Lyrics: The Next Generation

Comments (not posts) about my choice of lyrics were aplenty. The criticism centered around the jaded appearance that music stopped for me around 1978. While the dark days of disco created a big line of demarcation in musical growth, followed by the Big Hair Eighties, I have to admit that I left a lot of some really great music and lyrics off my recent post.

With the exception of rap, there has been a pretty good surge in popular music of late. I guess I have to include “hip-hop” in that even though I fail to understand the distinction between rap and hip-hop.

Just so I don’t date myself, I feel the need to update my earlier post of lyrics and add songwriters that are closer to this century. But just to defend my choices of the first post, I did have some method to my madness. As a fellow Blogger was told in harsh terms, I chose music that moved me at the time I first heard it and, at the time, I was very easy to move. Being young and having something called “your music” is very appealing in artistic terms and very difficult to forget.

I think it is obvious when music turned to the street that groups and songs were manufactured for short shelf life (which explains why I can walk through Best Buy and see thousands of groups I never heard of and, at the same time, the bins for the Beatles, Van Morrison, and even the Moody Blues are full).

As further evidence – if the Moody Blues point didn’t put you over the top – many of the early rapper’s most marketable songs were spiced up with “our” music. Best-selling songs like Gangsta Paradise was spiced up from the music of Stevie Wonder, Public Enemy ripped off Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth, and Wyclef Jean borrowed musical inspiration from Roberta Flack. Even Eminem used Aeosmith’s Dream On and Dido to further prove the current generation can’t lay claim to its own music, instead stealing it from earlier generations. If we children of the Sixties had to take music from the previous generation, Frank and Dino would have had our legs broken.

Not to rag on the current generation, but I think the reason people my age are so musically stuck in the Sixties and the Seventies is because we felt like the music was ours. I’m not sure today’s generation can feel that way. Still, there are some better songs being written now and it seems as though the singer-songwriter is having a bit of resurgence.

Like many others, I haven’t leapt to make comparisons between the Beatles and Cold Play. The Beatles were revolutionary; combining full melodies and instrumentation with words of love and of changing the world. Cold Play still sounds like they haven’t hit their stride yet, but I would be remiss if I didn’t include some of what they had to say lyrically:

Under the surface trying to break through
Deciphering the codes in you
I need a compass, draw me a map
I'm on the top, I can't get back

High up above or down below
when you’re too in love to let it go
If you never try you'll never know
Just what your worth

In a haze, a stormy haze, I’ll be round
I’ll be loving you always, always.
Here I am and I’ll take my time
Here I am and I’ll wait in line always
Always.

Give me one, 'cause one is best
In confusion, confidence
Give me peace of mind and trust
Don't forget the rest of us
Give me strength, reserve control
Give me heart and give me soul
Wounds that heal and cracks that fix
Tell me your own politik.

Sometimes songs hit you because of the way you heard them in a movie. The song from the now defunct band Remy Zero used for the movie Garden State is a perfect example. Like a moth drawn to the fire, I can’t help but put it here:

What if you catch me, where would we fall?



Even though U2 is alive and well, they forged their reputation 15 years ago. Because they are still putting out music, if only for aid concerts, they can still qualify as from this century. Here are some good ones from U2:

I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like fire
This burning desire
I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devilI
t was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

See the stone set in your eyes
See the thorn twist in your side
I wait for you
Slight of hand and twist of fate
On a bed of nails she makes me wait
And I wait without you

In the locust wind comes a rattle and hum
Jacob wrestled the angel and the angel was overcome
You plant a demon seed, you raise a flower of fire
See them burning crosses, see the flames, higher and higher

She runs through the streets with her eyes painted red
Under a black belly of cloud in the rain
In through a doorway she brings me
White gold and pearls stolen from the seaS
he is raging, she is raging
And the storm blows up in her eyes
She will suffer the needle chill
She is running to stand still

Midnight, our sons and daughters
Were cut down and taken from us
Hear their heartbeats

In the cold mirror of a glass
I see my reflection pass
I see the dark shades of what I used to be
I see the purple of her eyes
The scarlet of my lies
Love rescue me

Early morning, April four
A shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

Another example of a movie introducing a good songwriter was Elliott Smith writing Miss Misery which was used to end the fabulous movie, Good Will Hunting. While he has since died from an overdose (tell me you couldn’t see that coming from reading his lyrics), he has left us this bit of lyrical poetry.

next door the tv's flashing
blue frames on the wall
it's a comedy of errors, you see
it's about taking a fall
to vanish into oblivion
is easy to do
and i try to be but you know me
i come back when you want me to
do you miss me miss misery
like you say you do?

