I am instead still awake…but I made a miraculous and heart wrenching discovery tonight. As I was surfing about on the internet to wind down from my near 12 hour day at work, I came across a website for a pub in West Yorkshire called The Grouse Inn. The photo of the inn on the page jumped out at me and slapped me across the face in a You’ve Been There Before kind of way…could that be the same pub where my family ate lunch 11 years ago and watched some Morris Dancers perform out in the parking lot after? Did I just happen to come across the same place on the internet?
I decided to find out and hurriedly took all the wee vid-cam tapes to the den to try them in the VCR. I was sure that one of them would be our trip to England in 1995 (since I couldn’t lay my hands on my copy of the VHS copy right at that very moment). The first one I put in wasn’t of England at all, but a recording of my presentation about greyhounds for the retired crowd at Daddy’s church in Marietta, GA. Before I could really even take a deep breath, my Lizzard strolled across my TV screen.
Of course, being the strong and independent woman I am, my reaction was absolutely normal and expected. I sucked in my breath because at that moment I think everything just kinda stopped. When things/the world/my universe started back up again, I was sobbing and smiling. I had almost forgotten her stilted gait due to LS/DM, arthritis, and poor vision. Nearly gone from my memory was the way she would stretch out into a playbow before plopping down into the sphinx position.
And there she was, in second-gen VHS choppy and slightly blurry technicolor…and I haven’t seen anything that beautiful in a long time.
Miss you MommaDawg. Every Day.
