three emails came thru yesterday...a 15 yr old cat, and two dogs..the cat needs a place by friday, one dog needed a place yesterday and the third dog's family is driving up to the coast this weekend and hope to either drop her off in an adoptive home that we might magically have waiting for her, or if not, here at the sanctuary.
all of the emails said they have heard we do good work...did they hear we were full by any chance too?
i wrote this big long bitchy post yesterday about the unrealistic expectations that folks sometimes place on us.
there is this misconception out there that saints or i am not only able..but enthusiastically willing to shoulder everyone's actual responsibilities.
hey man..i adore animals and i will help every single one that i can...but i am getting to not be a great fan of people. i see no where in our mission statement that says our job is to make human choices and decisions easy.
i had a sympathetic chuckle with sheila yesterday when one of their difficult foster dogs came back for the third time...they decided to remove him from the adoption list and make him their own difficult dog. the returning adopter thought this was the best possible news...screech would stay with sheila and leila forever.
sheila and leila and i think it is terrible news when any dog loses their last chance for adoption ever....and difficult dogs are even more difficult for us then they are for a single pet home because we have others who are unadoptable too...it is a sad state of affairs all around.
i had three chuckles yesterday, two were the ones that if you don't laugh, will have you beating your head against some innocent wall...and one un-ironic that was just good innocently funny....(this would have been the image of joyce dressed up like a nun and accidently breaking jesus' head off her crucifix in public...ooops.)
the difference between ironic and un-ironic chuckles is one hurts us somewhere inside that has been hurt in the same way so many times before that is has become almost normal, so you laugh when you see it heading right at you again..."oh hey...here we go, been here a few times before and apparently here we are again!"...it is twistedly funny simply because it is so familiar and predictable but you still can't believe you are about to be run over again and that is what makes you laugh.
the un-ironic chuckles are something that just makes you feel like laughing because of the innocently funny, unnpredictableness of life, and hopefully it happens to someone else..like joyce, the sweetest and kindest anti-christ!
(sorry joyce but it was really too funny not to share)
and here another irony in life...i felt a deep sense of sadness in seeing off anne and jim this morning. i have seen them three times in the past 5 years...only for weddings and funerals. i don't think i actually had a personal conversation with one of my sisters, and very little with my brother too, they were in and out of town so fast and i was too busy to see anyone much outside of the wedding/saints stuff.
but here is the thing about family that we quite often forget...they know you, they love you, you can actually trust them to always remember this and that alone gives you a deep sense of freedom from worry.
we may all live incredibly busy lives, we may rarely get to see each other, and i may be to craziest of all of the siblings but maybe not...anne is pretty nutz in her own way too.
anyway... there is that connection of family that never disappears and never leaves you truly alone in the world. you can actually continue to love someone that you only see a few times in many years.
anyway..i think irony was created to save us from awful things like life long anger or despair. i think irony is actually something to help us get thru each day. it is a pretty good tool.
It's always sad to say goodbye to family, I remember standing at the airport one time wondering how many times in my life I would be there to wave someone off, and feeling like I had done way more than my share of saying goodbye,seems to get more difficult as we get older too. A bitter sweet moment because it means you have just had good times that now have to end.