Penny Lou, Amy Lynn, and Crimson Bell
Our local newspaper, the Pensacola News Journal, runs a friday column called “My Pet Photo”. You send in a picture of your pet, talk about what makes your pet special, and your pet might end up on the front page of the friday life section.
Our family happens to own the 3 greatest dogs that have ever existed, so in order to share this with those not fortunate enough to have ever been mauled by them, I sent the paper an email. Months went by with no response. Sadly I concluded that perhaps so many pets had been sent in that ours had been lost in the shuffle. There loss, I thought, and I forgot about the whole thing.
The night before our family was scheduled to go on a wine tasting tour in California, I receive an email from Lynette Wilson of the Pensacola News Journal wanting to run a story on our dogs. She asked me to call her the next day so she could interview me. I emailed her back letting her know that I would call her as soon as I got to California.
I ended up talking to Mrs. Wilson the second day. I took a break from tasting and dialed her number from a vineyard next to Mosby Winery. She informed me that we had beautiful dogs, so already Mrs. Wilson was on my good side. We talked for about 5 minutes, discussing where we got the dogs, their ages, personalities, that kind of thing. She also asked what I had learned from the dogs, my advice for people looking into adopting abused or abandoned dogs, that type of thing. I wasn’t really prepared for that line of questioning, so I’m sure I stammered quite a bit. I was a little worried about how I’d come across, but thankfully the article came out great (thank you Mrs. Wilson).
The only part that gave me pause was my answer to the “what the dogs had taught me”“ question. The article says:
“expect good things”
Which I really don’t remember saying, although I’m sure I did. It was probably taken from part of a rambling paragraph. The sentence to me doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and I’m the one who said it (I now understand how comments can be taken out of context merely by taking away what was said before and after).
Now, looking back at the interview, I think what I was trying to say is that all three of our dogs started out with strikes against them. Even today, with years of love, as happy as they are, I sometimes think of how difficult their early lives must have been. And yet, I see no worries when I look into their big, brown eyes (or in Crimson Bell’s case, brown beady eyes). Their past is just that, the past. They’re happy today, and they have no worries that tomorrow won’t be the same. They expect good things in the future, and that keeps them happy in the present. That’s a pretty good way to live.
