God

No love. No mercy.

No love. No mercy. Nothing but my loud and sickeningly ugly and monstrous whims.

I call it pinhead atheism. If there’s a God, he’s a cruel idiot because we know better what he should be doing. God as asshole.

The Muslims have the market cornered on this kind of divinity. Why, I think, the secularists and atheists are so protective of Islam. Allah is the poster child for god haters. As long as Muslims are stoning rape victims, erasing the identities of their wives and daughters, murdering gays, and blowing up everyone who disagrees with a permanent state of theocratic tyranny, they are the best possible argument against religion of any kind. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. No other major religion on earth has such a vicious, vindictive, violent, and vengeful god or pantheon. No other religion is starting or trying to provoke religious wars. But the American left, led by Obama, can’t find enough excuses for Islam’s unending list of contemporary crimes. How convenient. How clever. How seditious. How erudite and elite of them.

What they like most of all is that Allah is simply a different incarnation of the God of the Old Testament. They tell the same stories. Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac fathered the Jews, Ishmael the Arabs. Same family tree, right? If the one is completely fucked, the other must be, too. The same way all three brothers in the Rahm Emmanuel family are evil, foul-mouthed pricks. Nobody as perfect as the mythical Jesus could have emerged from THAT gene pool.

What gets left out, of course, is that God may still be playing to the low information voters none of the smart people care about. It’s not like low information voters have ever folded their tents and slunk away. In the case of the U.S., certain of the low-information crowd have actually managed to gain control of the dialogue.

Why an amazingly primitive metaphor might still work. The God of the Old AND New Testaments is the Harlem Globetrotters. Allah is the Washington Generals.

Perfect, isn’t it? The post-modern egalitarian relativists think the Washington Generals are equally entitled to, well, everything. Just because they always lose doesn’t mean they’re disposable.

Except that they are. Disposable, I mean. Of course they are. The Washington Generals exist only as a silly opposing force to the Harlem Globetrotters. Islam? It’s only a silly if incredibly violent, murderous, and oppressive opposing force to Christianity. The Isaac-Ishmael connection is key. By choosing Ishmael, Muslims have turned the meaning and intentions of God on their head.

The Jewish tradition led to law, morality, civilization, and ultimately to a compassionate culture which demarked a difference between faith and state. The Muslim tradition led to conquest, genocide, and religion AS state AND law. Sharia. With innumerable death penalties and unspeakable non-lethal cruelties besides. The Muslim tradition may have had a few brief moments of brilliance in the past, but there is no Muslim Shakespeare, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Bach, Pasteur, Mozart, Voltaire, Locke, Jefferson, Lincoln, Mark Twain, Einstein, or Gershwin.

Islam is not the hoped for example of the evils of religion. It is a vivid and shockingly obvious example of religion faked by an aggressive, malicious tyrant.

I’m a writer. All I am, really. The one thing I can tell you for sure: the Koran is phony scripture, copied from the Bible by people of lesser talent. Its structure sucks, its imagery is imitative where it’s not nonexistent. It’s more like a badly executed writing assignment foisted on an untalented staff of political toadies than a work of, uh, divine revelation.

Find me anything in the Koran that reaches the poetic heights of Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs, Mark, or John. Nothing. It’s all pedestrian, mediocre drivel elevated only by its pretensions.

And the God that is Allah is, uh, a God upside down, cast in darkness from above and lit only from underneath, by the adoration of death minded followers.

I can only wonder why nobody else has ever stated these obvious facts.

Upside down or upside up? You tell me.

Upside down or upside up? You tell me. But which of us is lit from above? Actually, there’s a right answer to this one. It hangs on the wall at the end of my upstairs hall. The light from above is a chandelier. THIS is right side up.

Preview

Can't bear to open my eyes to the extent of the perfidy. The me of this site. At 60 I desperately want to believe in goodness.

Can’t bear to open my eyes to the extent of the perfidy. The me of this site. At 60 I desperately want to believe in goodness.

I wanted so much to get away from politics. Shades of Godfather 3. I keep getting drawn back in. I’m working on a big new post at the other site. Could take me a couple of days because it’s SO big.

Maybe I’m just kidding myself. Ultimately, there’s a reason why some are deerhounds, seeming dumb but somehow dangerous. You know. The concept of the elemental, ancient, and savage.

