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Biography                             Rachel's Web Site Short Story

  Biography  2005                                                               Top of Page

Rachel Corday is an author, a playwright, an actor, and a teacher. She has an MFA in Theatre Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a PhD in Expressive Arts Therapy from Summit University of Louisiana at New Orleans. She is an ordained minister with the church of Spiritual Humanism. Rachel is a Certified Expressive Arts Therapist and a Lifetime Diplomate with the National Institute of Expressive Therapy. She has been an activist with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) for sixteen years, has served on the NAMI board of directors for the state of Colorado, and is the immediate past president of NAMI Boulder County.

She is a member of the Colorado Author’s League and is author of the non-fiction books The Common Loon, Expressive Therapy and The Art in Spirit, The Common Loon Essays on Serious Mental Illness, and Just One parrow: The Dance Between Nothingness and Somethingness, Understanding Life as Art. She is author of the novels Haight Street, The Summertime of Baily Lowell, and The Benningdon-Crank Nervous Hospital. She has won writing prizes and publication for several short stories, and for her essay Psychosis, The Inner Experience.

Her sixty minute video Losing The Thread, The Inner Experience of Psychosis, which she wrote and produced, has been awarded a four-star review by the National Video Rating Guide for Libraries. The video is distributed nationally by Insight Media, Inc. She is an accomplished playwright and has been produced in Honolulu and the San Francisco Bay Area, and in Boulder, Denver, and the nationally acclaimed Creede Repertory Theatre in Colorado.

Rachel is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and is most well known for her feature role in the CBS movie-of-the-week Manhunt, The Search for Claude Dallas. She is a professional stage actor and among many leading roles, has played Jessie in the Pulitzer Prize winning play ‘Night Mother at Harbor Repertory Theatre in New York.

She has studied intensively with the acclaimed theatre artist and Emmy award-winning actress Viveca Lindfors. She has been recipient of a Best Supporting Actress of the Season nomination from the Denver Critic’s Circle. As Artistic Director of the Corday Actors Studio, she teaches acting at the beginning and advanced levels in the Boulder and Denver area. She also teaches metaphysics through her class The Art in Spirit, which explores the meaning of art and the artistic process.

She is a leading speaker and advocate for understanding the inner life of those who suffer from brain disorders which cause serious mental illness. She teaches workshops on the inner experience of psychosis, and the process of psychosis in relation to the meaning of art and spirit and the qualities inherent in healing.

September Morning and Maude                                 Top of Page

by Rachel Corday

September 2000

 

Maude doesn’t sleep under the bed anymore because she decided it’s too uncomfortable. All her life she slept under the bed, but now she’s twelve and a half and needs a softer place to sleep all night. For awhile she slept under the bed part of the night and then moved to her chair. Now she sleeps in her chair the whole night through.

When she was five weeks old and I brought her home I had the notion she shouldn’t sleep with me because of my allergies. So I barricaded the kitchen, made a bed f or her on the floor and put her in there. It was idiotic to think I could leave a little baby like that alone. But I was still drinking in those days and not thinking straight. A couple hours later I woke up to her crying at the top of her lungs. At first I couldn’t find her, then realized she was behind the refrigerator. I was filled with horror at my neglect, and I panicked at the thought of getting her out without hurting her. I eased the refrigerator forward,

pulling first on one side and then the other, until I was able to reach down and pick up her tiny body. She stopped crying and I cradled her close to me. I told her I was so sorry and that I would never leave her alone again. And I haven’t. She slept the rest of that night next to me. She fit in one hand, she was so small. I only half slept, afraid I would roll over and crush her. I don’t remember how she started to sleep under the bed. Probably because my asthma was so bad that I’d put   her down and she’d crawl underneath. I wasn’t allergic to her though, I never have been. Every morning and every night she’d get up on the bed, and then jump down and get underneath.

“Time to go to bed,” I’d say, “Time to go to bed.” She’d play for awhile, pawing on the carpet and digging and growling, until she went to sleep. These days I lift her up because she can’t jump up on the bed anymore. She starts to play and throws herself down on her side. She growls her on-the-bed growl which means I’m supposed to creep up with my hand and give her a gentle jab under her side. Then she gives a shout of a bark and shuffles around to her other side, and I give her a gentle jab on that side. We go around and around until she either has to jump off the bed and run in crazy eights around the house, or she moves to the end of the bed and settles down, meaning I’m not supposed to bother her anymore. Sometimes I do anyway a little bit, but then I leave her alone because I don’t want her to go away. Each morning about eight thirty we go for a walk. Three hundred and sixty five days a year we go for a walk in the morning. When I start putting on my shoe she knows it’s time to go. In the winter when I wear socks, she loves to play sock. That means she’s upposed to get my socks away from me so I can’t put them on. She really gets into it, hunkering down and growling and grabbing my sock and throwing it around. Gimme dat sock, I say. Lemme have dat sock. I try and get the sock away, pulling from side to side and then letting it go. She attacks it then, charging at it three or four times to let it know she’s got it for sure.