Goo and Foo are our next two and Nicholas of Cairo fame turned me on to both groups when he was renting one of our back room and having his “friends” steal my Bose radio.

From the Goo Goo Dolls:

Comin' down the world turned over
And angels fall without you there
And I go on as you get colder
or are you someone's prayer?

And from the Foo Fighters:

Tonight I'm tangled in my blanket of clouds
Dreaming aloud
Things just won't do without you, matter of fact

Back to the Eighties with Modern English and a great lyric:

Moving forward using all my breath
Making love to you was never second best
I saw the world thrashing all around your face
Never really knowing it was always mesh and lace

Jack Johnson has become very popular lately but is probably best known for his light and easy music than his lyrics. Still, this isn’t bad:

It seems to me that maybe
It pretty much always means no
So don't tell me you might just let it go A
nd often times we're lazy
It seems to stand in my way
Cause no one no not no one
Likes to be let down

By the way, nobody said anything to me about this, but I did forget to include the Rolling Stones in my earlier post so I have to correct that slight:

It is the evening of the day
I sit and watch the children play
Doing things I used to do
They think are new
I sit and watch
As tears go by

There's no time to lose I heard her say
Catch your dreams before they slip away
Dying all the time
Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind
Ain't life unkind

I watched the glee while your kings and queens fought
for ten decades for the Gods they made
I shouted out "who killed the Kennedy's?" when after all it was you and me
Let me please introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
And I lay traps for troubadors
who get killed before they reach Bombay
I know I dreamed you a sin and a lie,
I have my freedom but I don't have much time
Faith has been broken, tears must be cried
Let's do some living after we die

And I went down to the demonstration
To get my fair share of abuse
Singing, We're gonna vent our frustrationI
f we don't we're gonna blow a 50-amp fuse
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes well you just might find
You get what you need

The following Bob Seger song means more if you hear him singing it. You can just tell he’s at a crossroads when he belts out the following lyric:

Stood alone on a mountain top starin' out at the Great Divide
I could go east I could go west it was all up to me to decide
Just then I saw a young hawk flyin' and my soul began to rise
And pretty soon
My heart was singin'
Roll me away ...

Last but not least, I left off Pink Floyd. No, this doesn’t really follow my “new generation” theme of this post, but Floyd’s stuff is so poignant that if I were to leave them off, I would have my Blogging license taken away. Oh yes, they require a license to do this. From Floyd:

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
and if there is no room upon the hill
and if your head explodes with dark forbodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
And I have become
Comfortably numb.

We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl,
year after year,
running over the same old ground. What have we found?
The same old fears,
wish you were here.

That's the truth, wish you were here.

There I Go Again

So much for rest for the weary. Once I return from my second winter, I get to visit Moscow 10 days later. When I get back, I will have logged more than 200,000 flight miles in the past 12 months (some, god forbid, in coach).

I don't mind so much going to Moscow, the place where my incessant traveling began two decades ago.

When I first started out being the only American foolish enough to actually start a business in the Soviet Union, I thought of myself as a bit of a pioneer. Of course many of the pioneers that went West, the way of Horatio Alger, lost everything including some who were given a haircut and close shave. After realizing seven years too late that I was one of the contributing factors to Russia's economic turnaround through transfer of wealth -- a riches to rags story that even Alger couldn't turn around -- I often pondered the circular lament of knowing then what I know now. Just as an aside, wasn’t Alger the 19th Century’s version of Michael Jackson?

