Weekend update.

The Greatest Weekend Updaterizer

Hi, gang. Couple of things to report after the weekend, especially a followup on poor little Nipper, the 100-pound puppy, whose overnight tribulations, as noted yesterday, led to a terrible night's sleep for both him and me (and senior varsity dog Tralfaz). Nipper was the poster child for the phrase "sick as a dog."

I won't recap all the gross details of his illness, but they continued all day Sunday to a lesser extent. He couldn't eat, could barely take water, and was still just as cheerful as can be. I think we spend most of our lives working hard to try to be half as happy as a Golden Retriever, and most of us never get there. Anyway, he did finally have some chicken and rice last night, and this morning he ate hungrily. Maybe we'll take him to the vet later. We'll see how things go.

I'm sure it was challenging for him, and it didn't do me a bit of good either. Saturday night I was stone-cold exhausted. I had a commitment in the morning and company coming at night, so between those two periods I had HOUSECLEANING! MyFitnessPal estimated I burned about 800 calories doing all that work, which is great, except I ate about 10,000 calories on the food my wife cooked. So, bloated and exhausted, I stumbled to bed late, and that's when Nipper's Yippie Trips to the Yard began.

It's a shame, because we really had a great time with our old friends. They love our dogs, and we all had a good time getting caught up and reminiscing. Well, we humans did. The dogs are excellent company but lousy conversationalists.

On Sunday, while Mrs. K watched the dogs, I dragged my tired hinder to Mass, where we celebrated the feast day of St. John the Baptist. Although the Gospel reading was about John's birth, I always think of Jesus's description in Matthew 11:11, that "among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist". The greatest man who ever lived, is what it seems to say, and then we think of him wearing "clothing made of camel’s hair and had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey," in Matthew 3:4. So the greatest man ever was kind of like Bigfoot's kid brother (as played by Michael York).

The thing about the reading we had, in Luke 1, is that after the strange tale of John's birth and naming, the story cuts to the narrator (if it were a film) who says:

For surely the hand of the Lord was with him.
The child grew and became strong in spirit, 
and he was in the desert until the day
of his manifestation to Israel.

And I thought of John the Baptist, and saw him now not as Desert Yeti but as a man who had a particular calling and fulfilled it with everything he had. It would cost him his life, but he was wiser than most of us, and more blessed, to have such a gift after all.

To go from the sublime to the more familiar, this is something even dogs know. To varying degrees, dogs need missions too, and those with jobs are happy dogs. Often a dog will appoint himself a job if nothing is assigned him, good things like protecting the family or cheering them up, or bad things like making humongous holes in the yard. I'm not sure what Nipper's job is, but whatever it is, he likes it. So, everyone's happy. Or will be when he's healthy.

One last thought on John the Baptist: When I was turning my life around from crap to non-crap some years ago, and taking faith seriously, I remember seeing this guy who hung around the 34th Street station of the R line, playing the guitar for Jesus while dancing barefoot on cardboard. And I used to think, God, please don't let that be my calling in life. And He hasn't. But that guy with the guitar always looked happy, and I sure as hell don't.

Maybe we're lucky if God doesn't call us to do hard or embarrassing or dangerous things. Maybe we only think we're lucky.