Road Trip #2: Picking up Chance from Camp Bow Wow

Are you beginning to see the theme about dogs being an ever constant part of my daily being by my posts?

Today makes the 11th straight day I have worked. It makes the 3rd night I've been home after work (and home before 11 pm) in those 11 days. I absolutely did not think I was going to make it. I've acquired an allergy to something in the air...and my throat is extremely sore, sneezes, sniffles, feel achy, feel drained...so I got up and took Chance to Camp Bow Wow today. They usually wear him out enough that I can rest in the evenings when he goes there for a day. And I had a lot of homework to do today.

I got off work, beat...went to pick up Chance, and encountered a person who'd broken down on the road. I pulled into Bow Wow, and hung out with Moe for a minute. When the lady there to pick up her dog, and the lady who didn't look like the type to drop her dog off at Day Care left, Moe told me that her car had broke down, and she'd been in there for the longest trying to bum money.

I do not understand people and their nerve. She'd asked Moe to loan her a dollar...ok, he works at Bow Wow, not exactly making a fortune...you know, if the lady had looked like she could half way stand on her own two feet without being a bum moocher, I'd have done anything in the world for her. But I can't stand people who just think because they ask you for a dollar that you should give it to them. And then when you say no, they ask again. What the fuck? Pardon my language, but I have seen days where I had absolutely not a penny to my name. I had no idea what I was going to eat for dinner, and did not know what I would be doing the next day--and I never asked a soul that I didn't know from Adam for a penny. I don't get it. I don't get people like that.

It makes me sad for them--that no one ever took the time to teach them about humanity, about morals, about human responsibility. I wonder how their life would have been different if someone had have cared about them when they were young. I'm sad for those people. I wanted to help this lady; yet, her mere personality showed me right away that she was used to just bumming her way through life, and she felt entitled to it.

Thank God I had someone to love me, to teach me that I'm not owed anything in life, that nothing but death is guaranteed, to teach me to love and pass on that love. I have often wondered what my path is here. I want to succeed, and I want to live by the sea (which unfortunately requires money)--but more than that, I've always wanted to garden, to help people, to be around people, and to share leading them. I wonder if I am discovering my calling?

Sarah Susanka's book, The Not So Big Life, has had a lasting effect on me. If you read, and you are a philosophic person, you will enjoy this. It transforms your life, I'm not totally transformed, and I have a very long journey ahead of me, but I see the world in a different light than I used to. If you listen to your inner self, you will begin to see that things and people in life present themselves to you as you learn who you are and what you desire to be. They will present themselves to you without your looking for them, and at just the right times.

I've noticed that pattern too in the past 2 or 3 years; if I think back, I've noticed it for most of my life, but I really began to become attuned to that a couple of years ago.

Was my encounter with this worthless person a call to my service to humanity? I'd love to take people like that and force them to learn to be responsible and appreciative by taking them to some 3rd world country and helping a village develop in agriculture. WOW! Teach them to help these people become part of the rest of the developed world--and as they do, to become developed themselves. People in America (and everywhere else), they forget how much they really have to offer the rest of the world.