Lucky

My first dog was named Lucky Merriweather. He was a liver-colored Springer Spaniel with scraggly hair that stuck like fur potholders to the furniture. When I was a young boy, he was a solid, steady force for me. We were puppies together for a time, and, with some chagrin, I admit that I’m the one who abandoned him.

Though I’m not claiming he was smarter than other canines, he had one very notable talent. He was a keen observer, with a sharp eye ever mindful of the front door. An enthusiastic opportunist, whenever he sensed an opening, he raced toward freedom with the flailing of his paws against the linoleum floor to break out with one nudge of his nose against the screen door. Running free, leash-less, was his drug of choice.

Several times a week, because he was “my dog,” I was assigned the ritual task of returning him and sobering him up, but he was a swift antagonist. He also relished this hunter/hunted game, excitedly waiting for me in the front yard, letting me come close, less than an outreached leash from him, before pivoting, jumping with all four legs, and dashing off, leading a chase around the dog berry bush and down the road, out of the neighborhood and into the far fields to the Big Pine.

I stalked him relentlessly. Hide and seek. He taught me, if you can’t find Luck one place, then you will find Luck somewhere else. And he’d wag his tail when discovered in the most unlikely spots, as if wondering what had taken me so long.

If that can be called the Lucky Principle, over the years, I’ve learned some version of it operates in affairs of the heart. The Seeking part of us wants to—needs to—stop plodding the worn familiar streets. We can’t afford to be trapped by our Pain and Self-deception. We cannot afford to bemoan the loss. We have work to do. Open our eyes! Think like a playful animal that has been too long forgotten, but still has hope. Spend time with a presence within that demands for us to be free, to seize at the crack in the door.

In my work as a therapist, I’ve found that Heart-dramas can be that crack in the door if we have the courage to push at the barriers that keep us housebound. When we do this, it’s not Luck that we chase. What we Seek from the depths is healing…a mending of the hidden woundings we carry, so the veil can finally drop, and we can recognize what is True and Beautiful.

If I Knew Then . . .

“Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and

makes it so much the larger and better in every way.”

John Muir ^[i]

 

I hold that if I knew then what I know now, I’d have been a companion worthy of my childhood dog. Maybe if my parents had done their own emotional work, attempted their own Heart-dramas, then the end of this Luck’s story wouldn’t have been so predictable.

But we were all dysfunctional and unable to comprehend it, and just too focused on Self-deception and protective avoidance. So, what happened to Luck? My older sister became pregnant at fifteen, and soon after relocated to Germany to be with her new husband who was just old enough to join the military. My father was having an affair with a coworker, and was “working a lot,” while my mother was stuck in bouts of depression, with fears she was losing her mind because her husband frequently told her so in those exact words.

I was left to my own devices. My mother used that phrase frequently, “Okay, I’ll leave you to your own devices.” The phrase might mean something different today, but this was a time before our present-day vast array of technology. She had a tone that sounded loving, pleasing, with a bit of acquiescence, as if she was allowing me my need for personal time. Like she was inviting me to take a road less traveled. “Go and self-actualize, young man!” Or something. In real time, it was confusing. Looking back, I see she was dissociated and was just making an empty awkward comment, unable to say, “I’m out of here,” since it always preceded her locking herself in the bedroom.

By eighth grade I did find some of my own devices, stealing bottles of whiskey from a local tavern and drinking to black-out with a few fellow delinquents. No adults seemed to notice.

Of course, I had lost track of Lucky, leaving him to old age without much awareness on my part. When he escaped one evening, and no one went to look for him, he was killed on a distant highway under the wheels of a tractor-trailer.

[i] John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, Edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1979).