Happy Late Night, SB. Don't know if you are still with me & still reading but I hope you had a nice day in any event. I'm still trying to adjust over here, and it's a slow process. I've been having some fun, however - and cheering myself up - by going back in the blogs and reading some of the Kobi oriented ones I've written over the past couple years. I keep coming back to one particular thing that I find amazing, and that is just how much activity the dude engaged in, even after he was already an old guy.
I wrote in one blog from 2014, "He's now 14, but you'd think he was 4". And he still had 3 1/2 years to go after that. Even when he had his seizure in February 2016, he still had almost a year and a half to go.
Maybe that's why they say that dogs live seven years for every year a human lives, just because it seems like they Do A Ton Of Stuff in a Relatively Short Time. Which, when you look back on it, seems like a long time. It all gets back to that Weird Time Thing that we've talked about a bunch of Times, whereby a given period of time can seem to whiz by, and yet another period of time, of the same length, can seem to stretch out forever.
I'd like to go back, when I eventually have the time, and look for all the stuff I've ever written about Kobi, whether in a blog or in my daily journal (which I've been keeping since September 1999), and see if I can put something together, like a short book.
That would make three books I want to write, two of which have been long planned. One will be called "The Meadows" and will be the in depth story of my life from 1993 to 1997. I have wanted to write this book ever since my friend Dave S. died in 2008. He shouldn't have died at 47, but he did. Dave was the opposite of Kobi in that respect, but the main thing is that he was my best friend for many years, and after he died I began to really think about the nature of those years in the mid-90s. And I thought, "nobody would have the slightest idea what I went through - what we went through - except for Dave". It was one of those "you had to be there" experiences, and even then, even if most anyone else was there, they still would probably not understand. But Dave did. He understood.
That got me to thinking about The Nature Of Friendship, and it's various depths. Friendship is a different kind of bond from love in the romantic sense. We love our friends, of course, but in a different way. But with certain friends, a bond can exist that is metaphysical in a similar way to that of a love relationship. That is the bond of understanding.
With a couple who are in love, it's easier to define (if still impossible to define in words). But with the similar bond between two friends, it is much harder to describe the nature of the bond, right down to the fine points, because it is not based on love or romance, in the way that we usually think of it. And yet we still love our friends.
Sometimes, we have a close friend, even a Best Friend, with whom we go on a life changing adventure. And when the adventure is over, the realisation sets in that the only person who will ever fully understand what has happened, is that friend.
But sometimes, the friend dies. That is what happened with Dave in October 2008. He died just a few weeks after my Dad died, and Dad had been a part of our adventure also, in the aftermath.
My book, the one I hope to write one day, called "The Meadows", will be an examination of the true nature of what friendship is. The context is The Earthquake Years, and our activities at the time, but that is only the backdrop. What I want to "pull up" - from somewhere inside me - is what was learned, what was sensed, and what was shared, without it being verbalised.
What happens when people go through a life changing experience together? Sure, they talk about it.
But what happens beneath that? What happens on The Unspoken Level?
What is Shared And Acknowledged Without Being Spoken Of?
That is what I want to get at, in part. I have never even begun to write this book, not even a single page as yet, because I know it will require the sharpest concentration I have ever mustered. It will also require a full re-immersion in the photographs, materials and memories of those years, which will - at this point in my life - call for a Herculean Effort. My writing is usually based on trying to reach emotional conclusions - "truths" - but in my case I am purposely trying to define things that can't be defined. I am not trying to do the impossible, but just trying to etch away at the nuances. I'm trying to define the doorway, the entrance of understanding to Things That Cannot Be Described.
That's what I have been trying to do, just for my own sake, since The Doberman passed away on Friday. He had the same effect on my life that Dave had.
Can a Dog do that?
This dog did.
So I now want to one day go through all my writings that involve The 'Ster, even those that only contain a sentence or two. Because I'd like to write a book about these years, too : The Caregiver Years. This book would focus on the emotions and bondings of an entirely different kind of experience, this time involving a dog as the middle-man, the anchor of the experience, the guy who holds down The Fort.
The guy who understands The Unspoken.
I hope to have the wherewithall to do Some Serious Writing in the future. Enough so that I can focus like a laser beam, so that I can pull up from inside what I am trying to say.
These subjects, and these friends, deserve such an effort. ///
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