Well now is, well, now and I know a bit more than I did back then, so I will poke my head behind the iron curtain again and hope I see something real instead of some guy yelling, "never mind that man behind the curtain..."

On Sadness and Other Bothersome Things

Gail just left after we were together in the Southern Hemisphere for 10 days. And I’ve been trying to figure out why I have this sadness welling up in me, or this feeling like a huge piece is missing from my life. I would like to explain, but in proper corners we don’t really open up that much and talk about our feelings or, when asked how we’re doing, we say, “fine,” or “not too bad.”

I’ve been using those throw-away lines all year and, to be honest, this has been one of the saddest years of my life. It hasn’t been “fine” or “not too bad” for a long time. I doubt anyone really knows that because since I was a kid, I always just trudged on with a “what happened has happened” way of dealing with sad events.

I cried when my father died and I think that was more about crying for my mother and knowing how lost she would be without him. A bit more than a year later, I had no tears left when my mother died, technically from a spreading cancer but more likely from a broken heart. Why didn’t I cry? Why did I demonstrate what she always said I was; a coper (if there is such a word)?

The years 1994-1995 were awful years for Gail and I, losing three of our four parents, moving across country, and enduing other trauma related to just living. I gained 50 pounds in protest, Gail seemed shell-shocked. But we made it, largely thanks to all of our friends and remaining relatives. And I suppose believing in the view that God only give us what we can handle. It sure seemed He had more faith in us than we did, though.

You also come to realize that, sadly, there is nothing unique to your suffering. Suffering is a great leveler of human existence as it crosses over all sub-sections of human existence. It doesn’t matter whether we’re a peasant in Bolivia or Bill Gates, we all eventually take those long, final heaves of breath before we pass under. And it’s no great solace that pain and suffering are democratic, it all still affects us as if we alone are left to feel that way. With any loss, the world just seems to sink into the background and all we can look at is our own broken-hearted feelings of sadness and, inevitably, frustration.

Too often we get told that “everyone goes through this,” or “you’ll make it through this, everyone does.” Somehow, that never seems to make it any better. What difference does it make that being hurt is not a unique experience? It still hurts, and relativism is meaningless as a demonstration of compassion.

This year has had it slices of saddening loss for my entire family and, it’s safe to say, that each of us will be glad to say good-bye to 2005. Kellen had to endure the ending of a 7-year relationship; trying to rationalize it as only he can when break-ups and love lost are never rational events. I know I told him about similar break-ups for me, as others had, but he was right to say that “it’s not the same.” And the reason it’s not the same is because what happened to me and others, didn’t happen to him. His was a unique experience and there’s no getting around that. All loss is that way.

Emily lost her dog and then, shortly after, lost who she thought was her soul mate. The same thing: she was given plenty of advice on how to cope from the experience we all have shared. In the end, it was all just as pointless as what was said to Kellen because the loss of something so intimate as a relationship can only have a vague resemblance to what others may have been through. So vague, in fact, that we should all vow to never feel compelled to compare.

The final blow was my brother Bill passing through sleep’s dark and silent gate, as Jackson would say. I cried when I heard about it from Peter, cried again when Kellen thought he was telling me for the first time, and cried in the shower, more out of frustration of not having a voice in the matter. I also cried at the funeral as did everyone around us.

Yet I still don’t feel I have fully mourned his loss as I don’t think I have accepted that he died. I keep thinking he’s going to be calling me or that he’ll just show up at the door one day. Even when Peter told me, I didn’t believe him, despite the fact he was also telling me they were conducting an autopsy – something that is usually not done on the living. I suppose I am still in a state of shock and denial but I am also aware that, like minor tremors, I am having fits of small cuts of loss nearly every day. I don’t think I will have that one big breakdown where it all comes out at once. I'll just continue to have the nagging everyday reminders that he is gone. I think his wife Sue feels the same and I know we both wish we could get that one big cry out of the way so we wouldn’t have to feel the endless little moments of sadness every day.