My plan had been a post here about azaleas. Now I’m back to Raebert at his most unpredictable, meaning, of course, at his most predictable. I don’t want to be. But I’m still that guy. Forgive me.

Problem is, I know exactly what’s going on, what’s wrong, and how wrong it is.

At one level it’s idiotically simple. But people never believe simple. They want subtle, complex, and sophisticated. The people who understand the wisdom of idiotically simple will know ahead of time what I’m working on. The people who need sophisticated, clever, and slick will have to wait. That takes time. Even for idiot deerhounds.

I hate it when he gets like this.

I hate it when he gets like this.

But I still have to be the other guy. Somebody has to.

But I still have to be the other guy. Somebody has to.

Somebody tweaked me, not wholly unfairly: Don’t Close Your Eyes. Out of context but not out of the ballpark. Well, not altogether anyway. I’m a fan of Keith Whitley. Elemental, savage, and doomed. Affinity is destiny. In some respects. Then again, there’s always hope. The more things stay the same, the more we triumph. Not everyone gets saved, but life has always been a fatal proposition. And, you know, if you can’t believe in God, how can you possibly believe in breasts?

Sorry. I guess that would be one more vulgar Scottish philosophical observation. Not Kantian at all. The Germans and the Russians have done so much to advance philosophy. Marxism. Nazism. Objectivism. I prefer to believe in breasts. Which I try to keep in check by believing first and foremost in Christianity. Although a hand on a female breast is the closest any of us males ever get to God.

Why my eyes remain closed.

Until Shane returns tomorrow or the next day. At the other site.

Strict Google Search

Orteil du Chameille.

Orteil du Chameille. French. Cool. Translate.

Not trying to shock anybody. I thought the Gosnell trial would end today as a kind of Mother’s Day message. It didn’t. From what the jury has asked of the judge, it looks as if they haven’t even gotten to the Gosnell charges yet. Still dealing with the flunkies, factotums, and stooges who propped up this charnel house.

There’s been other relevant news. Cher’s mom shared that she was sitting in a chair in an abortion waiting room when she decided she couldn’t go through with it. That’s the micro. At the macro level, we have word of a virulent new strain of gonorrhea, completely resistant to antibiotics, that can kill people dead in days. While we continue to make it easier and easier for girls to get morning after pills with no parental knowledge or consent. The important thing above all being that they simply must be free to fuck to their heart’s content. Which serves who exactly?

Libertarian, right? Progressive. Post-Christian modernism, right? Right?

We’re all just supposed to accept that our precious daughters, whom we’d do absolutely anything to protect unless the government disapproves, are being taught to have sex as soon and often as possible. Institutionally approved sex education is about how, not if, or, perish the thought, how not.

So don’t take the link I’m offering. It’s not about any four letter word. And it’s filtered by Google’s “strict” setting. Meaning it’s not explicit or even moderately offensive. It’s harmless, well in line with acceptable cultural norms, whatever they are. But guess what. It gives us a portrait of our daughters. Not all, but way too many. And even your virtuous daughters are friendly with these girls, texting them and learning from them. Ignore me if you prefer. But this is what the millennial generation of young women has become. Staggering percentages of them have sexually transmitted diseases. So much so that antibiotics are simply ceasing to work. Many of them are going to die before they even get to an abortion mill.

The Link.

The so-called smart people want you to turn a blind eye. No man can. Every man knows how provocative this is. When will you stand up and say no? Ever?

Or do we just love NASCAR?

We just love racing.

We dig racing. Deeply.

Two Bad Moments

I did nothing. Noth-ing.

I did nothing. Noth-ing.

We went to the vet today. Bordatella shots for all the dogs because we’ll be going away at some point in the next few weeks. The hardest thing for my wife to understand about deerhounds is that they aren’t just bigger, hairier greyhounds. So we had Raebert, Molly, and Eloise in the office all at once, transported in two cars no less. Everything was cool. A vet tech leaned over the gate and said mirthfully, “And a partridge in a pear tree.”

Then a cranky old male golden lab came in and looked crosswise at Raebert. Who said something back. Something Scottish. My wife was horrified. We shushed him. He subsided. He’s twice everybody’s size, you see. No hint of aggression can be tolerated. But he knows that because he’s a smart boy. Why he got A’s in obedience school, even if he forgets his manners now and again.

