meta
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Best Friends
(For Gidget on Her Birthday) Oh how they can’t wait to see each other on Dune Street! Puppy persistence meets patience of a lamb. Sophie nipping, running, prancing on hind legs. Gidget a cozy brown hug, judging no one. When Gidget turned two—this was back in the Great Pandemic— Sophie wanted to bring crabs and quahogs wrapped in pink ribbon. No dice. So they ran in circles on the sand, promising to stay in touch after the leaves turned red and yellow and vaccine tamed the virus. Years later, when they forgot who was older, they remembered the summer of 2020— how good the salt air smelled, how fun it was to paw the waves, how happy they made the humans just by being themselves, together. By Len Edgerly Ocean Park, Maine August 19, 2020
Our friends Pam and Marie arrived from Maine last night for two weeks on Sanibel. They brought Sophie’s best friend, Gidget. This sparked a wiggle-fest of delight in the living room and much chasing of each other around the house.
At 2 a.m. I remembered a USB-C cable I need for my Zoom H1n record for South By Southwest interviews. I ordered it on Amazon and then curled up with a book to wind down back to sleep.
The one I opened on my Kindle was The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life by Mark Rowlands, a Welsh philosopher who heads the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami.
Rowlands writes:
As a general rule, I think, dogs lead more meaningful lives than we do. Working out why this is so—indeed, why it must be so—is what this book is all about.
Rowlands asserts that meaning in life is not complicated. “It is authentic happiness. That is all it is.”
Advantage, dogs.
The unexamined life? Maybe it’s worth more than Socrates could imagine.