It is getting late. It is getting late earlier than usual. It is getting late so quickly now, there is barely time to give the day a name. Well, maybe I do not give days names. I am not really good with giving names, except for maybe Elisabeth, Paul and William, but that certainly does not count.
Today was one of the sunnier Paul ones. It was a day that was just calling for a quick run with a happy dog, like the one we used to have. (Well, I think she also had us.) She would run and run for miles. I would try to follow her as well as I possibly could. Then we would just run to the nearby cornfield and she would check all the rows for possible intruders, while I would grab some corn and eat it right there, right then. Or maybe we would both look for items in the soil. It was like dog-walk archeology. I would find tiny broken toys and small medicine bottles not very deep under the crusty surface between the corn plants. The corn field was a really great place for these little artifacts. I was wondering at first where they could have come from, of course. So many man made items in the all over a field with 7 foot plants does seem a bit like a story for an adventure movie for young boys. My last conclusion was that the field was just a dumping ground for the remains of the original city. Hanau, the place where we lived in Germany, was almost completely destroyed in the last few days of World War II, so the tiny remains of burned out households had to go somewhere. The corn field was put there later. The corn field was not there to stay. The place is now a garden colony, my parents have a little wild garden there. I am sure the dog would have loved it.
Today would have been a perfect day to run with her. She could run and run and run. Never get tired. She was an Irish Setter. I carry her dog tag with me on my key chain still. The one from Poland. The one she got in the year when we fled. The one that was supposed to mark the year we had left her behind. She knew we almost did. She was so incredibly unhappy about it. So we took her. We took her into the “free” world, where there is not only food, but even food that is specifically made for dogs. She would still love to eat everything she was not supposed to eat. She would find chocolade even if it was hidden and sealed somewhere in the refrigerator. We once brought round chewing gum from Hungary. I hang them on the wall, too high for her to reach. I still do not know how she managed to get them off the wall. She did not have enough time to eat them all. She invented a special option for such time pressing situations. She bit into every single one of the 32 sweet sugary balls. Only once, precisely into the center of each and every one of them. Just to mark them. Just to make them hers. She was so very skilled in getting the things that were really bad for her. She died of stomach cancer.
Why am I writing this? What does this have to do with a wonderful yet incredibly short day?
I think I will need to start over. Let me put together a more positive post. (See you in a few minutes.)