She’s so intent that it makes me laugh and I fall off the  footstool. I fall onto the floor and roll around with her. When I finally get my socks away and start putting them on, she bites at them as if they were enemies of my feet.

Usually my coat pockets are filled with Kleenex and poop bags. I get King Soopers brand baggies, 150 a box. We use about three a day, two in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening. Every morning I go to the kitchen and get two baggies and put them in the right pocket of my dress, and I get a Kleenex for the left pocket. And I say, Okay gal, I’m ready. Outside it’s hot. There’s a rain cloud moving across the sky. Maudie walks onto the lawn and squats to pee. The riot and Nelson are usually close by. They’re both Persians. The riot’s got bright gold kitten-like eyes. He sidles by Maudie with his long brown-gold fur. He’s cheerful and friendly. Nelson, on the other hand, holds back. He is a cat of few words. He’s gray with a pretty white front and is smaller than The riot. Nelson’s not much interested in socializing. He’ll let me pat him a little, but just enough and then he’s done. He’s sensitive and doesn’t want to be jostled. Nelson’s probably a Cancer. The riot’s most likely an Aquarian.

We walk past Rita’s house. Rita is always being a guardian for a dog. She takes in hard-to-place dogs from the humane society and cares for them till they find a home. Once in a while she’ll get a dog who for whatever that special reason is, she’ll get attached to. Then after the dog goes to his new home she’ll say, “I’m not going to do this anymore. It’s too hard.” But then there’ll be another one who needs help and she’ll take him in. She loves dogs more than people. She’s been a tour guide going most often to the South which she hates. She says people are so boring on those trips she can’t even believe it. She does healing work with animals now, using a method she has been trained for called Telington Touch. Rita’s house is full of wooden animals and glass animals and pictures of animals. Lots of elephants and gorillas and giraffes and dogs and everything you can imagine. I love all those animals. Animals remind me of everything that is pure and powerful and true about life. We cross the parking drive, down from which there cycling bins are. This morning there’s somebody emptying white plastic bags full of cans and jars. He dumps them into a bin and they crash loud at the bottom. I take my recyclables over there too every few weeks. I don’t have much to recycle any more because I eat fresh food mostly and no wine or beer, and only get the paper on the weekends. The paper’s very boring too by the way and I’m thinking of not getting it all together. I kind of like crashes, so when I’ve got a bag full I find an empty bin so I can upend the bag at the top and let everything fly, bottles ricocheting off each other. I close my eyes in case one breaks, hoping it will happen. The empty bins are better too because the fuller ones smell like old alcohol, and I don’t like to get a whiff of it. That garbage can booze smell takes me back to every dark old bar I’ve ever been in, dozens and dozens of them. Life in the bar is like life in an institution. People who have to be in institutions a lot talk about getting institutionalized, which means they’re more at home in the institution than on the outside. Drunks feel the same way about bars. I felt that way. But eleven years ago I went to AA and got sober. Now I don’t want the smell of my old life to reach me. Then again, the old pull is still there. That smell makes a part of my mind say, Breathe it in, breathe. The demon alcohol says, “Come on back, I’m where you belong, you’re all alone out there standing free in the fresh air outside this stinking trap of a garbage can. ”Maudie and I cross the street to the park. I let her off the leash and she sniffs around the newly watered grass, goes up near a tree and starts to poop. I get out a plastic bag and stand over her. I used to say, Good girl, when she pooped, but now she can’t hear soI don’t say it as much. Besides, some things you just don’t have to say after twelve and a half years. The park’s nice sized. If you looked across and had good glasses you might be able to recognize a dog you knew if it was big enough. Over on that side is a basketball court. This morning the guy who does T’aiChi is there. I don’t look at him if I can help it. The look of T’ai Chi makes me crazy; that slow movement gives me vertigo. But sometimes my eyes get caught up in his movement and I have to slow down. Then I can see what a beautiful dancer he has become. T’ai Chi is like listening to Bach playing on unaccompanied cello. You have to slow down and shut up to hear the astonishing beauty of it. On that far end close to the basketball court is a playground. There are a lot of parents around herewith little children about a year or two old who swing and go down the slide. It’s terrible but sometimes I think, Does that person hurt their child? So many women and children are abused, sometimes I just can’t get it out of my mind. Some day soon I’m going back to Hawaii, to Molokai, so that I won’t be around newspapers and news programs and people who remind me every day about horrible things. In the direction we’re walking, toward the creek, there’s a line of Cottonwood trees that separate one part of the park from the other. Those trees flood when there’s a rain storm and dogs run and jump in the water. I love how some dogs get ecstatic about water. Maude’s a small dog, about eighteen pounds. She’s a cockapoo, and she doesn’t go for water like the big dogs do, with abandon. She likes to get in a stream with me when I get in. But she’s just a little girl and looks to me to keep her safe. I walk along and take a deep breath. The air is soothing and cool. I start doing the Sarasvati mantra. Om, aim, sreem, hreem, saraswati, devai, namaham. But then just as quickly I forget it and something else enters my mind. Something about my ear problems or my lungs, or free will, or the existential void, or a bitfrom a Brandenburg concerto, or hoping my mom’s all right that day, or what I’m going to do if I run out of money again this month. We see Dorothy coming along. Dorothy has three dogs, a Golden named Cody, a corgi bassett mix named Bart, and a small grayish black wire-haired terrier mix named Lucy. Cody is like a Golden, always happy and filled  with