Blind Wally and the Christmas Miracle

A couple of weeks ago, I was getting dinner together when the door bell rang. It was a lady who'd been out for a walk and had noticed a dog in our front yard. She wondered if he was ours. I am afraid I was rather emphatic that the dog DID NOT belong to us. "I think he's blind," she said sadly. In my infinite mercy for stray animals with life altering disabilities, I suggested she ask the people across the street if they recognized him. Then the husband went out to supervise our relinquishment of any and all responsibility for another stray beast. The neighbors offered to keep the dog in their back yard, because they are kinder than we, obviously. Then, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, I forgot all about the stray blind dog because I could. He wasn't in my back yard, you see.

So, five days later, the kids and I were walking to the park and we stopped at a red light to wait for our turn to cross the street. I saw a flier taped on the light pole. LOST DOG. I stepped closer, and saw "This is Wally. He is BLIND. Please call if you've seen him!" I made the kids get off their bikes and I called the number, leaving a message that Wally was (hopefully) in our neighbors' back yard. When we got home from the park, I saw a lady and a boy about Harper's age holding an empty leash across the street. She asked if I were Patti, then thanked me profusely and told me she had been grieving for five days, sure that blind Wally had come to a sad end. That she had given up hope. That she really saw this as a Christmas miracle. I'm just glad that, even though I hadn't sacrificed much, I got to play a part in the sweet reunion. There's a lesson embedded there somewhere, right?

What is not a Christmas miracle is that I still have not ordered my Christmas cards. We have one decent picture of all of us, and I can't make it fit into the one template (out of hundreds I perused) I decided is the only one I like. Then I asked the husband if we might just try to take another picture, this one more conducive to a square. And maybe he did or maybe he did not cuss. So then today when everyone was all gussied up for church I though maybe I could get a cute one of the kids by themselves and that would do. Well:





So, I'm off to the tiny prints web-site to make one last effort. I think I may have to cut off part of the husband's head, which, now that I think about it, is pretty emblematic of how he feels when we try to take a family picture. So, apropos.