My dog goes in the box, thank you.

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2010-02-03 Saturday

Getting home things have changed, my folks have plans to redo their patio covering the dry old grass with stonework. Under that dry ground in the summer and muddy nothing in the winter laid the only dog I ever loved.

Her name was Elsy Maria, a golden labrador retriever that by no means was a pedigree nor complied to the aesthetics required for any competition.

My mother gave me this dog when we had recently moved to this house in Guanajuato Mexico, we made a BbQ that night and i fed her a steak behind my dads back, I was 14 and she cried all night. Cries I could hear from my bathroom window. -so I whistled all night long till she fell asleep.

Knowing she would have to be relocated a team had to be put together;

Mario Josué Aguilar Méndez a Marine biologist and Bacteriologist. Father of one.

Christhoper Guillermo Sierra Garcia a Nurse. Father of two.

Both of them had a kick at discussing anatomy issues and found the details most exciting.

Being a saturday they both brought beer with them and the list begins:

1 X note pad

1 X pencil

3 X garden shovels

2 X Brushes

3 X dog bone structure schemes

1 X red plastic board

10 X beer

2 X pair latex gloves

2 X industrial gloves

1 X strainer (to find all the little bones)

4 X plastic bags

4 X big cups of coffee

1 X pair of scissors

10 X cigarets (for the scientists not me)

1 X cardboard box

and 4hours of a saturday.

This may sound like an excuse but the truth is that other cultures have rubbed off on me in a

way that stimulates introspective answers.

The Guanajuato mummies give a sense of direct comparison of who your looking at and who is

looking.

American mummies,(the two Iv encountered in the US), have really cool stories that could be told in any movie, song, or photographs and are treated as jewels. The excitement to sit and stare at them is something inspiring, some kind of afterlife rockstar with fascinating heritage, true or false, still inspiring.

The Peruvian Chiribayan mummies, a sense of perpetual access to the departed loved one.

This revisiting in a confrontational search with your own questions,

looking for wisdom within, honoring the eternal respect to the ones who only live in our memories.

Can and will solve the issues that the whole society required to be prosperous, but in this case its just me and thinking about the time I spent growing next to this old dog.

I put her to sleep the night of my welcoming party at my first year of uni, party that i never attended.

That night my brother called me with the news, she was infested with tumors and would be put down the next day. Knowing she had been very sick for the last month she was to suffer no more pain. Several thing happened that night that helped with the revisiting, like having her leash and tennis ball handy to bury them with her, and my mom giving me a sheet that was not 100% cotton kept all her bones together. We found them all.

Getting the vet to do us a favor at 10pm on a friday is an easy thing to do in Guanajuato, so we got it over and done with.

Currently she is in a box with Merengue the albino african clawed frog, her leash and tennis ball. Waiting to be boiled down with calcium and soap, to be mounted and displayed at the Veterinary school of the Universidad de Guanajuato.

Appendix: The story of Merengue.

After Elsy paste away I bought a fish tank, several low maintenance fish and a supposably pigmy albino frog. He was pigmy till he ate the fish, he was a he and sang with the humming of the fridge till he turned into a she.

A heat wave changed the temperature of the tank, and after 5 years hey floated belly up in the tank. In a drunken stupor at 5am I came home and put “it” in a jar and buried it on top of where i thought Elsy`s rib cage was.

The only memory I have is my mother blaming the dogs for making a mess in the yard, the day after. So much to my surprise I revisited two of my pets in one day.

Wee all feared that Dora, my brothers dog, would dig up the remains out of instinct. On the contrary , she slept on top of the grave for at least 6 months and did not want to know anything about the revisiting. It was a very odd situation for her and an introspective day for me.

"When I hear that trumpet sound I'm gonna get up out of the ground

aint' no grave gonna hold my body down

I looked way over yonder and what do you think I see?

I see a band of angels and they're coming after me"

Johnny Cash

(Now that would be scary, a Johnny Cash zombie)