Let me apologize right up front. I’m not writing anything funny in this column because I’m not feeling funny these days.
Do I still have joy? Yes. Do I have hope for brighter days ahead? Of course. But do I have my funny? Not so much. It will come back, though. It always does.
The first of the year usually finds me navel-gazing. Reflecting on the past year, I look at what I did right, what I did wrong and what I need to do to improve those areas.
That’s enough to knock the funny out of anyone. But this year has been different.
December brought with it a number of things that took the wind out of my sails, some too personal to put into a newspaper.
However, No. 3 on that list (and this should tell you how bad the list is) was my beloved German shepherd, Chico, getting hit by a car and left for dead. Thankfully, a good Samaritan stopped and asked if we owned a German shepherd. When I said we did, he told me he caught a glimpse of his ears sticking up out of a ditch down the road.
On a cold, windy December morning, that good Samaritan helped me load him into the car for a tearful, make that sob-filled, drive to our vet’s office. “What made him go into the road?” I asked myself over and over. I’ve never known him to go into the road.
X-rays would show a broken pelvis. It didn’t take X-rays to see that his right paw had been split in two and one of his toe pads ripped off. Eight weeks of cage rest, a catheter and about 12 pills a day were prescribed, and the all-too-familiar “only time will tell.”
I now have to walk my very proud dog outside using a towel as a sling to hold up his hind legs. Sad. Very sad.
But not as sad as the news I got the other day. Dear friends took their beloved dog to their vet after he was lethargic for the better part of a day. Turns out, he had massive internal bleeding from a large tumor that had been growing inside of him, unbeknownst to anyone.
This wonderful couple had rescued him from an awful life just a year ago and if there’s any silver lining, it was that this sweet dog had a taste of heaven before he actually got to cross the Rainbow Bridge. My friends, understandably, are heartbroken.
On the very same day, I found out that another dear friend’s daughter, who has spent years training for the Olympics, tore her Achilles at a routine team practice. In a split second, her identity as an athlete and her dreams of gold vanished.
I am always mindful of how life can change in an instant. Years of anchoring the news helped me form that mindset.
To have to write and then read stories about people who boarded a plane for vacation or a business trip, not knowing they would never return to their homes or their loved ones. The same with victims of car accidents and the murders of innocents, whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
None of us knows when life will end or how it can change on a dime. That phone call, that knock at the door, that injury or prognosis.
So as I ponder the year ahead, I resolve to bring as much light and joy as I can to a dreary and hurting world, and for myself, to enjoy the little moments of peace and calm. Ordinary moments when nothing is going wrong. For it is then that everything is going right.
Robin Swoboda’s column runs every other week. Contact her at Robinswoboda@outlook.com.