Then they’d had their shots and I took the sighthounds out to the car while my wife did the business part with Eloise in tow. But no sooner had we reached the top of the steps than we saw, at the bottom of the steps, a gorgeous young Swiss Mountain dog. He took one look at Raebert and did that aggressive male bark we’ve all learned to recognize and dread. “Who. And. What. The. Hell. Are. You?”

Oh God, I’m thinking. You really really don’t want to know. We had an escape route. A ramp, a 40 ft detour to avoid the steps. I led Raebert and Molly down the slick first half, and the slicker second half in the opposite direction. Raebert was absolutely cool. Molly was only a little frantic, the way she always is at the vet’s.

I didn’t tell my wife right away that the ramp caused the leashes to get fouled and when I went to put them in the car Molly got out of her collar because Raebert had his leash wrapped around him to the point no one but Molly could move. “Molly, stay,” I commanded. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Why I was able to slip the collar back on her while I belatedly stood on Raebert’s loose leash. Everything under control except my heart…

“What a gorgeous Swissie!” my wife told me when she returned with Eloise.

I’m just reporting here. Raebert didn’t go all Braveheart on anyone and Molly didn’t bolt like a deer into the trafficky suburbs. Total victory. And Eloise was a little angel for the whole ride up and back.

Why my weekend is already a complete triumph.

Gun Control Logic

Breitbart's small type super-header was "Beauty fades, dumb is forever."

Aussie supermodel. Enough said. Breitbart’s small type super-header was “Beauty fades, dumb is forever.”

No, she’s not one of our pets. Izzie would violently protest being so upstaged. But she is an eloquent symbol of the post-Newtown gun control frenzy.

How many of you know that since the repeal of the Reagan era assault weapons ban, gun crime has fallen steadily for two decades, including school shootings?

Now for my new hyper-linking skill. Here’s a rundown, with more links to multiple persuasive graphs, of the latest numbers on gun crime, courtesy of Pew and The Bureau of Justice Statistics, neither of which are known NRA stooges.

Now you’re free to transition to official mother worship mode.

Get her flowers, take her out to dinner, or better yet brunch (they prefer it), and dote on her every word. Just don’t let her tell you that we should start junking the constitution because she thinks guns are scary.

Not that they all do. But too many do. She deserves better than to be patronized. Make her think. What we all owe those we love.

The Conservative Terminator

Grunt

I feel obligated to recognize Sean Hannity. I don’t know about you. I get tired, despairing, hopeless at times, and I hate having to make the same old arguments again and again even though I know hardly anyone remembers anything for more than ten minutes, let alone ten months or ten years.

Remember Terminator 2? When Sarah is watching her son with Ahnold? She’s amazed to discover that he’s probably better for her son than the men she’s known. She observes that he’ll never get tired, never get impatient, never stop following his programming, never lose his temper and go nuts.

I listened to Rush today. His mood is like mine. Not trying to depress anyone, he said. But he was saying what I said yesterday. Nothing in the Benghazi hearings will make any difference whatever. He was grim. He was tired of explaining the reasons and the lessons. He knew he was being depressing. But he had to vent.

Fast forward to Hannity. Same old same old. He’s never ever ever tired of reciting all the history, all the lessons, all the hypocrisies, all the nonsense most of us can’t even bear to think of. He does it very like an automaton, reeling off all the precedents, wickedness, and despicable lefty behavior that makes current liberal posturing so ludicrous. Amazing. As a guy who writes about what’s going on, I have to say that his never getting tired just seems impossible.

So I take my hat off to him. He’s on the Benghazi case again tonight. Tirelessly. He even reminded me of the comparison that has to be made between Benghazi and the Valerie Plame affair. Relentless press after a scandal that never existed versus the no press coverage of a scandal worse than Watergate. I covered the Plame Affair myself. He’s right. And fatigue is no reason to stop being passionately outraged.

Sean is annoying, funny, and maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But he’s necessary and on days like today I admire him.

What’s the story with Hillary?