good expectations. Bartie the Corgi barks two big barks. He has bites on him from where he got cornered by a coyote, Dorothy says. Lucy runs around in every direction without much of an idea of where to go. Dorothy got Cody and Lucy and Bartie from the Boulder humane society. She volunteers walking the dogs in the kennels. She writes children’s books. I don’t know what age group she writes for. A really good book IS a children’s book if you ask me. Wouldn’t a child love to hear The Mill on the Floss? The sound of great writing, where sound is as important as words. When a child listens to great writing then, it is likes singing her a song. Maudie stays close by my side. She’s not crazy about dogs. She likes humans and she likes cats. Dogs are too boisterous, too invasive for her. Besides, once she got attacked by a German Shepard who grabbed herby the back of the neck. I dived in between them to save her but she had to go to the emergency room anyway to get pain medication and a shot of cortisone. Now sometimes she’ll try to hide behind a bush when she sees a big dog. I hear a voice, and Chris beckons me from behind the swimming pool fence. Hey Rachel, he says. I go in and sit with him while Airdie floats by herself in the aqua blue water. Chris and Airdie are in their late sixties, I’d say. They’re so much fun to talk to and we have a lot of laughs. Chris especially thinks I’m funny in a slightly outrageous fashion. Airdie says she’s going to take off all her clothes and run  down the street naked at two o’clock in the morning on Bill Clinton’s last day in office. I say well keep telling people and you’ll have all of Boulder there, plus the Daily Camera with flood lights, the Rocky Mountain News, and Channel 4. She has the days counted until Bill Clinton’s through. She is disgusted about Bill Clinton having oral sex in the Oval Office. She says he is the lowest form of human life on earth. She cracks me up and I laugh. She’s unhappy because George W. Bush is losing in the polls. To cheer her up I say, “Airdie, George W. Bush and Al Gore are pretty much a like anyway.” She growls and says, “No, they’re not.” I laugh and sit back, “Oh well, so much for that approach.” She says she’d like to shake George W. Bush’s hand. George W. Bush AND George Bush. I think, George W.Bush, what a twit. I’d like to shake the hands of those African men who shoot poachers on sight. I’d like to shake Oscar Arias’ hand, and Ann Richard’s, and Molly Ivins’, and Jessye Norman’s, and George Page’s, and David Attenborough’s, and Ralph Nader’s. He’s been working for freedom and justice his whole life. I’m a Green Party member and do a lot of campaigning for the Greens. Chris and Airdie want to know how that’s going. They want to know about me and how I’m doing. It seems like they are always ready to lend a hand to everybody in the park. Once Chris spent a whole afternoon helping me wrench loose my washing machine hoses so I could put in new ones. As Maudie and I reach the creek path we walk into the sound of the stream and the shade of giant cottonwoods. There’s a perfect climbing  cottonwood right there, with one great arm cut off after getting it broken in a storm. I remember the storm that broke this branch. I remember thinking how much I wished I could have been there, to see the astounding power of the Divine Mother. I’ve never climbed this cottonwood tree, but I know about good climbing trees, I grew up in a fir forest. A few feet along, I see what looks one of the two water snakes I see along here sticking up from the middle of the stream, but I don’t have my glasses on so I can’t tell for sure. I pick up a few bits of gravel and toss them gently one by one to see if I can get it to move. It doesn’t move, not a fraction. It looks like a solid bent stick angled out of the water, the top of it leaning on a branch. I give up but I’m sure that’s a snake. I go another few feet and sure enough, there’s the other snake, half off the path. He wriggles down into the underbrush, going to meet his mate in the water. I knew that stick was a snake, there was something about it. The apple tree comes up on the left side of the path. I start looking under the tree for apples. It’s September and they’re ready to eat. I want to get them before they’re too ripe. The lower branches have been picked and the higher branches are too high so I have to find what I can on the ground. I’ve tried to think of how to get to the branches, see if someone would give me a hand up. The ground’s at a slant, and the tree’s trunk is short so I can’t shake it. I pick up a rotten apple and throw up at the branches. Good shot, two in one throw. I keep an eye on where the good ones fall and find them both. I find another one too that’s only partly damaged, bruised  on two sides. I only need enough space so I can get a good bite. Up till two years ago I’d make an apple pie from this tree. Now I don’t eat pies and don’t have anyone around to bake for. These are pretty good ones, Gal, I say to Maude. A few drops of rain fall from the cloud overhead. We walkover the bridge and try to see if the musk rat is down here around her home in the side of the bank under the water. She’s not out at the moment, but sometimes she pops up and swims all the way down stream with us until the creek veers away and is hidden by trees and long grass. I take a big bite out of one of my apples and the tart juice flies from the pulp into my cheek sand throat and rushes out of my mouth. I hold my head back so I can keep it all in. That’s the only good bite out of that one and I give it a toss and hit the creek so I can hear the splash. The other two are good all the way around. They’re medium-sized apples, green with red highlights over the shoulders. I take great crunching bites out of one. It improves my energy immensely and I stride along and feel like everything is certainly very attractive. Eating apples from the tree makes me feel like I belong, like I’m a natural part of the world too and this proves it. It’s a gift of the apple, or, maybe a happy delusion. I think of Jesus saying we don’t have anywhere to belong. But I do, and it’s here, walking along eating an apple from the tree, and biting out the rotten parts and shooting them from my mouth through the air into the grass along the side of the path. We’re almost to the cement wall that holds the ditch that goes over the creek. A young man comes along with his greyhound.

