I don't know why--maybe all this talk about the presidential puppy?--but this morning as I sat with my coffee and my prayer beads this came to me:
"The story of Old Yeller* is a lie:
You do not have to kill the thing you love to be a grown up."
Make of this what you will. I didn't think I thought that, but the amount this made me cry suggests I did.
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* If you don't know Old Yeller, it's the children's book--and Disney movie--about a boy on the American frontier who has to, in the end, shoot his beloved yellow-colored dog, because the dog gets rabies and Pa is snake-bit or some such thing and can't do it. The underlying message is this act makes the boy a man. A Good Man.
Sort of as if John Wayne wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and your parents read it to you at bedtime.
