LIVE, LOVE AND BE HAPPY

Those are the words I put in my high school yearbook, next to my photo, in my senior year's departure. I thought long and hard about that phrase. Many students put in the year book what they wanted to do, such as be a doctor, teacher, parent, etc. But not me. I thought to myself, what if I don't want to become any of those things. What if I decide what I wanted to be and never became that person. Because, you know, I never really knew what I wanted to become. All through my life I never had any guidance or parents that provided a good foundation for my education. They could have cared less about education. They were too busy working.

My older siblings dropped out of high school to work and gave my mother room and board, as did I. That was the way it was done in those days. We didn't even know we could sit around the house watching TV all day, then go with the rest of our friends who dropped out of school to do drugs, drink and have sex.

I did all of the things that were expected of me to be an honest, caring human being. I kept my nose clean of drugs, alcohol, jail, illegitimate children and being friends with the "lower class." Now, I'm not saying I'm Ms. Ladida, but I believe I led a pretty honest, hard working life.

Everyone has skeletons in their closet.

I've tried, during my lifetime, to not judge a book by its cover. And the other day, while driving between the rain storms we've been having here, was when I experienced the truth of that.

While stopped in lined up traffic, there was a man in a pickup truck ahead of me. He had a ponytail and sitting close to him was what I thought his girlfriend. But she was sitting way too close to him. As I further realized, this wasn't a girl, but a very large dog's head. As we both just sat in a line of traffic, he looks over at his dog, face full on and really close to the dog's nose, I could see he said something really lovingly as the dog just kept looking with a loving gaze into his owner's face one inch away, as if he understood what his owner was telling him. His owner then stopped talking, still gazing into his dog's face and scuffled his dog's head with his hand. At that time, the dog put his head on his owner's shoulder and the owner once again put his hand on the dog's head to keep the dog's head on his shoulder and gave him a loving hug. Tears came to my eyes. If we were at a place, such as a parking lot where I could have spoken to the gentleman, I would have approached him and told him what I thought of how cute that whole scenario was. There are some nice, loving, people in the world that care about their pets.

I have to change the channel every time I see those ads on TV about how human beings do bad things to animals and they show the pictures of these poor animals.

Here's hoping the new year will bring living, loving and happiness to all.