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

Looking for some help here. Has anyone else noticed that the Democrats don’t have any young’uns on the bench? The two supposed front runners for the 2016 nomination are Biden and Hillary. Who are both, uh, old. Come the 2017 inauguration, Biden will be 75 and Hillary will be 70. As first-termers. The rest of the Democrat leadership is similarly, uh, old. Right now, Harry Reid is 74 and Nancy Pelosi is 73. Younger Dem stars like Anthony Weiner and Jesse Jackson Jr. are usually either disgraced or in jail. And their women are, without exception, drabs, dykes, or dingbats. Elizabeth Warren. Kathleen Sebelius. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Barbara Boxer. Janet Napolitano. Sheila Jackson Lee. Claire McCaskill. Maxine Waters. Elena Kagan. Sonia Sotomayor. Mayor Bloomberg. Barbara Mikulski. Twinks or toads all.

Toad

No wonder the Dems went a little crazy and thought they might nominate airhead movie star Ashley Judd to run for the senate in Kentucky. I mean, if you’re the party of Hollywood, celebrity, and the glamour of unbridled hedonism, you should have at least one sexually attractive invitee to the party, shouldn’t you? But she couldn’t even leave Tennessee long enough to press flesh in Kentucky. And her only (and every) political metaphor was rape. Bye, Ashley.

Which leaves Hillary. Who’s actually more celebrity than statesman when you think about it. She pretty much sucks at both politics and governance. The 2008 nomination was absolutely hers to lose. She lost it. As Secretary of State for a president who despised her she was given practically nothing to do. And she still managed to pull off one of the biggest, most appalling and humiliating blunders a Secretary of State ever presided over in real time crisis mode.

She’s a housewife with a law degree and a nasty personality who nevertheless still basks in the reflected charisma of her morally loathesome husband, who is the only remaining star in the Democratic firmament. Until he keels over from a Viagra overdose.

They tell us that Democrats are the party of young people. Really? Really? Their future and the dreams they presume to offer are all locked firmly in the middle of the last century. They’re a joke.

So how desperate is it that the liberal political and media establishment will commit every kind of fraud, perjury, and moral negligence to preserve the career of this arid, corrupt ideologue?

As I said, give me some help here.

PS. And, yes, our pug Eloise IS beautiful. Far more than any other female named in this post. So there.

So who is Robert Whitcomb?

Buckeyes! What do I know from Dartmouth? Thinking we'll win anyway. Boss says so. He cuts the grass. It'll be good.

Buckeyes! What do I know from Dartmouth? Thinking we’ll win anyway. Boss says so. He cuts the grass. It’ll be good.

Blasted him at the other site. Why?

Remember I talked about old friends who really aren’t?

He’s an executive editor of the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. I have no doubt that he’s a good man as he conceives it. He was a good friend to me when I needed one, way back in my teens. I was at his wedding. A fine Episcopalian event on the Main Line. He’s one of the elect.

Smart. Privileged. Graduate of Taft School, Dartmouth, and the Columbia School of Journalism. Best friend of his fellow Taft grad Arthur Waldron, who was the valedictorian of his class at Harvard and is today one of the leading experts on China in the United States.

How dare I diss him? Because. Because he’s an idiot.

He accomplished the exact opposite of Winston Churchill’s definition of intelligence. If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no brain. When I knew him in college, he was a conservative. Now he’s a Rhode Island liberal, once challenged, ready to brand me a coward, a fool, and a reactionary.

Sadly, not even the privileged are immune from personal pain. Robert has a daughter in pain. Which makes him believe that the government should pay for all our health care. We clashed over ObamaCare. His highly intelligent argument was, why shouldn’t we try it? Really? Because it will bankrupt us and destroy the lives of millions of real people?

Oh wait. Robert knows nothing whatever about real people. He’s never met any. In the U.S., he’s lived his life in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Rhode Island. Ring any bells? He’s also affiliated with the Aga Khan. Supposed to make us feel respectful.

I feel bad for him. I feel sorry for him. I won’t go into the personal matters that cause him so much pain. I understand pain. BUT…

He’s a journalist. An influential one. And he’s done absolutely nothing to cover the Obama administration in any way that’s different from what the New York Times also doesn’t do.

Hence my contempt. If you have all the advantages, you have an overwhelming duty to be better than the usual suspects. What has he done? Nothing. Absolutely, completely, utterly, nothing.

He’s become a septuagenarian Ivy clubbie. Could he write if he wanted to? Yeah. You know. Not great. But correct, workmanlike if not lyrical, and convincing if he’d ever had a mind to.

What I said about the trajectories of life. He’s a success in career terms. He’s the biggest failure I know.

Look him up. I miss him. And I also don’t much care anymore.

