Posted: 3 years ago

Dear Carol:

Your story (in our eClub's meeting of 12/15/08) about your daughter writing a letter to God (which backwards is dog, which is interesting!) to introduce her dog Abbey (who died) to HIM (when Abbey came to Heaven) was a moving one. There are people out there who care about being human and what that means (and we never know their names, faces, etc. but we do know that they read the meanings between the lines and care enough to add something "basically human" to the situation). Let me tell you my story:

Years ago, I was billed (with one of those computer-generated standardized letters) for a lighting bill which I never ordered or wanted. I wrote several letters and tried to call on the telephone (which was a joke of being moved from pushing one, two, three, etc. and never getting a human being to talk to). Finally, in desperation, I wrote a long letter blasting the Electric Company's system of standardizing everything and never allowing a human being to enter the fray, but in mock satire, I ended the letter with "Passionately yours, Joe". A few days later I got the standardized letter again (same previous totals) with all the same billing mistakes that had frustrated me for over a month with one exception, someone, somewhere, had pen-written this at the beginning of the letter, "Darling". It made no difference to the billing but after that we chalked up the mistake to one of those things like the weather that we can do nothing more about but "Darling" somehow made the experience special. I still remember getting this computerized letter with that one human touch. Someone, somewhere had a sense of humor and understood my frustration. Our basic humanity when it reaches out does make all the difference to how we see things.

In each system, there are really human beings (even in the IRS) who care, even when they must stay hidden and invisible except when this kind of thing happens.

Passionately yours (but here there is no frustration, only appreciation),

Joe 

PS I made a mistake when I first wrote this article: I wrote "dog" instead of "God" in the title but I noticed that all the letters were there. "D-O-G" has the same letters as "G-O-D". I am sure HE would not mind. HE must have a sense of humor (to have us being born to die), but after reflection I changed it today to read as Carol meant it (but of course the system would not let me correct the title on the forum- it figures!).

Thinking further about the similarity of those two words, that may be what the playwright Samuel Beckett meant in "Waiting for Godot". Backwards, it is "to dog" and forward, it can be (forward) "God" and (backward) "to" (or another way to say, "God aught"). I do not know and Beckett never explains his absurdities which seem to make sense. In respect for Beckett, I decided that I would wait almost one day before I corrected this mistake (at least on the title to the article where I could make a correction). I know that the story that you Carol told was about "God" and "dog" and something else which even transcended those three-letter words. It was marvelous, no matter how we read it (or how the system will not allow us to correct some mistakes).  

Posted: 3 years ago

The story about the little girl and her dog Abbey was sent to me, author unknown. I felt so compelled by the story that I wanted to share it with my fellow Rotarians.  It truly is a love story, and we see these all the time, but in our busy lives, we let the moment pass rather taking time to pass the good messages on to others.

Carol Anderson