I forget, sometimes, how sensitive I can be.<\/p>\n
It was a lovely day, and I decided that I wanted to go for a walk for lunch. I wasn’t sure where I was going to end up, but I knew it would be far from the office, and I would probably get lunch whenever I got there.<\/p>\n
And since I have a mobile phone now, with a built-in camera, I took pictures of clouds. Yesterday, we had hurricane-like conditions. Today, we had many clouds, the air felt sharper and cleansed, and the colors of the world were more vibrant. I may upload some of these pictures to Facebook later. Or I may not.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I reached York Road, and since there was a Chinese place nearby that I visit like once a month, I thought I’d get some takeout and take it back to the office.<\/p>\n
So, as I waited while they fixed my lunch, I read Twitter on my phone.<\/p>\n
Andrew Sullivan had up a link to an article he’d just posted to his blog, “A Soldier and His Dog<\/a>.”<\/p>\n I read the text. A British bomb demolition expert had been killed by a sniper in Afghanistan, and his dog partner died of seizure — and, apparently, a broken heart because his master and partner wasn’t there to comfort him — a few short hours later.<\/p>\n Sullivan had a link in the article, but my lunch was ready, so I made a mental note to revisit this when I got back to the office.<\/p>\n Fifteen minutes later, I was back in my cubicle with its view of the rolling hills and the office parks, and I pulled up Andrew Sullivan’s blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n The first thing I noticed was that the article had an embedded video. My mobile browser (I use Opera Mini 5<\/a>) didn’t show me that.<\/p>\n I watched the video<\/a>. It was a news report on the funeral of Lance Corporal Liam Tasker. There was a detail there that Sullivan’s link didn’t mention; the funeral was also for Theo, the dog, whose ashes were repatriated back to Britain with his owner’s body<\/a>.<\/p>\n I was utterly devastated by this. I have no idea how many tissues or napkins I went through. I had no real desire to eat that lunch I’d hiked to buy. Watching the video was hard enough. Following Sullivan’s link<\/a> and reading the article there was more difficult. The pictures of the canine mourners<\/a> at the funeral procession are touching. Watching the video there<\/i> was wrenching.<\/p>\n It cast a pall over the next hour. I’m not sure the pall has entirely dissipated, either; writing this has, at moments, reduced me to a near-quivering mass. Things get past the defenses — which aren’t that strong or that deep to start with — and they turn me into a wreck.<\/p>\n Moving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I forget, sometimes, how sensitive I can be. It was a lovely day, and I decided that I wanted to go for a walk for lunch. I wasn’t sure where I was going to end up, but I knew it would be far from the office, and I would probably get lunch whenever I gotContinue reading “On the Moving Story of a Man and His Dog”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[766,4105],"class_list":["post-5677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-afghanistan","tag-news","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}