graciespeaks

gracie sleeps

You can find Gracie most of the time on this couch, which she prefers these days to her dog bed.  I was prompted to post this by Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish post about his 12-year-old Beagle, Dusty. 

Gracie walks pretty well, although some days she declines when the leashes come out.  Her hearing is nearly gone, but if Max runs around enough, she will wake up and join in on barking along with him at whatever he's interested in.

When I stop to think that my relationship of over fifteen years with Gracie is longer than most any other outside my family, and I consider what she's witnessed and where she's been with me, and consider that she's still hanging in there, loving me and happy to see me, I am amazed and grateful. 

Ann Patchett on Rose

Last night I finished reading Ann Patchett's 2007 novel Run.  Patchett is the author of one of my favorite novels, Bel Canto, and one of my favorite memoirs, Truth & Beauty, so the bar was set pretty high for Run. 

The characters in Run learn some, but not all, of the secrets that have been kept from them.  It's a reminder to me that no matter how much I mine my life for the truth of the past, secrets will remain and questions will go unanswered and even unasked.

I went to Patchett's website and found this unrelated piece on her dog, Rose. 

This part reminds me of Gracie:

"The rotten part is that their life span is so much shorter than ours. Barring some seriously bad luck I will outlive Rose by a large margin. She is eleven now. She has a lot of warts and various fatty tumors that the vet says are harmless. She has cataracts and her back legs are weak. When we take long hikes I always wind up carrying her home on my shoulders. When she dies I imagine I will howl like her ancestors, but the inevitable end of a relationship is no reason not to go there in the first place."