He walks straight and holds the dog leashed in closely. I see them like this often, silent but no turn friendly. This greyhound is a rescue like all the others. I love greyhounds. They’re spirit is so light they nearly float. They’re angels I think, living between earth and the ethers. I say, “hello,” feeling very chipper, crunching my apple. I pet the greyhound. He is so gentle that I am mesmerized and stop chewing. As I look at him I can’t believe my eyes. It’s as if he moves in a different kind of time. Not slow motion, but more like his whole body is lifted away from the denseness of the earth. Starting across the cement wall that holds the ditchwater, Maudie jumps up to walk in front of me. We always go this way so I can see in case she falls. It’s a wide wall, about eight inches across. If she fell to the right she’d fall into the ditch which is about four feet down and has a lot of swift water running through it. If she fell down the left she’d fall into the creek. The water in the creek here is deep, but it’s slow moving. I often wonder what I would do if she fell. I wouldn’t jump into the ditch after her because I might break something and then I would be no good to her. What I’d do is run across the wall to the other side where there’s a way into the water. I’d be saying, “Okay Gal, it’s okay. Here I am. I’m coming.” She’d be swimming toward me but she’d be swept along by the current. If she was moving away too fast, I would run down stream and get ahead of her, then jump in and struggle toward her as she tried to get to me. I would be talking to her, “It’s okay Bookie, I’m coming. It’s okay, here I am.” But she’s never even come close to falling off. This is the  usual route for many people around here and their dogs. Now she goes in front of me and looks back about half way over to make sure I’m coming. She can only get a glance safely, but that’s good enough and she goes on to the other side. We step onto the path that leads back in the direction of home, with the creek now on our left. Maudie trots in front of me but stops to chew something on her back right foot. I know what it is and run up to her quickly. I say, “Wait Gal, wait a minute. Wait a minute, Bookie.” I reach down and start pulling the fur out from around a burr. It’s a round kind of burr with thick barbed stickers coming out in every direction like a porcupine. The burr weeds are all along here. They’re in layers coming up from the creek. In the summer the burrs grow in big clumps and in September they dry up and fall all over the place. They’re so stickery they grab on to my shoes and pant legs. With Maudie’s fine fur, she’s a magnet. To get them out one at a time is hard enough, but sometimes she gets clumps stuck to her and they burrow right up next to her skin. Then I have to take her home and cut them out. I need to take care of it before she pulls at them with her teeth. One got stuck in her throat once and that was terrible. I wouldn’t go down there but I can’t figure a way around it except to go along 63rd street and that’s too fast. Maudie won’t even walk toward 63rd once we’re within about fifty yards. We see Max and his dad coming up. Max is a regular brown dog about medium-sized, short-haired. He’s the most easy going dog in the neighborhood. He and his dad are inseparable. His dad is a tall, nice looking man in his sixties. He’s in good shape. He and his wife play tennis a couple times a week here at Powderhorn where I play. He plays golf too. Maude trots up to him because he is the cookie man. He always has a treat in his pocket. Maudie sits up and he feeds her and then tosses Max a bit. It’s funny how we all know our dog’s names but not each other’s. That’s because park-walking time is dog time.

