One Blink

Dear Kate,

So it happened again tonight, and not for the first time after Sunday dinner with family.

My dog Sumi is on leash whenever she goes out.  She's a rat terrier (just like the one featured in today's local news), a farmer's dog, a very stubborn enfant terrible for life, and would go after anything that moves--such as a leaf blowing in the wind.  But whenever I let her out for the final time before bed, I would just carry her in my arms, take her out the front door and let her roam on the lawn with no restraint.  It's a 10 seconds affair: if something animated is to show up, I can easily grab her and come back home.  She is quick, but I am not that slow.

Tonight it came to me again, a picture I saw in the deep darkness before me, not for the first time, last time just the same after Sunday dinner with family, of me saying goodbye to Sumi, I don't know why I would but in the picture I did, sending her away into the pitch black of boundless unknown, or maybe it was she who wanted to try something new out there and I somehow let her be, granted her wish against everything I knew to be true about us, our relationship, or maybe it was just a most horrible what-if that took good advantage of my mellowed Sunday sentiment, after dinner, enjoyed love, felt belonged, suggested its own palpable possibility to me in the deep of the last winter chill, if I would only blink once and let it happen to me.  One brink, and Sumi will be no more, the voice said, Satan itself.  She might come back three years later; she might become Su and Mi after crossing a road; she might as well have never happened to me at all.  Why Sumi at all?

And I thought, that's what God could have done, just one careless blink, and all hell breaks loose, back into chaos, my life, everything, fatherless, untenable.  Why anything at all?

It was a startling picture.  It shook my soul.

Yours, Alex