So when Gail left today and took half of me with her, I shouldn’t be that surprised. Loss of anything, as simple as just time, is always difficult because the book on it says you just have to deal with it. I know I wanted to be on that plane with her today (well, not her plane, it had as excruciating long layover and I just don’t do that), just as much as I wanted to be with Emily as she was going through a rough patch this afternoon.

These are the moments that fill our lives and sadness doesn’t get enough attention because we fear our feelings. Family and friends too often get pushed aside for the supposed greater triumphs of personal gain. I like what I do and I like what I have accomplished, but the simple fact is: I would rather be a better husband, father, and friend than anything I hope to end up with here. Politics and all the entrapments of power is so transitory that who wins what or who has the upper hand on an issue or whether or not the good guys are in the lead are oh so trivial when it comes to taking care of those around you.

Here’s hoping you are all well and surrounded by your loved ones. And that we never forget what we have and what we have lost.

Browne or Whitman: You be the Judge.

Without my new best friend Skip, this site would have no posts at all. My kids tell me it’s because I have only told three people about my Blog. But I thought the word of mouth would have spread this bastion of eclectic art around the globe! Oh bother. Maybe they’re right. Anyway, the only thing that gets a reaction are the Top 5 lists or posts that create controversy. So, here’s some more of the same.

I wrote earlier about using movie lines to speak for us. How about the same for the poetry of music? Certainly some of the best prose modern literature has to offer has come from our generation’s gifted songwriters. Songwriters like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Lennon & McCartney, Richards & Jagger, Bernie Taupin, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Marley have had as much an impact on furthering the literary movement in our culture as have, say, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Bellow, and Mc Murtry. Even poets like Frost, Sandberg, Whitman or Dickinson, because, after all, aren’t today’s writers of lyrics the poets of our time? Didn’t Paul Simon foretell the future: the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, tenement halls….

And that’s a good place to start, Paul Simon. Here are some of my favorite lyrics of his:

• “Because a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
• “And as I watch the drops of rain, weave their weary paths and die, I know that I am like the rain, there but for the grace of you go I."
• “Like a poem poorly written, we are verses out of rhythm, couplets out of rhyme, in syncopated time, and the dangled conversation, and the superficial sighs, are the borders of our lives.”
• “We come on the ship they call the Mayflower, we come on the ship that sailed the moon. We come in the ages most uncertain hour and sing an American tune.”
• “There will never be a father who loves his daughter as much as I love you.” (For some reason I always feel ill after that line. Emily?)

The Beatles had a few:

• "And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.”
• “Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel tower. Elementary penguin singing Hari Krishna. Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.”
  

Most people think of Elton John when they hear the following lyrics. However, the large-spending, bespectacled, aging pop star only put Bernie Taupin's fine words to music:

• “And tell me grey seal how does it feel to be so wise. To see through eyes that only see what’s real. Tell me grey seal.” (For a Dogg.)
• “I’d just allow a fragment of your life to wander free baby, Cause’ losing everything is like the sun going down on me.”
• “What happened here, as the New York sunset disappeared? I found an empty garden among the flagstones there. Who lived here?”
  

Gail has the same kind of love and affection for Joni Mitchell that most women of her generation have. I could have put "Clouds" in this, but then I would have to kick my own ass for being a big wuss. But I do happen to like this one:

• “If I could drink a case of you, I would still be on feet.”
  

Willie Nelson started out as a singer/songwriter, penning "Crazy" that Patsy Cline made famous. Later, after all the pot slowed down his desire and creativity, he was happy to cover songs from others, most notedly Kris Kristofferson. I think his renditions of Kristofferson are some of the best he did:

• “A thousand times I’ve seen you, and a thousand times you take my breath away. Fear and doubts consume me, afraid someone will take it all away.”
• “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Nothing ain't worth nothing but its free.”
• “Come and lay down by my side till the early morning light. All I'm taking is your time, help me make it through the night. Well I don't care who's right or wrong and I won't try to understand. Let the devil take tomorrow cause tonight I need a friend”
• “Just like the sound over the mountain top, you know I always come again. You know I love to spend my morning times, like sunlight dancing on your skin.”
  