Max’s dad reminds me of my dad except that dad was more reserved. Max’s dad talks about sports and the weather. This morning he’s hoping Pete Sampras wins the US Open since he was not able to play last year due to injury. I say I hope Todd Martin wins after being narrowly defeated by Agassi last year. I breakaway and say, “Come on Gal, time to go.” But she tries to mooch another treat. She goes and sits up in front of Max’s dad again. She’s irresistible and he give she another treat. “Come on Bumpkin,” I say, and do my beckoning wave. She can’t hear anymore but she understands my gestures. Max’s dad is saying how nice the rain is to clean everything up, and I say, “Yes,everything’s so fresh looking.” It’s hard for me to talk much anytime, but especially in the morning. I only have so much energy, and talking is the worst drain. Sometimes people stand around the park and talk even at seven a.m. For some people, talking seems to come from a separate brain compartment that doesn’t effect the rest of them a tall. They look like they’re talking without their body even knowing it. For me, talking is a job. It’s an effort that I have to be up for. Formless spoken words seem like so much noise to me, an insult to the silence. I think, surely the voice is meant to make expressive sounds like growling and sighing and crying and  singing. I think of Marilyn Whirlwind in the TV show, Northern Exposure. She never talked. One time she said, “If birds could talk, they couldn’t fly.” We are moving away from the creek now, back toward the park. I finish my third apple and toss it into the trees. I feel good, like there’s something in my stomach that it likes and can use for good purposes. What I would like is to only eat apples and pears and peaches I could pick off trees, and cherries and blackberries and raspberries, and spinach and lettuce I could reach down and break off and stand there and eat, and carrots I could dig up, and sweet potatoes I could cook. Maudie poops for her second time and I pick it up and put it in the trash can that sits along the path. There are some people in a townhouse close by who are making a Japanese garden. It feels wonderful to walk by there. I can see how conscious, how awake they are by the care they take. There’s a grapevine that’s grown half way across the eave of the roof in a graceful arc. There’s a new Japanese maple whose leaves they say will turn yellow. They’ve got a climbing flower, like a clematis, against the wall by the patio door. In the center there’s a pond with lily pads and a Buddha sitting next to it on a little hillock of grassy ground. I don’t know if there’re goldfish in the pond. I hope so. As we come back into the park we see the expanse of the sky. The cloud has moved east, and the rain drops seem to come from blue sky. Up the walkway Maude sits and waits to see what I am going to do about the rain. I smile and run up to her.   “You think Mom can fix everything don’t you?” She looks up with her brown eyes that I love and she hunkers down. “You’re right Gal,” I say, “I can fix everything. But we have to walk in the rain for awhile. We’ll be home in a minute.” I throw my head back and brush the rain out of my hair with my hands. Somebody is throwing one of those ball-on-the-end-of-a-rope things for his Jack Russell terrier. It goes very high and when it hits the ground the dog leaps up and gets it on the first bounce every time. Iko is out there chasing a ball too. Iko’s a very sweet old black lab. She slowly lopes after the ball. She wants to get the ball no matter what. She’s humbling to me, wanting to play, wanting to join in life even though her body does not serve her like it used to. On the basketball court the T’ai Chi guy has gone and somebody is shooting baskets. I try and look away when he shoots so I don’t jinx the shot. But I look back as the ball is flying to see if he made it. No, not that one. I think of Dad shooting baskets with us when we were kids. Playing PIG, and HORSE. I think of the four hand prints of us in the cement at the outside edge of the patio. I wonder what the date reads. 1954 or ‘55maybe.Maudie gets a scent and runs off toward a circle of roses under an aspen tree. I love those rose bushes. They’re pink and they come out beautifully in June. They smell just like pink roses. I love how roses smell like their color, even like the shade of their color. Irises are like that too. Dark purple irises smell exactly like grape Kool-aid.

