This is a re-write of a previous story. I’ve been thinking of it lately and wanted to share it with some new edits.
Dogs and Hogs
My older sister, Charity, was easy to love.
She loved many things but above all, she loved dogs and hogs.
Charity owned a litany of Golden Retrievers, each one legendary.
First there was Sadie, mild and docile, until she saw a cat then she was positively possessed. Plus, Sadie had bad doggie breath, god bless her.
Then there was Shadow, an unruly male with fire in his eyes. It was a full-body workout just to walk him around the block—a lot of shoulders, triceps, and core work.
Then there was Chase, cool (and as round) as a cucumber, a total rockstar amongst the kids in my sister’s neighborhood who would come to her house and ask if they could play with her dog so they could dress him up in costumes, ride him like a pony, or lay on him like a pillow. As long as he was getting attention, he was into it.
Charity also loved Harleys.
She loved the spirit of freedom and ruggedness of Harleys. A rebel at heart, Charity loved how Harleys slightly leaned toward lawlessness. The spirit she appreciated in Harleys, Charity also appreciated in men. The nickname for Harleys is hogs—an adjective equally attributable to many of the men she dated.
Charity would have loved French men. Living in France, I witnessed their version of road rebellion—"let them eat asphalt" being the apparent subtext of most motorists, pedestrians be damned.
Charity always did everything her way and there was no way that Charity was going to ride on the back of someone else’s motorcycle. Being a fiercely independent woman, a self-learner, and because many of the men she dated were often even less reliable than their bikes, she bought and learned to ride her own damn Harley-Davidson—a silver Deluxe Softail with Screamin’ Eagle pipes and whitewall tires.
She adored that motorcycle.
Every year she would load up her hog on a trailer, attach it to an RV, and haul it from Salt Lake City, Utah to Sturgis, South Dakota to attend the biggest motorcycle rally in the world.
But one year while at Sturgis, she saw a fellow woman rider die in an accident and her love for motorcycles died with it. She resolved to park her bike on the trailer and sell it as soon as she got back to Salt Lake.
For a year or two, her hog sat in her garage gathering dust under her Cowboys on Motorcycles calendar.
Then one day, one of her less-than-reliable ex-boyfriends rolled by to say hi. He suggested they dust off her hog and go for a short spin. On this occasion she uncharacteristically rode on the back and uncharacteristically rode without a helmet.
Not speeding, but taking a turn too sharply, a foot peg caught the pavement and flipped the bike, throwing her headlong into a large boulder on the side of the road, killing her almost instantly. Her ex-boyfriend sustained injuries but survived.
Charity’s sudden and violent death was a massive shock to our family as well as her enormous wake of friends. We just weren’t prepared to lose her.
Over many weeks and months, we gathered as a family and wrapped up her affairs including finding a home for her surviving dogs, Chase and Suri, who were generously adopted by some of Charity’s best friends.
I love Charity immensely but unexplainably, I felt numb about her death for about 18 months or so. I felt guilty about not feeling more than a little grief. I think that I just couldn’t wrap my mind and heart around it.
But eventually, in my own time, I opened up and was able to properly grieve her death, which no doubt was the result of the healing work I’ve done with my personal meditation and Yoga Nidra practice. Oh, and a great therapist. That, and I can’t forget the help of a shaman and a healthy dose of ayahuasca in the jungles of South America.
It took a while but through all of this I came to realize that my relationship with Charity didn’t end. My friend Tiffany Burns runs a practice called Continuing Connections, using Yoga Nidra and writing to help people stay in relationship with loved ones who've passed. She helped me understand that you're not meant to get over someone. You get to stay in dialogue with them—through symbols, memory, and meaning-making.
I loved Charity’s dogs but I didn’t feel like I was the dog-owning type. I mean, growing up, our family had a few dogs but the first one ran away and the second was hit by a car in front of our house. Both of these instances broke my heart and frankly traumatized me. So, not wishing to relive that all over again, I was quite content having doggie nephews and nieces and leaving the actual owning of the dog to others.
Plus, there’s a metric shit-ton of dog doo to pick up. No thanks.
My attitude changed after many months of convincing by Sen and Ellie. So, in December of 2022, our family adopted a beautiful and loving Australian Cobberdog. We named him Cosmo because the name came to Sen in a dream and if your wife gets a revelation that you’re supposed to name your dog Cosmo, you name your dog Cosmo.
We fell instantly in love with Cosmo. I bonded with him quickly. He feels it’s his great responsibility to walk Elio to and from school. One of Cosmo’s favorite things to do is to wake Elio up in the morning by going into his room and licking his face. As he is doing it, Cosmo’s so happy, his tail wagging so much, that you’d think it might fall off. He's undeniably a messenger of joy and happiness, so much so that I don’t even mind picking up the dog doo.
When Cosmo was only 5 months old and totally puppy-brained, we were on a walk with him en route to one of our favorite cafes in Nice when, walking on the sidewalk next to a busy intersection, we encountered another dog on a walk with his owner. The dogs greeted each other like long-lost friends (brothers from another mother) and instantly began playing, hopping around, and pawing at each other. Almost immediately, the leashes of the two dogs became impossibly tangled.
I was holding Cosmo’s leash but when the dogs tangled their leashes, Seneca who was opposite of me in the foray of ecstatic dogs, reached for the leash to help untangle them. I let go of the leash thinking that she had it. She didn’t.
But Cosmo’s leash slipped from the knot. Feeling his leash untethered, Cosmo burst away from the cluster, suddenly drunk with freedom, several feet from where I could grab it. And in his euphoria, he bolted blindly and at a dead sprint directly toward the busy street with oncoming traffic.
To my horror, I saw an enormous delivery truck tearing down the street, fast and furious. Lawless. It was clear to see that Cosmo was in a direct trajectory to collide with this huge truck. It was all happening too fast. This nightmare was unfolding before our eyes and there was no way to grab his leash in time. We were completely helpless.
The speeding delivery truck couldn’t see Cosmo because he was driving too damn fast and because his vision was blocked by a motorcycle that was parked (lawlessly) on the sidewalk perpendicular to the street, totally blocking any view of pedestrian traffic. I mean, who parks like that? Oh, yeah. The French do.
Then, in the half second before Cosmo collided with the truck, his flapping leash somehow wedged itself under the rear tire of the illegally parked motorcycle, yanking him to a stop and landing him on his back as the delivery truck sped by unaware.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Angel of Lawlessness.
It was an unmitigated miracle.
My hands shook as I removed Cosmo’s leash from under the tire of the parked motorcycle and picked up my trembling dog from off the ground. I held him tightly against my chest and could feel our two hearts pounding from fear.
Elio and Sen gathered around and we all loved on him and petted him reassuringly as we exchanged wide-eyed glances with each other sharing our wordless gratitude for our dog who was just miraculously saved from an untimely doggie demise.
In the days following, on our morning walks to school, Elio and I started processing and making sense of the events of that terrifying moment. We decided together that clearly Cosmo must have a guardian angel. We also decided that if it’s heaven’s law that you’re not supposed to meddle in the lives of the living, there must have been a rebellious angel up there who took things into her own hands to save our sweet dog. We decided that this angel could be none other than Charity because what other rebellious angel loves both dogs and hogs?
One motorcycle took a life and another motorcycle saved a life.
Thank you, sweet Charity.