If I don't throw some words from Ian Anderson in here, I will be absolutely flooded with complaints from a certain Pultab site. I was forced to grow up with these, so it's been more of an imprint when I shared a nest and therefore reflexive. For the ill-informed, Ian Anderson is, for all intents and purposes, Jethro Tull:

• “He's not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.”
• “In the shuffling madness of the locomotive breath.”
• "Really don't mind if you sit this one out. My words but a whisper, your deafness a shout.

I like the following line from Kenny Rankin so much that I wrote it on a piece of butcher paper Skip and I had up on our bathroom wall of our apartment. It was naturally surrounded by Tull-isms. Doesn’t the quote fit the bathroom though?

• “Cause it’s oh so peaceful here. There’s no one sitting over my shoulder, nobody breathing in my ear.”
  

Eva Cassidy covered a Sting song, and I think she made it better. However, the lyrics were all from Sting and I think are quite romantic:

• “I never made promises lightly. And there have been some that I've broken. But I swear in the days still left, we'll walk in fields of gold.”

I used to listen to Cat Stevens incessantly as a kid, so, this is for a boy I once knew:

• "Now every second on the nose, the humdrum of the city grows. reaching out beyond the throes of our time. We must try to shake it down. Do our best to break the ground. Try to turn the world around one more time.”
• “All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside, It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it. If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them you know not me. Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away. I know I have to go.”
• “Her eyes like windows, trickle in rain. Upon the pain getting deeper. Though my love wants to relieve her. She walks alone from wall to wall. Lost in her hall, she can't hear me. Though I know she likes to be near me. Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa, Lisa.”
  

It took me a long time to come around to Bob Marley as I judged him for his odd religion and his devotion to ganja. But I learned more and, as an aside, it’s still a weird religion but has this interesting bit of trivia: In the Rasta religion, Haile Selassie, the former leader of Ethiopia, is considered a saint. It seems Jamaica was in the midst of a terrible drought. Salasi came for a state visit and the moment his airplane arrived, it began to rain. It rained for his entire visit and the drought was over. He was hailed as the savior. So, the poor guy has a bad vacation, and they found a religion on him.

Anyway, I became more interested in Bob Marley because of his lyrics. I think he has written incredible lyrics, especially taken into the context of where he came from and the feeling he put into his words. Here are some of my favorites:

• The road of life is rocky
  And you may stumble too.
  So while you point your fingers
  Someone else is judgin' you.
  Love your brotherman.
• I wanna love you and treat you right.
  I wanna love you every day and every night.
• One love, one heart.
  Let's get together and feel all right.
• Good friends we have had, oh good friends we've lost along the way.
  In this bright future, you can't forget your past,
  So dry your tears I say.
• Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,
  None but ourselves can free our minds.
• Don't worry about a thing
  'Cause ev'ry little thing gonna be alright.

I could make this post quite a bit longer with a number of other favorites, and not even scratch the surface of Dylan, which we will just leave for others to post their favorites. But I have to end with, dare I say, one of the best poets of our time, Jackson Browne. While anyone who has head him speak on, like, ah, man, like this big, ah, like problem, of, you, know, man, this nuclear, ah thing, well, man, that’s, ah, a problem, you know?, and believe him to be actually retarded, he is undeniably a bit of a savant when it came to writing lyrics. Here are some oldies but goodies (warning, there are a lot):

