Lily in the Field: Old, Blind, and Badass

Lily, my love, would you please suspend your sniff-fest? Just for a minute. Mama has something to say.

Ever since you trundled into my life with your charcoal fur, your lamb chop legs, and your swashbuckling tail, I've become a more humane human. You've made me less inquisitional. More inquisitive. You're the reason I walk away from my laptop and lose myself in a belly rub. Your belly, I mean.

You give me permission to breathe, to interrupt the thrum of anxiety. Around you, I feel no urge to tweet, tap, post, blog, swipe, scroll, or slack. In fact, whenever I'm hunched over my phone, you notice and get bored with me. Message received.

Your gifts to me couldn't have been foretold. How did I luck out? Most people want the entertainment value of a puppy, not a sightless senior like you. Rare is the acknowledgment of puppy privilege. Abundant is the assumption that to be blind, or old, is to be a hassle.

Passersby stare at you in your stroller. Some chuckle at the spectacle of a dog in a baby carriage. A few zero in on your cloudy eyes. Then they get all sad-faced and tell me I'm a saint for adopting you. A saint! They don't know me.

More important, they don't know you. They've never watched you out on the grass, noting the direction of the wind, heading into it nose- first, accepting your power to march right through and blow your own way. You won't be bullied by your vulnerability. You'll hit walls and fences and tree trunks and table legs. Then you'll bounce back, pivot, and carry on. Resilience, thy name is Lilybean.

It's not as if you're immune to hurt. Seems to me you were hurting the first time I scooped you up into my arms. The nipples protruding from your tummy, and your untreated glaucoma, confirmed that you'd been somebody's property — repeatedly raped for a dog breeder who slapped a price tag on your uterus. You had no reason to trust. You could've hung onto past hurt. Yet here you are, giving a second chance to the promise of family.

Maybe it's wrong to compare your behavior to a human's. It might be true that unlike human animals, dogs have no long-term memory and that's why they don't bear grudges or devolve into cynicism. Scientists haven't reached any hard and fast conclusions about this, but I know what I've witnessed: Your memory's perfect when we hop into the car and you doggedly snoop for goodies because the last time we drove, I fed you half a strip of jerky. Now you think I can be convinced that the back-seat treat is our tradition. You've got moxie, Ms. Lil. And magnificent recall.

All to say, "blind" doesn't remotely define you. Neither does "old." Yes, you're both of these. You're also much more than these. Your defiance of simplistic labels has me thinking about the lessons for human beings.

Our Division Problem

Math teachers tell us that to solve a division problem, we must find the common denominator. From its birth, this nation's common denominator has been diversity. "I'm not a fan of that word," a neighbor recently snipped. "It divides people." Well, that's one slant on diversity.

The word itself comes from the Latin "to turn aside," or, as some take it, to splinter and separate. But nature would disagree with that interpretation. Every afternoon, Lil, you meander in the park. Here, diversity is the lubricant of a humming engine. Do you breathe in just one aroma?

How about two?

Five?

That's some head-tilt you've got going, Lilybean. You're catching on to my crazy talk, aren't you?

It's bananas to isolate and enumerate the smells enveloping you. None of them, on its own, captures the magic of the intermingling whole. You're gaga about the park exactly for its kaleidoscope of scents that jostle with each other and sometimes get up your nose.

See where I'm going with this? Diversity itself doesn't divide; it's what we do with diversity that splits societies apart or stitches them together. The paradox is, to do diversity honestly, we can't be labeling all of diversity's critics as bigots.

You disagree, Lil? You're entitled to your opinion but you haven't let me explain mine.

Welcome to the real world, you say? Well, this isn't exactly the real world, is it? You're a conversing canine, for God's sake.

Okay, okay, you're right, enough of my defensiveness. Getting my back...