I found something cool the other day and my first thought was to share it with you. 

My mother died at the age of 95. She married at 22, gave birth to three daughters. Moved us from the Midwest of her youth to a river on the east coast. She remained married to my father for 20 years, and then?

She lived alone for the next 53 years of her life. That’s 19,345 days.

She was a psychotherapist and a poet. To combat the isolation, she wrote in journals to review the events of her day the way partners share anecdotes in the evening over grilled salmon and a glass of wine. To have a witness, a place to explore her fears, resolve anxieties, to express her opinions. A place to store memories, and often, to receive inspiration from a spirit greater than her own.  On North Carolina beaches, in blinding blizzards, waiting for the brake pads to be replaced, Mother recorded her thoughts. Often those observations were about my sisters and me—who was pregnant, not speaking, had bought a new car–and I admit this practice was met with an eye roll more often than not. 

I picked up a journal from 2002 the other day. If she hadn’t written it down, I’d have not remembered that was the year I blew out a disc in my lower back. I’d been hauling 15-foot Leyland cypress trees from a nursery and 40-pound bags of mulch around the yard for days, my theory at the time being that if you can lift it, you should lift it. I was in excruciating pain, unable to even walk. The ruptured disc had been confirmed by an MRI but mother-the-therapist penned, “I think Laura’s back pain is emotional.”

I blew out my back because I was …mad?

I hadn’t blown a disc; I’d blown a gasket?

Sigh.

But I am writing to share a different entry and you’ll see why. In a marbled black-and-white, wide-lined composition book Mother wrote: I want to put down something I thought was very interesting. A group of students was asked to list what they thought were the present Seven Wonders of the World. They ended up with:

1. Egypt’s Grand Pyramids
2. The Taj Mahal
3. The Grand Canyon
4. The Panama Canal
5. The Empire State Building
6. St. Peter’s Basilica
7. China’s Great Wall

One girl was having trouble completing her list. There were just so many, she said. The teacher asked her to read what she had so far, maybe the class could help. She hesitated and then read; The Seven Wonders of the World are:

1. To touch
2. To taste
3. To see
4. To hear

She paused again, then added:

5. To feel
6. To laugh
7. To love

My mother characterized the anecdote as interesting, but I suspect she found it beautiful and there was no one to give it to—and don’t we all have the impulse to share what moves us?  What is that instinct to press wonder into another’s hand? To say, “Wait till you hear what I saw, what I heard, what I found!”

If gratitude is joy, love is generosity. Pass it on. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

This is where my story begins. The trouble comes later. My yellow lab of 15 ½ years died so I took the hole in my heart to a volunteer training class at the local animal shelter where I could do some good for the less fortunate in Kaya’s name. For the past five years, I’ve been a volunteer dog walker, showing up several times a week to walk the temporarily incarcerated on the wooded, 11-acre trail on Back Creek.

There were 14 of us in my class, including a retired CPA, a mother and her teenage son. A kind of sketchy guy in dark glasses who turned out to be fine.  From our facilitator we learned how to recognize aggressive behavior. We learned to stay 50 yards away from each other walking our unpredictable charges. We learned that if your dog bolts off the wooden pedestrian bridge over the stream, you’re going in after it. 

We got t-shirts. 

Since this is a no-kill shelter, they take returns and there were one or two frequent fliers— like Chase, who got adopted (yay!) and then reappeared a few weeks later. (Ruh-roh.)  

Like Jet. 

As you make your way down the cement run past the kennel cages to retrieve the dog you intend to walk, the other dogs compete for your attention of course, yelping, somersaulting, leaping like toddlers in need of a bathroom break. Except Jet, who sat with patient dignity amidst the rabble rousers, posed at a slight angle to the cage door, the way high school photographers made you cant a shoulder and tilt your head in an impossibly awkward position no human boy or girl ever assumed for your yearbook portrait. Only on Jet, the pose was remarkably debonair. A handsome hound, his white chest and black martingale collar could have been a tuxedo. A calculating flirt, you could almost see him raise both a martini and a suggestive brow as you walked by. 

I loved Jet so I was particularly sad when he was adopted and returned. Evidently, he was hiding anxiety issues. Aren’t we all? 

So, it took me five years of walking dogs who rescued me from lonely days at the computer with no human contact, to finally bring one home. This is where the trouble begins. 

She was an underweight terrier mix surrendered with external and internal parasites. A year old, her facial hair had grown so long she couldn’t see, but it was thin, so she wore a ratty pink sweater. She’d just been spayed, so she had a giant cone on her little head. I couldn’t actually see much of her except two shiny bright eyes.  How could an animal so sick and neglected radiate only goodwill? An old soul in a puppy’s body. Love with her high beams on.  

I was so moved by her need I didn’t research her breed. Heads up. Big mistake. She barks incessantly at the television and has this weird preternatural ability to know when you’re changing channels, even on mute! Even with her eyes closed! Even sound asleep!

