This isn’t the first time this has happened; I knew and accepted this reality when I brought Simon into my home. Simon is still a pup, a weimy pup, a pup who needs to chew and needs attention and needs to spend his abundant energy.
Simon also has a knee injury, which means he hasn’t been able to spend his energy chasing tennis balls for weeks. And so, Simon did what Simon does. He chewed. He chewed up a brand new willow pumpkin right before Halloween. I was okay with that. He chewed up my Guatemalan, hand-carved rooster I bought in Key West. I grit my teeth and accepted that. But yesterday…yesterday he chewed up my Winnie the Pooh script. My heart stopped. I melted into a puddle of shrieks and sobs and crawled around on the floor like a little child, picking up every precious giblet and scrap.
I sent Simon to his kennel. I sat and flattened out every salvageable page as best I could. I taped what could be taped. I paced with my stack of pitiful pages. I clutched them to my chest. I poured myself a Crown and coke and wept some more.
Before you judge me too harshly, please realize that I don’t always act like a child. But that script carried me back, back to my childhood. That script was MY script, my summer youth theater script, my first lead role script, my Rabbit script.
That script was my most precious childhood possession (next to my brown teddy bear and my snoopy). I don’t think of my childhood as being particularly happy; I was a sober child. But that script represented a truly happy memory, and I have always kept it tucked safely on a high bookshelf…until…until recently. Until photographing my first bicycle sucked me into reverie. Until I took down my script to look at it and finger through it’s pages and be carried away again. Until I placed it where I thought it would be safe ‘til going back downstairs to my library. I’m such a heartsick, heartbroken fool.
I'm ready for that knee to heal.
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