{"id":1712,"date":"2013-12-01T14:27:20","date_gmt":"2013-12-01T19:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/?p=1712"},"modified":"2013-12-01T14:26:37","modified_gmt":"2013-12-01T19:26:37","slug":"thanksgiving-week-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/2013\/12\/01\/thanksgiving-week-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"Thanksgiving Week Anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_9424<\/a><\/p>\n

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, the one I feed the most.<\/i><\/p>\n

George Bernard Shaw<\/p>\n

Five years ago this week the Jersey Girls had a very serious decision to make, isolate ourselves again or rejoin the world.\u00a0 Would we continue to feed the mean and evil girls or would we feed the good girls? By now you know the Jersey Girls are Lina, an adorable pit mix, Toto, a precocious wire-haired terrier something or other and me. We came from places that were not kind to us to New Jersey within three days of one another in September of 2008. We were ecstatic but reeling from the change with little time to adjust to our new surroundings.\u00a0 We did the best we could not knowing what the future would hold but thankfully, clinging to the old saying that a dog will find the person that needs them most, we knew we were meant to be together and to be in Jersey.<\/p>\n

By Thanksgiving we were at a crossroads, the dogs were unruly and aggressive to anyone they came in contact with and I was curing that by walking them behind my building.\u00a0 People were no longer coming over and I was right back where I started, alone.\u00a0 Of all the blessings Muriel has bestowed on me, the best one ever was; I\u2019m not coming over anymore.\u00a0 I know that doesn\u2019t sound very blessed but it had the impetus that inspired action.\u00a0 The Jersey Girls spent Thanksgiving week recalibrating our lives.\u00a0 I took back my power with that one line.\u00a0 You see, that would never do, there was no way to fulfil my friend, Cookie\u2019s, request that I take care of Muriel if she wasn\u2019t ever coming over again.<\/p>\n

Say what you want about Cesar Milan, he saved our lives.\u00a0 We became the house of \u201cnothing for nothing\u201d.\u00a0 The girls didn\u2019t eat until they sat, they didn\u2019t touch the food until I said OK,\u00a0\u00a0 They didn\u2019t go out until they sat, and they never again went out the door first. They didn\u2019t come up on the couch without being invited. They learned words like sit, stay, off, and no.\u00a0 I\u2019m mean they really learned.\u00a0 I mean I really learned.\u00a0 We all learned.\u00a0 At the end of the week, Muriel put her stamp of approval on the amazing transformation.\u00a0 There was much more work to be done but we had a solid start.<\/p>\n

Continuing our education would come a bit later when we needed to conquer the walk.\u00a0 We still had our issues, Lina was terribly frightened, Toto was terribly protective of her and that combination didn\u2019t bode well around a neighborhood full of dogs on extending leashes and owners of sweetie dogs that had been raised from puppies.\u00a0 Mine were dogs found together at a dumpster, starving, ribs showing and about as suspicious of other beings, canine or otherwise, as you could imagine.\u00a0 Add to that a woman who was all too willing to let the dogs protect her from the new neighbors and avoiding the chit chat and you\u2019ve got aggression at its finest, if you can possible use that particular word.<\/p>\n

Enter Shawn Stewart, trainer extraordinaire. There is a way a man carries himself that changes the air in the room that puts ease in place of anticipation.\u00a0 There is a miracle that happens when a man of grace simply walks into a home, our home, and two anxious rescue girls fall in behind him as if he were the Pied Piper. Ears forward, hair down on their backs, tails wagging.\u00a0 Exhale.\u00a0 To say that Shawn was generous with his knowledge is an understatement, to say that his patience was un-ending; to say that his frankness was welcomed would be even more of an understatement. We worked, we learned, we grew into the women we were meant to be.<\/p>\n

And so it is that every Thanksgiving, among all the blessings that have been bestowed on us we know that our lives are as magical as Stowe Lane.\u00a0 That five years later the walks we take, the waves we get from neighbors (that prompt Muriel to ask; Who are you?), the people who stop to comment on how well behaved the girls are (that still makes me chuckle to myself) and the ease with which we move through the neighborhood are all a gift not to be taken lightly.<\/p>\n

To wake up nose to nose with these two sweet girls is a confirmation of having grown into their pack leader, mother, Sargent and into my own true exhale.<\/p>\n

I stumbled from the dark woods\u2026holding these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the existence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I\u2019ve figured out.\u00a0 I know this much is true.<\/i>\u00a0 Wally Lamb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[346,350,210,349,347,348,351],"class_list":["post-1712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-pause-points","tag-aggressive-dogs","tag-cesar-milan","tag-dogs","tag-dogs-are-easy","tag-jersey-girls","tag-shawn-stewart","tag-thankful","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27hQ5-rC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1713,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712\/revisions\/1713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}