• Jamaica, say you will help me find a way to fill these sails
  And we will sail until our waters have run dry.
• It's such a clever innocence with which you show myself to me
  As if you know how it feels to never be who you wanted to be.
• Now we're lying here
  So safe in the ruins of our pleasures.
  Laughter marks the place where we have fallen.
  And our lives are near
  So it wouldn't occur to us to wonder,
  Is this the past or the future that is calling?
• Who'll come along and hold out that strong and gentle father's hand?
  Long ago I heard someone say something 'bout Everyman.
• Now for me some words come easy
  But I know that they don't mean that much
  Compared with the things that are said when lovers touch.
  You never knew what I loved in you,
  I don't know what you loved in me.
  Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be.
• I'm just one or two years and a couple of changes behind you in my lessons at love's pain and heartache school.
• You go and pack your sorrow,
  Trash man comes tomorrow.
  Leave it at the curb and we'll just roll away
• I don't remember losing track of you.
  You were always dancing in and out of view.
  I must've always thought you'd be around.
  Always keeping things real by playing the clown,
  Now you're nowhere to be found.
• Baby if you need me like I know I need you
  There's just one thing I'll ask you to do.
  Take my hand and lead me to the hole in your garden wall,
  And pull me through
• And when you've found another soul
  Who sees into your own,
  Take good care of each other.
• Make room for my forty-fives
  Along beside your seventy-eights
  Nothing survives
  But the way we live our lives.
• I'm going to find myself a girl
  Who can show me what laughter means.
  And we'll fill in the missing colors
  In each other's paint-by-number dreams.
• Love won't come near me, she don't even hear me
  She walks past my vacancy sign.
  Love needs a heart, trusting and blind
  I wish that heart was mine.
• Give up your heart and you lose your way,
  Trusting another to feel that way
  Give up your heart and you find yourself,
  Living for something in somebody else.
  Sometimes you wonder what happens to love
  Sometimes the touch of a friend is enough.
• Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capitol.
  The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will.
  Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon,
  And I hear the U.S.S.R. will be open soon.
  As vacation land for lawyers in love.

I know I will need to do more of this, but I have been sort of tied up will Gail being in Wellington and taking up my good Blogging time.

