This post has nothing to do with photography, other than a failure at it.
I found Louie today. Louie is a husky I adopted from the Humane Society in the spring of 2014 and then reluctantly relinquished because he ran after our cats and I was afraid he was going to kill them, being a husky.
I’ve often thought that my life started going downhill when I gave him up. The cats were killed on the street in front of our house in short order after that, my photography business felt like it was taking off but then slowed and puttered, raising the kids became excruciatingly hard, and then at the end of the year my husband left and it all came together in a mass of pain.
Louie’s eyes were piercing blue, to the point of unbearable. He was exceedingly beautiful yet I could never make a good picture of him.
I didn’t keep him long enough to develop a bond with him, just long enough to fall in love with him. Not long enough for a good picture. Two days after relinquishing him I called to see if maybe I could get him back but he was gone already, adopted on the very first day, a prize pure bred in a house of mutts.
And then there he was as the kids and I walked on campus. I wouldn’t have stopped had Dylan not asked if he could pet the dog, a usual request. There he was, Louie with the piercing blue eyes, on the very same street where I used to walk him after dropping off the kids to their music lessons during the short time he graced our lives. It made me ridiculously happy, to see him again, to see that he was well taken care of, just to see that he was.
Maybe now I can take a good picture of him, like that of Chang but with the piercing blue eyes, and my joy in them.
Animals have that power over us, the power of grace, the power to remind us of that well of innocence creativity and wonder we all had as children, a drop of light we've long buried inside of us, smothered with our heart breaks, reality, the dirt we take on with the years, the beatings, that drop I'm after in each photograph, my holy grail, I found in Louie's piercing blue eyes.
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