Pets

People have asked me about the 13 year old girl I spoke of last week.  They’ve asked what she died of, what was her name.  Truth is, she was our family’s pet turtle, “B.”

Suzy loves turtles and after she and I had been dating a year I gave her B as a gift.  I was going off to Chiropractic school and we were about to begin a long distance relationship.  By this time we each knew we were going to get married, but had never spoke about it in the more personal sense.  So Suzy named her B, as a symbol of our love.

B lived with Suzy at UCONN for two years before we were married.  All of her friends marveled at her and how Suzy could keep a pet like that in her dorm room with such little space.  After we were married and moved to upstate New York, B and her new friend Spunky joined us.  One night while I was studying, I heard a loud clunking noise like I often did as the turtles bumped their shells against the glass of the aquarium.  But a few minutes later, I heard Suzy scream, then laugh.  I went out to the living room and found B crawling across the floor.  The clunking I heard was her falling out of the tank onto the counter and then again onto the floor.

Another time when we moved into our first apartment, I was cleaning the tank and had the turtles in the laundry basket by the back patio.  It was a very stormy night, thunder and lightning.  I finished cleaning and went over to pick up the turtles and B was missing.  We literally moved the entire apartment looking for her as she could have been hiding under anything.  We finally stopped looking after an hour or so.  We were so distraught to think that we had lost her.  I was staring out the patio door into the rain and lightning lit up the sky.  As it did, I saw something moving in the grass about fifty yards away.  Another bolt flashed as I got a fix on the movement… it looking like a moving rock.  Barefoot and half naked I ran out into the courtyard.  Another lightning crash lit my path as I scooped up B and ran back to the apartment.

I often find it amazing how we’ll do more for our pets than we will for ourselves.  It intrigues me how much love we pour out for them and how little we pour into our own lives.  They are the perfect example of what it means when we say that in order to live, we must die before we die.  We must die while we are alive and then we get to live while we are alive.  It simply means that we give up our self.  It means that we let go of all that we think matters, all of our possessions, all of our thoughts.  It means we stop placing value on things we think about and place value where it belongs… on love.  Our pets, more often than not, bring such love out of us.

Picture the world with people loving each other the way we love our pets.  Doing for each other what we do for our pets.

That’s Chiropractic.  That’s why I want your help in spreading the Chiropractic message of innate.  That’s what I mean when I say “drag them in against their will.”  Not with force, but with such love and compassion that they just follow you; even though they don’t want to, they have to.

And then both of your lives change for the better.