MISSING SCOOTER

photo via Pioneer Woman

Photo4natic

The Pioneer Woman is in the final stages of a contest of dog photos, and this shot turned my eyes teary and made me both happy and sad. We had a great dog for 10 years. He LOVED me. He definitely considered us inseparable. Not that he didn't enjoy the rest of the family. He kept JE company through long afternoons in junior and senior high. He accompanied (?!) CA on nightly jaunts around the cul-de-sac and out into the fields surrounding our subdivision.

Scooter Bob McDuff never lost his adventurer, explorer, crime-fighter spirit, but he did approach senility. Too young.

By the time we moved into our current home he had begun to be increasingly unpredictable and worrisome around children and people in general. He could and did snap unpredictably. Then he began to leave little bundles for me to collect after work...

Poignantly, it all came to a head one evening as I peered around the doorway from our bedroom and saw him nose-to-nose with our corner cupboard. Investigating, I realized he was stuck. Lost. Unclear as to how to proceed. As I un-stuck him and hugged him, I knew we were losing him.

Even now, every time I clean the kitchen floor and the surfaces beneath and around that cabinet, I grow misty with remembering.

I loved that dog!

MOSTLY I'M CONFUSED

I think healthcare is ridiculous in this the most culturally developed country in the freeworld. Not that all that culture is sophisticated or intelligent, but still... This is the United States of America and we are LETTING large healthcare organizations dictate our care, and allowing them to steal us blind at the same time.

This comment within a comment I read in today's New York Times set me to thinking...

"But, as a lawyer friend, Manuel Wally, put it to me, “When it comes to health it makes sense to involve government, which is accountable to the people, rather than corporations, which are accountable to shareholders.”
OpEd, The Narcissus Society
by Roger Cohen
New York Times
February 22, 2010

Mostly, I reserve forming a solid opinion of all that's being debated. I will tune in when we get closer to a compromise, or rather a first generation solution. They won't get it right the first time, or the second, but we need to make a start.
 
We as Americans look down on nations divided by wealth and poverty--caste systems--yet our country is hardly better. There are the proverbial boot straps, but those are mostly out of fashion and harder to reach these days.

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I can't resist adding a few more of Mr. Cohen's comments that followed the above quote...

All the fear-mongering talk of “nationalizing” 17 percent of the economy is nonsense. Government, through Medicare and Medicaid, is already administering almost half of American health care and doing so with less waste than the private sector. Per capita Medicare costs for common benefits grew 4.9 percent between 1998 and 2008, against 7.1 percent for private insurers. Why not offer Medicare as a choice — a choice — to everyone? Aren’t Republicans about choice?


The public option, not dead, would amount to recognition of shared interest in each other’s health and of the need to use America’s energies and resources better. It would involve 300 million people linking arms.


Or we can turn away from each other and, like Narcissus, perish in the contemplation of our own reflections.

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Amazing how Narcissus has come up two times in sucession in this blog...

DIAGNOSING

An essay in the Chicago Tribune today about social networking and the tenuous relationship between an adopted daughter and her birth mother uncovered for me a new psychological term: narcissistic injury.

Narcissistic Injury
a wound to the ego caused by the destruction of some core idealization. It contorts its bearer's emotions until it is acknowledged and explored
A Family Reunion on Facebook, sort of
Tamara Kerrill Field


As those close to me know quite well, I've taken two psychology classes in my academic career which, of course, qualify me to diagnose...

This new discovery has set my process-oriented mind to wandering and I'm sure I'll find a resting place for this diagnosis.