PS. Here’s the front page of today’s Providence Journal. Unless you’d prefer their website.

Unfinished Business

Patrick. He stood up for the puppy Psmith. Big Time. He weighed 80, the bully 90. First time I heard Patrick growl. Only time. Bully hid behind mommy's pants. The daddy was mortified.

Patrick. He stood up for the puppy Psmith. Big Time. He weighed 80, the bully 90. First time I heard Patrick growl. Only time. Bully hid behind mommy’s pants.

Another thing that’s different about this site. When I realize I’ve left some of my slip showing, I feel obliged to admit it.

So I did a lyrical post on greyhounds. Mentioned a boy named Patrick. I buried my grief at his loss because my wife thought it was verging on ostentation. Like I missed him more than she did, which was patently untrue. There were more greyhounds who needed rescuing. I conceded and got with the program. How we got Andrew.

But why did I get so cranky with everybody yesterday? With Lake and my wife in particular? They loved and praised my post, and I nevertheless gave them both hell. The answer is Patrick.

I loved that boy. More than I can say. It spilled out in text messages to my friend Lake. I criticized his comment. He offered to pull it, aware that I was on a tear. I said:

“No, I don’t want you to pull it. I was disappointed. I keep forgetting about different strains of Christianity. My point was that greyhounds ARE angels sent to help us. Your immediate interpretation was that those of us who help them are good Christians who condescend to help helpless animals. I just thought you’d catch my drift.

Patrick was giving my dying mother communion, and I think she knew it.

I was so devastated by the death of Patrick that my wife told me to stop it. She had to move on. So I tried to forget him. He never licked me once. But we had a nonverbal bond. I hugged him and he swelled. He was as important to me as Psmith and Raebert. In a fraction of the time. He never said a word.

Dogs are also creatures of God. There is no convincing story of human civilization that doesn’t depend on dogs. In many ways they are our moral superiors, altruistic and loyal beyond human understanding. But there’s a rumor out there that they have no souls. Your interpretation of my post leads me to believe you share that view.

I believe… I believe that a huge part of what Pat brought me was the experience of sight hounds. I grew up with shepherds, terriers, smart, smart, smart, and interestingly, in my earliest youth, Irish Setters, now mythologized for their dumbness, which is supposed to transcend their beauty. (Just a mention for Irish Setter Katie… Smartest dog I ever even heard tell of.)

Smart dogs reinforce human superiority. Is this the best they can do? Great. So dogs are all stupider than us and we feel smarter. Dumb dogs are different. The smartest woman I ever met was engaged with what I’d been taught were the dumbest dogs ever. And she was entranced.

Education. The smartest woman I ever met was also a skeptical, truculent Catholic. She had a way with her dumb dogs and feral cats.

Since then, what? She made it her business to make all my dreams come true. In every realm. In the animal realm she learned that I had had a Bengal cat who died young. She got me a new Bengal. We still have her, and she’s a joy to both of us.

She learned that I had a fantasy about Scottish Deerhounds because I had seen a picture of one on the Internet. She arranged to get us one.

His name was Psmith and he lived and died with us.

She already had greyhounds. Two of them. Why she was willing to step up to a deerhound, which is a whole other order of commitment. She saw that I was the one who brought her male feral cat out of his shell onto my lap, and she knew we could do this whole spiritual adventure together.

Since then, we’ve been through heaven and hell. We’re too old to have babies. We have cats and dogs instead. What we prefer. And, yes, we have grand kids, but that’s an old and predictable story. What’s not predictable is the shafts of light we get from dogs and cats. Which are stupendous. Raebert is way way smarter than he’s supposed to be. His paw is articulate all on its own. Molly thrives. THRIVES. Is this a reward? Or just an exception? Our pug is not fat, our Bengal is not impossible, and of our two feral cats, one is the coolest man in the room. Then there’s Elliott. Think of him as the Daniel Craig of cats.

Maybe I should post this. But I don’t want to jump up and down on you. My sense is, you just don’t get it. Please tell me otherwise.”

Lake, being the man that he is, saw unexpressed grief rather than insult and said, “Post it. I get it.”

So I just did. What grief looks like. Sometimes ugly, always bloody. But the beat goes on.

I'm 11. God's gift to Pat and Robert. I can still outrun that ratty-ass Raebert.

