It's the process, not the outcome

She's turning 15 in a few months. She scratches too much, like a electric mixer gone crazy. Her face has turned white, as if she was, oh, say 75 or so -- which is what the seven human years for one canine year turns out to be. She's at least partially deaf, and she misses the thrown treat now most of the time and then has great gobs of trouble finding it on the ground.

But she's been there through it all for us and with us and it is going to be a great, great loss when she's gone.

But the doc says that won't be for quite some time because her heart is strong and she's healthy other than what ails her. I could have told him about the heart thing, for her heart has always been strong.

She's named Logan because in the year she was born, 2000, the X-Men movie came out, and our daughter Carrie (who was 12 at the time) liked the character Wolverine most in the movie. Wolverine's real name is Logan. Hence ...

Or maybe it's just the way her lips fold back when she growls, which she only does when she's protecting food, which is anytime she gets fed. In fact, food is her main if not only obsession. Getting a treat, which we do when the dogs go outside, will have her going outside every 15 minutes if she can get away with it.

I've written this story before, but it's the quintessential Logan story, so I must tell it again. When we evacuated for Hurricane Katrina, 10 years ago, we did so to my mother's house in the country. Other dogs and cats who left New Orleans with us didn't care for the culture shock of Lizelia versus New Orlean's west bank. But Logan loved it. Trees and grass and open fields were her cup of wet dog food. She ran and she ran and then ran some more.

I was petrified she was going to run off and get lost, because that's what humans do in unfamiliar territory. The fact she was a dog with a wonderful sense of smell didn't register. Anyway, one day she came up missing. I scoured the back pasture from a hill behind the house, and no Logan. I looked toward the tree line to the North of the house I grew up in, and no Logan. I looked beyond the barbed-wire South of the house, and no Logan. I walked around to the front of the house, and no Logan. Wait, wait. There she was, racing across the front pasture like her behind was on fire. I wondered for just a second what was going on, then I saw it. Three steps or so in front of Logan was a rabbit making like The Flash. I followed them with my eyes all the way across the front pasture, a quarter-mile or so, and the separation stayed the same. Logan never caught the rabbit, but never fell farther behind. I shook my head, walked back toward the house, and waited. A few minutes later, she came trotting up, breathing heavily and happily.

That was Logan, running everywhere she went, always three steps behind but never falling farther. And loving the process of the run as much as the success of the run. The journey, not the end of the journey, is what is important.

Last week she had surgery. She had a swollen ear caused by who knows what. She had had a couple lumps on her belly for a while that she loved to scratch at. I had read that probably meant cancer and I just didn't want to know so she hadn't visited the Vet about them. Not knowing is bliss, I figured. Turns out, they were cancer but the Vet could get all of them, or so he said.

We had a 150,000-mile repair job, removing the cancerous tumors and slicing into the ear so the fluid could bye removed, and she went on a series of antibiotics. For the second time I believe she had to wear a cone. It's been quite hilarious to watch Logan bang into everything in the world with that cone. So, she's deaf, partially blind and wearing a cone. But she's got wet food, in which we put the crushed meds, and because of that she's in dog heaven.

The point of all this?

Love came down to us all those years ago in a yellow mix of Terrier and Lab with a sawed off tail that is always wagging. She's been a joy for all these years, mixing the ability to persevere with the ability to find happiness in the smallest of things.

She's been running all her life. What she's running to, I do not know. I only know that she's running with joy, with purpose, without a care. It's the process, not the outcome, that keeps her young.

That'll preach, won't it?