![]() ![]() He had jumped out of the truck and off the bridge over the Arikaree Creek, on Highway 119. ![]() All these animals were interesting and worth learning about and deserving of care, but I am going to tell you about the beagle mix. with his male beagle mix, who had jumped out the open window of his truck while it was stopped in traffic the dog suffered bilateral tibial fractures. Around 11 p.m., an older man came into the E.R. I saw a forty-pound poodle mix who had chewed through a bottle of Advil. On Tuesday, I saw a cat who had eaten a lily. But I knew not to rest on my laurels, because the way we move through time is by an accumulation of unexpected turns. This accomplishment gave both my father and me tremendous joy. After years of nearly failing each grade (and actually failing third grade), and years of my father being called in for discussions with a series of teachers, each of whom wondered if I might be better served by a different kind of classroom, I was able to obtain a degree in veterinary medicine. Perhaps new gut bacteria, or the intervening hand of the most old-fashioned and personal sort of god. As all my peers were beginning to go alfalfa, I started to grow as straight and fast as cat grass, and any piece of knowledge I was offered delighted me, and I devoted myself to mastering whatever came my way. Then, in high school, or maybe a beat earlier, something abruptly shifted for me. He also told me not to worry too much about any of it. My father often told me that I made “errors of interpretation” in my sense of other people. On rainy days, we were allowed to play board games, like Sorry! and Battleship, both of which I found to be unreasonably aggressive. For example, there was a man made out of cardboard who we were told “lived” behind the chalkboard-the cutout was stored behind the chalkboard-and we were meant to invite him out for our grammar lessons, by calling him by name three times, like a spell. Some of the acts of imagination that we were called to undertake seemed too silly. Those classrooms were not bad places those teachers were not bad people my own misunderstandings were the reasons that the settings did not please me. My first eight years of school could be summed up by the absence in my classrooms of any sense that joy was an ethical obligation. That I could become a veterinarian, or anything that required extensive schooling, was a revelation in no way telegraphed. ![]() ![]() Rivka Galchen on fathers and veterinarians. The diagnosis has altered his personality in no perceptible way. My father, now seventy, was recently diagnosed with chronic leukemia. Though I don’t recall many further conversations about it. The sect didn’t make sense anymore, I said it was like pursuing dodo birds, however glorious. It was the wrong time period to be an Anabaptist, I told him. I came to the conclusion that my father had made an error. But too much of what I read made me think that this was a path through a five-hundred-year-old landscape that had since vanished. That one made one’s own path to God made sense to me, and that baptism followed rather than formed a spiritual relationship-sure. When I was in middle school, I researched the Anabaptists. Sorrow is an obligation, too, and a wonder and a necessity-but sorrow is joy’s servant. Joy is the proper response to the gift of life that God or something has bestowed upon all of us day after day after day, and then at some point for no more days. Such was my experience with the suicide dogs, who, like most of us, were not what they seemed. Weirdness does, though, generate uncommon strengths. I know that many people experience such clarifications as weird. A part of me is moved to specify that not all veterans have been in contact with death, nor are all veterinarians so on a regular basis. A veterinarian is someone currently in contact with death on a regular basis. A veteran is someone formerly in contact with death on a regular basis. ![]()
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