I’m 11. God’s gift to Pat and Robert. I can still outrun that ratty-ass Raebert.

Losing Greyhounds

She steals my place on the couch and she walks on me a lot. I put up with it because she's Molly.

She steals my place on the couch and she walks on me a lot. I put up with it because she’s Molly. I have the inside track on Cheetos too. She lunges before she makes nice. I just look wistful and stricken.

Our own grey, Molly, is fine, so this is not that kind of report. But the people who rescue racing greyhounds after their track days are a community, partly geographical, partly evangelical, and wholly devoted. We frequently know the others in our area who also have greys, and often the others are people who persuaded us to rescue in the first place, while just as often they’re the people we’ve persuaded to follow this unique path.

Why, when one is lost to age or disease, we feel it especially keenly. This happened to us over the weekend. Friends of ours had to put one of theirs down. We know how they feel because we’ve been there. It’s a common end for greys and it’s hardly ever “in the fullness of time.”

The breed is in many ways distinct from all others. They are purebreds who have been massively overbred as livestock in service to a legal, profitable industry, dog racing. All the rescues have birthdate tattoos in their ears, like cattle. Which is how most have been treated since birth through their racing years, raised without human affection or even human interaction.

Indiscriminate breeding of purebreds also leads to multiple genetic predispositions to disease that plague many purebreds but can be guarded against in many breeds by scrupulous breeders. As a result, greyhounds suffer inordinately from cancer. They have, almost all of them, bad teeth. And because of their extreme physical traits, no body fat, incredibly compressed digestive systems and leg bones, they are unusually prone to grievous limb injuries and death by bloating.

My wife and I have had four greyhound rescues. One died of bone cancer, and we were present for the euthanasia. Even the vet wept. One died very suddenly of liver cancer. A third died because we foolishly allowed another vet to remove all but four of his rotten teeth; he declined with extraordinary rapidity, and we will never consent to that treatment again.

Why am I telling you this? The rescue spiel is supposed to begin with the good things and mention the bad as a kind of asterisk or footnote the good hearted need to know. It’s not. It’s part of the deal in virtually every instance.

I’m telling you because it’s all worth it, every bit of it, even if you’re not some kind of determinedly self-sacrificing altruist. Something even we need to remind ourselves of when worse comes to worst.

A rescue acquisition is carried out like some kind of drug deal. Two cars rendezvous in the remote corner of a mall parking lot. The foster parents — the real saints who take them directly from the track and screen them for the small animal aggressiveness that coincides with a predator who runs 45 mph in pursuit of a fake rabbit — pull up in a modest compact car and you exchange tentative greetings, both of you feeling each other out, before they open the rear door and introduce you to the “package,” a full-grown dog who has never had a puppyhood or a human relationship that didn’t end in sudden disappointment.

I remember when we got Andrew, the fosters were apologizing that he might be difficult to extract from their back seat because he was so timid and shy of men in particular. I leaned into the car and grasped his leash. He looked at me and came out of the car immediately. I turned in the direction of our car and he led me to it without a backward glance. I opened the door and he clambered in. He was going home.

Believe me, I’m not presenting myself as a dog whisperer. There’s a spiritual aspect to the greyhound experience. Somehow dogs are supposed to be with human families and they have a sense of this that survives even the most extreme deprivations. I think Andrew just knew that his family had finally come for him, and he’d been waiting for them all this time.

When I was courting my wife, she already had a greyhound named Sonny who was notoriously timid with men. I never saw it. He was like, “Oh, YOU’RE finally here,” and within a week or two of that first introduction, we went to a thing called a greyhound meet where dozens of rescue people bring their dogs for a day of schmoozing in the open air. The people make each other’s acquaintance, though the dogs don’t have to. Greyhounds know each other as members of the same breed in a way I’ve never seen with any other breed, except possibly deerhounds. They hang their heads over each others’ necks and there’s never any barking or confrontation. You see one small woman with five greyhound leashes in her hand, and her dogs aren’t pulling her off her feet; they’re just visiting with the others, including the multiple amputees who seem to move as easily as the rest of them.

Sonny, though, was also timid about crowds — all those humans — and he clung to my leg as if we’d been practicing “heel” for months and months. He couldn’t even bring himself to eat a hotdog. But he had chosen me as his anchor for the day. He was the one I had to watch, a scant time after, put to sleep to end the great pain of his final illness.

