This is a guest post written by Josh Hanagarne, the twitchy giant behind World’s Strongest Librarian, a blog with advice about living with Tourette’s Syndrome, kettlebells, book recommendations, buying pants when you’re 6’8”, old-time strongman training, and much more. Please subscribe to Josh’s RSS Updates to stay in touch.
My mom loved to run over our pets. She lived for it. She couldn’t get enough of it. Christmas mornings began with puppies or kitten crawling out of our stockings. My siblings and I would ooh and ahh and scream for about a week before getting down to the serious business of letting our parents take care of the animals and cursing out laziness.
By April, those pets would either be run down in the driveway or carried off by coyotes. Didn’t matter which. Gone is gone, as they say, whoever “they” are.
My most vivid memory of talking about the concept of life after death came while I was kneeling in a graveyard which grew by at least one Popsicle stick cross each year.
Enter The Pug!
If there is a Heaven, I am convinced that all my pets up there put their smashed heads together and sent Grover to Earth just to end my mom’s winning streak.
He was dumb, but wow he was tough. Grover looked like a sausage that someone stuffed into a fur coat, and then they fattened that sausage up by feeding it more sausage. He would slobber and howl and his eyes looked in opposite directions. None of us really liked him because he was so spastic, but it was awesome to have a dog around that had the knack for vanquishing death.
Grover got ran over about once a week. He would bounce right back up and jiggle off in search of high adventure. But he’d always rush back to the driveway just in time to lie down under someone’s wheels.
Nobody Wins Forever…
Warning: this story has a happy ending, but it gets worse before it gets better. Tough it out.
One night I was watching TV in the living room when my sister ran in crying. “Mom ran over Grover!” No surprise there, but…no, something was different. This was serious. In the background I heard a hideous noise, rising in pitch every second.
It was Grover. He was dragging himself around the lawn on his front paws. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. It looked like he had broken his back. Whenever our dogs had broken their backs before, they never recovered. Not even close.
I ran to get my dad’s pistol, but he had hidden the bullets somewhere else. The noise outside was getting worse, both from my mom, sister, and that poor dog.
I was desperate. I grabbed my baseball bat and ran out into the front yard. My heart was pounding so hard I thought I’d die. The thought of what I was about to do was too horrible to comprehend, but it wasn’t as bad as the pain he was in.
I walked up to Grover, my own eyes starting to tear up now. I raised the bat, gritted my teeth and…
He jumped up and ran off into the bushes. He was fine. The next morning it was as if nothing had ever happened. In fact, it was about 12 hours later that he came nipping at the tires of my Honda Civic as I backed out of our driveway.
The Lesson
The next day, a quote by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut went through my head. It’s from the book Mother Night.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
I don’t know why Grover acted like he was hurt, but it almost got his brains bashed in. I would have been traumatized and he would have been dead.
It’s never a bad idea to take a look at yourself. Are you acting the way you feel? If not, why? Why would you pretend to be anything other than you are? There are certainly times to control your emotions and project a particular aura, but do you know when those times are?
If you pretend to be something you aren’t for too long, you will become that thing. If people already perceive you as being that thing, it is time for self-scrutiny and change.
But the real lesson here is this: Read Kurt Vonnegut!
(Photo via audreyjm529)