She chases squirrels from inside the house! She can climb trees when incentivized. She can fly. There is a five-foot-tall brick wall enclosing the back garden and I’m sure the neighbors, enjoying a glass of prosecco on the other side, have been startled to see her head sail by in pursuit of her quarry.

In the car on the way home from the shelter the little dog was aquiver, trembling, a coiled spring spotting squirrels from the car window and maniacally digging the glass to get at them. I felt more ambivalence than love for her at that moment. I hadn’t thought this through! I’d never owned a high-intensity dog before. I suddenly felt more anxiety about the commitment than devotion to the cause. 

And this is how my story ends. 

 I have this theory that you grow to love what you serve. That nurturing promotes bonding. That love follows action because love is not a feeling, until, well, it is.

“I could never work at a shelter,” friends proclaim. “I’d take all of them home!”

No, you wouldn’t. There’s chemistry. There’s personality. And we can’t swap out loss quite so efficiently. It takes time. It takes love in low doses to reseal that container so it can hold risk again. Because when you love a pet, you are going to have 15 years of good days for which you will eventually pay with the worst day of your life. 

It’s the paradox we were born for. “Come!” is a command. “Stay” is a request. Grace holds the tension between them. You know going in, you will have to let go, yet as much as we are wired to avoid pain at all costs, we eventually choose to love, again and again. We fall hard. We are undone by our children. We bring the neglected home. 

Somewhere in love’s evolutionary past, fear became a recessive gene and hope prevailed.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

You might as well know up front that I believe in life after death, mental telepathy, and mind over matter. Also, that I spent quite a bit of energy in my youth trying to make Purrfur-the-cat levitate, and that I have had at least two precognitive dreams. A third dream may have tapped into an unknown dimension as well. 

So, in the first dream, my boyfriend’s life was in danger. He was a winsome 2nd class midshipman at the US Naval Academy, and I was an angsty, song-writing sophomore at Washington College.  We had met on a blind date and hadn’t been going out very long, when I awoke in my cinderblock dorm room in Minta Martin Hall knowing my boyfriend and all his classmates were in mortal danger. The dream was just weird enough that I went to the phone at the end of the hall and placed a call. “You’re in danger,” I said. Then I shared the dream warning on a feedback loop in my head. “You won’t know who he is, because he’s one of you.”

“That’s weird,” my boyfriend replied. “Last night, we went on lockdown. A guy who graduated in June had a mental breakdown in basic training at Quantico and was driving back to Annapolis to settle a score. He had a uniform, of course. And a gun. And a DOD sticker on his car to get through the gate.” 

In the next dream, I was sitting in a circle with a bunch of other college kids from all over the east coast, listening to a tall, soft-spoken man with thick white hair, introduce us to his wife, a diminutive blond with a French twist and an authoritarian vibe. “Your purpose in life,” she explained, eyeing each of us in turn, “is to learn and to grow.” Not a week later, I arrived at the Craigville Inn and Conference Center on Cape Cod, where I would be waiting tables with other students from June through August. I can’t say the exact circumstances of the dream were replicated but as I reported to the front office, with its faux wood paneling and worn orange carpet, there they were. The man and the woman I had just dreamed of –only now they had names—Dr. and Mrs. Pierre Vuillemiere–co-directors of the conference center. 

Unfortunately, all I learned that summer was how to pack on a fast 30 pounds cutting up Boston Crème pies, and that true southern boys, who want to marry southern girls, think Maryland is a northern state. But the third dream is the one I hang on to. How can we know if it’s true?

I was thinking about guardian angels one evening just before bed. I was a young mother of three at the time, which probably is why the whole concept came to mind, as in, I could use some help here… Is there someone assigned to watch over them? Over me? Over you? Maybe an ancestor or relative we’ve never met? Or one we’ve lost? I thought of my Aunt Lenora, who had died at 104 with a cap of white curls and the sparkling blue eyes of a fairy godmother.

And that night I dreamed I did indeed have a guardian angel and that person was standing right behind me! I could feel the presence, a benign loving energy, close enough to touch. And I thought, all I have to do is turn around. A mystery of the universe is about to be revealed. Male or female, I wondered. Young or old? Familiar or stranger?  Slowly, slowly, I turned to meet my protector and guide. To say thank you, I’m so grateful, how can I serve?

And there was not one person in attendance behind me, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of souls standing there–smiling, compassionate countenances as far as the eye could see. As tightly packed as a crowd at a rock concert or a Superbowl, only lovingly silent,

The world is a mysterious place, and we are hardwired to learn its secrets. What is consciousness? Quantum entanglement? Dark Matter?  

We want to know how everything works but here’s the thing: until we do, we live in a world in which we’re not in charge. Where the inexplicable can happen. Where a girl can try to save a boy who’s just entered her future, where a stranger can weigh in on the meaning of life. Where you already possess all that you long for. Where in your scariest moments, you were never alone.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.