When you see a greyhound in profile against strong sunlight, you can actually see the sun through the skin, tendons, and bones of their legs. They’re translucent. Light is their thing. People talk about their speed, which is an order-of-magnitude faster than most breeds considered quick and even marginally better than other sight hounds, which is saying plenty. Second only to cheetahs among land animals. But it’s not the speed of light. That’s reserved for their vision. Which is superior to ours. Our greyhounds can be outside, behind a chain link fence in their necessary enclosure, in the first light of dawn, and see you standing behind the bay window a hundred feet away watching them. They look at you and see you.

Which is the answer to all the questions about why you’d involve yourself with this problematic and assailed exotic. They look at you and they see you.

Forget all the marketing truisms, which are nevertheless true. They are mild mannered couch potatoes. They have a penchant for stuffed toys, which they actually seem to adopt. They like cushions and pillows, which they arrange in curious ways, just as they enmesh themselves in odd folds of blankets and comforters. They have to be taught how to walk up and down stairs, even though they’re the greatest extreme athletes in the canine world. They are continuously, gravely affectionate (not much licking but they love strong hugs), undemanding, and almost automatically housebroken, because their early lives left them outside so often it’s the place where they know to pee and poop.

Forget the mandatory mentions of their failings. Without puppy experience with humans, they have rotten table manners. With their great noses, they know what food you’ve got nearby, had two hours ago, and are thinking about now. They would like all of that food, please, even though their diets have to be incredibly strict. (A contradiction, though. They’ll steal unattended food. But when it’s offered as a treat, they’re gentle to the point of delicacy — even the giant hairy barbarian uber-greyhound Raebert.) They don’t learn tricks easily. Even sitting down like all good dogs do is a fake with them. Their rear ends are never planted on the ground, only poised on feet that are ready to hit top speed in three strides. Hardly anyone ever calls them intelligent. (Although owners of greys have learned that term is relative; they could never be police dogs, seeing eye dogs, bomb-sniffing dogs, cadaver dogs, watchdogs [forget it!] or anything involving 9 to 5 hours and human definitions of utility; yet as therapy dogs, they are sublime.) You can’t ever let them off the leash without a fence because you’d get three seconds of glorious speed and never see them again; they can’t find their way home. And back home on the warm couch, when they haven’t SEEN you in too long a while, they whine.

But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? They see you and they know you. Their love is a gift of light. Having a greyhound in your family is like having a unicorn. An impossible, oxymoronic miracle of the universe. They need you deeply but have no need to possess you. They have a kind of focused violent strength that’s hard to believe until you experience it. I was once walking Sonny’s bro Patrick in my mother’s back yard when he spotted a real rabbit across the street. He was at full speed before he reached the end of the leash. Almost yanked my arm out of the socket. I wailed “no,” and he stopped cold. “Sorry,” as he meekly returned for a single Cheeto from my mother’s hand.

And, yes, they love children, form strong emotional relationships with cats, and love to go for long satisfying walks without needing to work out with weights and track shoes, er, ever.

When they die, you always die a little too. That’s a fact. Rescue owners all have a trail of souls that feel like lost children. But it’s a direct answer to the universal question of suffering. How do we humans ever get to experience the existence of a hummingbird, so beautiful and so remote from our own ability to perceive?

Dogs are one of our direct channels to the divine. Greyhounds are the canine version of hummingbirds. Translucent wings, mysterious otherness, and the proof that human love matters in even this ephemeral realm. I don’t know what angels are. But I saw the look in my failing mother’s eyes when Patrick took a Cheeto oh-so-gently from her hand, just one before lying down quietly, and came back hours later, as if on a schedule with her naps, for the same communion. Communion given or received, your call. But I saw her smile.

Patrick. You’d never have guessed him for a soft touch. I used to call him the Schwarzenegger of greyhounds. His muscles had muscles. He led every race he ever ran for the first hundred yards. I had to carry him to the end of his final one. I’d do it again a hundred times for having the privilege of knowing him. I do believe he was my mother’s last love, though she knew him in only the final few weeks before her death. She was the one who told me, way back in my childhood, that greyhounds were just dumb. I’m glad she finally got to experience their eloquence. A gospel in the simple taking of a Cheeto.

As I said. Greyhounds. Worth every bit of the inevitable heartbreak of loss.