A Fluffy Animal Story for Tough Times

The tragic news of the loss of life and destruction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has been overwhelming. It’s difficult to imagine writing something serious as it would seem so trite by comparison. After what has happened, I decided we need more whimsy in the world and on this Blog. We need some sort of feel-good story, or just a simple anecdote or daydream. For reasons I can’t explain, the title of Stephen Sondheim’s play “A Little Night Music” came to mind as something to soothe the heavy heart. Even soothier was the name of the Igmar Bergman film the play was based on, Smiles of a Summer Night. The last week of the unofficial end to summer seemed like there was nothing to smile about, but I will do my part and oblige with a little light fare. I hope others will post their happy and fun thoughts to help blunt an otherwise depressing news day. By the way, where’s Nicholas when you need him? Cairo? What the hell is he doing there? OK, so here’s my fluffy-animal story: My favorite daughter Emily, who grew up learning gymnastics with black patent leather shoes apparently too close to the Slade’s entry wall, has an affinity for animals of all sorts. She’s much too pretty and fun to be called that “crazy cat lady” yet, but she’s getting close with her new round of cat fostering. Sitting in “my” bathroom in Sacramento is a bucketful of kittens; five to be exact. A barrel-full of monkeys has nothing on this gaggle of 8-10 week-old kittens. The reason they have taken over MY bathroom (with the Super Flush 2000, and the air-sucker fan -- ahhhhhh!) is because Emily agreed to take any cats that the animal shelter deems are too sick to be adopted. It turns out there were these five unrelated kittens, all with respiratory illnesses in need of safe harbor while they mend. Naturally five kittens are not too much for my bathroom and Emily to handle (have I told you yet how serene this bathroom is?). The kittens were all named by Emily to match their namesakes and personalities of characters from Reno 911. Jonesy is always purring but has a habit of scratching; Junior is the shape of a football, small head and tail, huge orange belly. He can’t stop eating, although that isn’t really like Junior from the show. Perhaps she should put a Kevlar vest on him. While Emily likes Garcia,  all the other kittens don’t seem too fond of him and don’t want anything to do with him. He also hit Jonesy once and, like the show, Jonesy had to pull crosswalk duty as a result. Weigel is crazy and won’t take her meds, and Dangle is kind of gay and boring. They are definitely nocturnal and can be heard banging against the door playing all night long. Anything amuses them. They play with these little balls with bells in them in the bathtub (not that this bathroom hasn’t seen larger balls before, I can tell you). They also play with cat poop, my Super Sucker 2000, Emily’s hair, and virtually anything that moves. When they sleep, though, they all sleep in a ball that is a mélange of color. One is an orange tabby, Jonesy is orange and white, and the others are sort of gray tabbies. Emily has found such joy in helping animals. Just about one year ago today, she came to us and said there was a dog on the Animal Shelter’s website that was going to be euthanized the following day. We were skeptical of both the threat to give the dog a fateful shot and of Emily’s long-term willingness to take care of the dog. She took a friend to see this dog and instantly fell in love with a decrepit, broken, scared and battered beagle. She phoned us and told us to come down and give our opinion. It turns out the dog was indeed marked for death as the Sacramento Animal Shelter euthanizes dogs after a certain period, and nobody was going to take this sad sack of a dog in the next 24 hours except someone with a caring heart. That turned out to be Emily, so we were given a discount to buy the dog (imagine owning a marked-down pet), and put her shaking body in the car. It didn’t seem as though she would survive the trip home, the beagle looked so frightened and old. We found out that an older couple had dropped the dog off saying they were too old to care for it. When it arrived at the shelter, the workers thought the dog was black because it was covered from head to toe with fleas. Instead she was a white and tan beagle. She also was at least nine years old but looked much older. Her tail was broken, she had such bad arthritis that she walked like a peg-legged pirate, and she had a four-inch glob of tumor dangling from her body. One eye bulged out of her head due to advance stages of glaucoma. A vet told us that the pain from the disease would be impossible to bear if she were human – but I suppose if she were human she would have been better cared for. Oh, and the dog had never been spayed and was nearly bred to death. Naturally we named her Flash after the “great” speed in which she walked (I think she ran once, though). We took Flash to the vet and were told she was suffering from many ailments, not the least among them was cancer. We were told that it would cost us $3,000 to have all the operations that were needed. But, as luck would have it, Andrew Whitaker, through some sort of clerical error, was admitted to the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and Emily called him to see what he could do. We believe the school had never seen a dog in such bad shape and agreed to do cancer screening, remove her eye, have her spayed, and give her the once-over for $300. Her biopsy report indicated there was no place that cancer did not exist and Emily was told not to expect her to live very long. Emily cared for Flash and nurtured her and spent nearly every opportunity by her side. Flash often slept on top of Emily with her nose tucked under Em’s arm. Flash became very comfortable in her new surrounding, particularly after the eye was removed and the pressure gone. She took to sleeping on her back, legs spread, acting very un-lady-like. Emily had Flash in her life for eight months when it became painfully obvious that her health was rapidly deteriorating. The cancer had moved to her liver and quickly all her organs were slowing down. On a Saturday I was traveling back east for about 10 days and wondered if I would see Flash again as she was slipping so fast. Four hours later, stopping over at the Minneapolis airport, I turned on my cell phone and just as I did, Emily called and simply said “Flash is gone.” I will never forget those words and it made me cry, mostly for Emily who loved Flash so much. Flash was at peace, knowing that the last eight months of her life were better than the previous 10 years all thanks to Emily. She told me that Flash was unable to get out of her favorite bed to eat or go outside. She called Andrew who assured her the time had come. Emily gathered up her animal soul-mate and, along with her human soul-mate, stayed with Flash and held her for twenty minutes before the medication was given to her to put her at peace. Emily said a lot of people told her how great it was for Flash that Emily had given so much love to her. But Emily said it was the other way around; that she was grateful of all the love Flash gave her back. So now you’re thinking I have gone from a happy kitten story to a sad ending. But there is a happy ending to this story too. About four months later, a beagle-Jack Russell Terrier mix was running around our backyard. She looked like a younger and skinny version of Flash. It turned out that a neighbor had seen her running around the street and put her in his car to keep her out of traffic. He did his best to find her owner and then took her home. The neighbor couldn’t keep the dog and Emily quickly offered to give it a home until the owners could be found or until she could put her up for adoption. The neighbor named the dog Spooner because it insists on spooning with you as you try to sleep. It became evident to Emily, Gail and I that Spooner was going to be staying and now Em has another dog who loves her and who she can love. Spooner even got the nickname “Spoonie Love From Up Above” because we all believe she was sent by Flash so we wouldn’t be so lonely. See? Nice ending. I told ya.