
I really love the nickname though. I got interviewed for the Underdog Podcast this week (the last few interviews have all been podcasts when they finally realized my face was built for radio) and at the end one of the questions they ask if what makes you an underdog and I said no I'm a junkyard dog, chasing you down or in that case up a hill for the best place I could get. Heck, I like the term junkyard sog so much I think Elaine's might let me dance with her to "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" at some point during the reception.
I grew up on streets in Mexico where dogs run free. Heck I grew up in a town that has the same name as a dog, Chihuahua. (When I hopped over to the US at age 8, it was a frog's name, Kermit). No they didn't walk free, they ran free. The fenced in ones where the ones there to protect homes because it didn't mean matter how much you owned we all had covered windows and glass and spikes on fences. I can think of no one who had fancy stuff but we knew what to value. In a time where much of my family was trying to come to the US, the land of opportunity, I was happy chasing cans and then walking backward to play hide and side. I was happy where we all grabbed each other by the arm and kept growing and created a human chain that moved faster and faster and more dangerous for whoever was on the end... maybe one of those times I flew off the end and landed a rock is what damaged my brain earlier on. There was the special treat of Mexican coke once in a while and my toys were nails on a board with rubber bands to make shapes. I loved helping clean so much I wanted to grow up to be a janitor... maybe someday I'll day still pull it off. When my mom tried to send me with one of my uncles I screamed and cried and yelled and he wouldn't take me in that condition. There's a reason my older brother was here before me.
But I came to this great country where they recognized I had academic potential and once I learned the language, I was a GT student, then valedictorian. Even then in high school, never having lived in a city that had a college, I thought maybe I was supposed to go work in the oil field like much of my family but some people encouraged me to go to school and the librarian and her husband who I had worked for flew me out to Napa Valley where I went to school at Pacific Union College. Two degrees suma cum laude with honors with many trips San Francisco nearby, an internship in LA and a class in London had opened up my worldview to realize that the world was a little bigger than Mexico and small town Texas. I'm not sure which one had me barking more.


I have a dog who in about a month will be 14 years old. I've had her since she was born. She was a stray when I was volunteering as a teacher in the Marshall Islands. I brought her back with me, two third World Immigrants enjoying life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the Marshall Islands, dogs are also more protectors than traditional pets but on campus we had a female dog that was impregnated and people only took the male newborns (those bitches aren't valued the same as the male dogs). There's no such thing as proper pet food so the dogs eat scraps and since the most common meals there are chicken and rice and fish and rice, they eat those bones that here we warn are so dangerous for pets. To this day, when there is chicken at the house, Puppy gets some of those bones. (She was named puppy cause I kept trying to figure out how to get that Puppy away from my house... I'd say that didn't work out so well except the way it worked out was exactly how it should be). Every time one of my sophisticated friends gives me a hard time when they see me giving her bones, I remind them of her age and that it's gotten her here much longer than most dogs live period. Heck these days I even remind them that after I got cancer I ate dessert more... Life's too short in my book to only eat healthy. Maybe, just maybe, that's why we're both okay. I moved out of my parents home when I was 14 so if she makes it and I see no reason why she wouldn't, she will be who I have lived with longer than anyone in my entire life. Even now she tries to get out without a leash to explore. She'd be gone for a long time when she pulled it off younger. Now it's a little short but then or now, she'd always make it home. Maybe it's a couple of junkyard dogs that found home with each other but know that opening it to these two ladies has made it even better.
Every year I make 8 New Year's resolutions. Most years they're very random, with little association to each each. Some years a few rhyme and this year is one of them where most, not all, but most are just about focusing on guarding the right junk. So there are people who've wondered why I've taken some of the opportunities I've taken and passed up some of the ones I've passed up... maybe some will argue this junkyard dog don't know no better. Maybe but just maybe we know how to keep chasing when needed, to protect what we know is valuable which we call home and where we see friends, strangers, passers by. Even if most people view it as heaps of garbage, we are guarding something that some some of us realize is forgotten treasures.
Beautiful!
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