This past Christmas, in my lack of enthusiasm for writing anything resembling a “what we’ve been doing” update, I instead wrote about something very real I was experiencing at the time: the disappearance of my hum. It’s been on my mind lately again, so I’m revisiting it.

“Hum” is how I describe a feeling that defies words; it’s a feeling, it’s a tone, it’s living life aligned with everything and walking to that…to that tune, I guess. Prior to Thanksgiving I was in the hum. It can be capricious but it has always been there for me, waiting for me to rejoin whenever I’ve been ready or able. Now that I think of it, it’s possible that my euphamism for this experience may have stemmed from a passage in Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple;” Celie, Sophia, and Harpo are sitting around a table at Sophia and Harpo’s home and have just, at Celie’s suggestion per their curiosity, smoked some “reefer.” As Sophia and Harpo strive to assimilate the experience of being a little stoned, one of them notices something they hear and calls it to the others’ attention. They all listen intently, and in the openess to the experience the marijuana has created, they all hear it. It is a hum. “What is it?” someone asks. “Everything,” Celie determines.

Exactly.

I lost my hum the day after Thanksgiving. It was a beautiful, sunny, windless day with no snow, and after having spent the morning having coffee together and just enjoying the sun coming through the windows and each others’ company, Paul and I went to the grocery store, where a quick trip for a few things was extended by a futile search on my part for a cake. I wanted  chocolate cake. Not just any chocolate cake, but one the store had sold in slices at the deli just two days before. I’d seen it, coveted it, but hadn’t bought a slice. Now I wanted one.  When it was clear no such luck was to be had, I let it go, we paid for our groceries and went home to our dogs.

At the time, we had seven. Izzy and Charlie and Tyler were ours. Tyler was newly adopted after having spent close to two years with us as a foster. I also had, as fosters, Lettie, Elle, Axel, and Lola.

We put our groceries away and decided to take a walk. The dogs were harnessed and leashed (all but Lettie, who is blind and frail), and we headed down the gravel road that runs by our home, heading East, and moving, I thought, like a well-oiled machine (walking six dogs at a time, even with two people holding leashes, is difficult and some of our walks do not go so smoothly).

To keep to the point of this post, and spare myself some tears, I’ll condense from here: a lone pickup turned from the highway to our gravel road; we saw it in plenty of time and got the dogs off the road, but at the exact moment the truck approached us, Tyler’s leash broke and he lunged up onto the road and under the wheels of the vehicle. He died in my arms minutes later.

I think if you know me or read my blog that you understand how much I love my pets. To Paul and I, pets are our family. They aren’t surrogate children and we don’t anthropomorphize them. We know they are animals, and we choose to value them for that. They live with us and share our lives and we have an emotional connection to them and they to us. Losing Tyler in such a horrific way was by far one of the worst experiences of my life; one I can still barely speak of or think about.

Tyler (Bobo) Hatlestad
Tyler “Bobo” Hatlestad

In the days, weeks, months after that day, not only do I miss my dog, but I miss the hum that went away with him.

I have always counted myself very fortunate. Lucky. I don’t have a lot of money; we live humbly, and I’ve had my fair share of hardship. But still. I love my life, or rather, I’m in love with my life. It makes me happy. It makes me feel charmed. Things usually go my way because I want them to…are you familiar with this feeling? I don’t mean that I wish I was something and then, kapow: I am. I just mean that although my life could be different, I am glad it is not. I feel I’m on the right journey, for whatever destination God or Creation has in mind.

But if a cherished life you’re committed to protect can be killed in an instant by a happening so uncanny in its circumstance it feels as if it were pre-destined…if your stalling hours earlier for only a few minutes over a piece of chocolate cake can inadvertantly bring about such pain…if something so awful can happen out of the blue on a clear fall day when all was well, with no premonitory conditions, with the sun shining warm on your face, and you can’t summon the power to make it unhappen…

what else can happen?

Suddenly, I feel so volunerable to fate. I feel so fragile. I’ve never considered myself so much a magical thinker as an embracer of what life brings to me. I look for lessons, but I have always thought I had some control over these lessons. That my intentions – my actions – brought forth these lessons. I’m not a Pollyana nor one of the authors of “The Secret,” but I certainly believe in the law of attraction. That what goes around, comes around. And now I feel liked a marked woman. What next piece of fate will smack me in the face and undo me, and what action did I take in the past that will bring it about?

I know it was an accident, and no one expects an accident. That’s why they’re accidents. I think that wake-up calls big or small knock us on our asses and tell us to get ready to have our eyes opened to change and possibility. I tell myself to feel fortunate. I know that I should. In my heart, I mourn a dog I miss as part of our family circle, but life goes on quite well and I have all that is required to be happy. I am blessed. I just want my hum back, but I’m afraid the tune will have changed. And I wonder how to live by a new song.