“Come on Gal,” I say, and put my arms around myself. The rain has soaked in a little even though it’s almost stopped. “Let’s go. Time for breakfast.” She’s turned away and I have to go around to the front so she can see me. “Come on Gal.” We’re next to the playground and a little girl about three is being pushed in the swing by her mom. “Puppy, puppy,” the child says. Her mother lets her come over to see Maude. I hold onto Maudie so she won’t wander away. “You can pet the puppy,” I say, and the little girl waddles up with her fingers spread wide to pet the puppy. She pats Maude gingerly on top of the head. Little children love Maudie because she’s their size and she’s so soft to touch. The little girl stand s still, wondering if that’s all there is to it. “OkayGal, let’s go,” I say. “Time to go.” We move on down the path. “Bye bye,” I wave to the child and her mom. The little girl gives us a hesitant wave back, “Bye, puppy.” Next to the big lilac bushes where it’s boggy there are five robins all together looking for worms in the wet ground. I think for the thousandth time, Do robins hear the worm in the ground, or not? If not, how could they know where they are? We walk along the curb up to the corner where we stop to cross the street. Here’s where we put the leash back on. Maudie walks up to me. “Have a seat,”  I say and gesture with my hand. But I don’t really mean it. The ground is wet and she doesn’t want to put her bottom down on it. She only has a little short stub of a tail so she can’t use it to protect herself. “Okay Gal,” I say, and put the leash on and we cross the street.

On our front porch I look at the tomato leaves covered with rain drops. There are several small green tomatoes left. I think next year I’ll plants Strawberries again. Their leaves are pretty and they last longer. Inside the door I take Maude’s towel off the hook. She shakes and then I put the towel around her. “OkayBookie, let’s get this hand,” and I dry her left hand. “Okay, let’s get this hand,” I say, and dry her right hand. I dry her back feet one by one and then her bottom and her belly. I dry her head and her back and before I can say anything, she knows I’m done. She growls and races away. She loves the towel game. She charges the towel and I hold it in front of her and then pull it back. “Bullito,” I say, and she runs at the towel. “Bullito mio.” I hold the towel out so she can grab at it. She growls ferociously and starts running as fast asshe can around the room behind all the furniture. She charges at the towel and I try and catch her with it. She runs across the room and sits down, panting, waiting to see what we get to do next. Her brown eyes look at me with such faith and I am humbled. Her blond fur has turned into wet curlicues all over her body. I go to the kitchen. “Come on Gal. Let’s get something to eat. Want to have a treat? Okay, you want a Pupperoni?” She sits up in excited anticipation. “Hereyou go.” I put a Pupperoni sideways in her mouth. “Okay Gal, take it away. Good girl.” She politely takes it across the room and then gobbles it up in two bites. “Let’s see,” I open the refrigerator, “Chicken and rice, how about that?” I take out the can of food and mix some with her  vitamin and put in some dry food. “Here you go, Gal.” I put her food down next to her water on a swatch of carpet. She sits watching me and then barks a single quiet bark. “What is it, Gal?” She goes to the door and looks out. Betty from next door has come out into the yard. Betty is a very sweet bassett who is innocent and loving.

“Oh look, Gal, it’s Betty.” I reach down and put my arms around Maudie. I love it when she gets somebody’s scent and barks. It’s a special event now that she can’t hear. We sit looking out the door. “Oh Bookie,” I say, “I love you.” What a wonder she is to me. Each time I look at her it’s there, the feeling of the miracle that she is; a perfect expression of the Divine Mother. I squeeze her gently and say for the hundredth time,“ I want to be like you, Gal. I want to be just like you. ”Outside, Betty trots around, bouncing happily on her short legs. We rest a moment in the warm sun streaming in the door, then go back to eat breakfast, and to talk about the unfolding events of the day.

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