I’m inspired by my dogs. All three of them bring something unique to the table. Hobie is now almost 13 years old, and so arthritic it is actually painful to watch. He has some other health issues which have been rather exasperating lately (nothing serious, just little annoyances). Where once we could patch things up in a day or two, it takes longer and longer for the little annoying things to heal, or they recur, which is maddening. Charlie Brown and Cooper turn a year old in less than a week! I can hardly believe they are all grown up already, time goes by so fast. Charlie Brown is still a little devil (hey, he’s bored, I’ve been too sick to deal with an oversized puppy!), but he is SO smart. No offense to his predecessors Timba, Hector, and Hobie each of whom I claimed were “the smartest dog on the planet”. But Charlie is showing remarkable smarts that I never saw in any of them at this young age. Maybe I’m just getting better at training, yeah, yeah, that’s it! And then there’s Cooper — ah, The Coop. The three-legged wonder dog. This remarkable creature is so inspirational an entire book could be dedicated to him (and most likely will be in the future). Every time I think of how I’m in pain and having a hard time going up or down stairs or any other physical activity I used to be able to do easily, I begin to whine about it, and then I see Cooper, out of the corner of my eye, doing something remarkable like beating Charlie to the tennis ball I just threw across the yard, like reaching the top of the flight of stairs faster than anyone (he hops like a kangaroo), like coming into the house and saying “I am here now, everything will be fine” and bringing absolute and complete balance to the entire household (when we thought adding a third dog would be a challenge, instead it actually SOLVED problems!).
