As dictated to Kari Ann Owen, service dog “owner” and partner.
Dear Beethoven,
I am Kari Ann’s new service dog, a sixty-pound red Golden Retriever. You don’t mind, do you? She still needs help up the steps, and I have learned very quickly to go up and down slowly, listening to Kari Ann count in French, trying to live up to your bi-lingual skill. I know the meaning of “brassez,” and brace her at the top. We have gone together to a stage musical, to movies, to work at the riding stable, and to medical appointments. Kari Ann just had a painting on exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco and we both attended the opening.
Kari Ann is miserable without you, but I am trying to help. I do not leave her side during the day and sleep alongside her bed. I let that silly, fluffy marshmallow of a cat sniff me and rub against me and even kiss me, because it makes Kari Ann happy. Be honest: How did you put up with this?
Please accept deepest consolation on your unexpected death from drug-resistant pneumonia. Kari Ann still will not walk to the part of the huge back yard where you hid yourself as you were dying, and she cannot speak without crying about how she managed to get you, a very sick 165-pound Saint Bernard, down ten concrete steps and into her car.
She does talk a lot about your love of all people, and I try to emulate you every day. She talks about your love of children, and how you were abused by your first owner, the meth lab dealer who is now in prison. I know all about your participation in anti-drug education, and how you and Kari Ann would lead the kids in the San Pablo Library in taking the Beethoven Promise not to use drugs, chanting, “Meth equals death!” “Meth equals death!”
I was born into a loving family and given to Kari Ann by a breeder of Golden Retrievers, who also donated a very healthy, stubborn, and talented Western pony to her nonprofit therapeutic riding program. No one on that family’s twelve acres in Hollister has ever been abused – not person nor animal nor even flower. I can barely image how you must have suffered.
Are you happy in heaven, with Kari Ann’s husband and so many of her friends and relatives? She says she hopes you are rolling in fields of Swiss edelweiss in the shadow of the Alps, and that you occasionally enjoy rescuing angels in avalanches. We are doing all right down here, and I hope that although I am a new service dog, you are proud of me. I know it is impossible to fill your paw prints, but I do my best because Kari Ann needs me.
Your friend,
Cassie Rainbow, age 3
Kari Ann Owen is the Director of Wildhorse!, a therapeutic and abled horseback riding program in the Hayward Hills. She is currently writing a play about Bernard Madoff in Hell. View her website at www.kariannowen.com, which contains information about Wildhorse!, service dogs, and her many other passions. Kari Ann can be contacted at penomee@yahoo.com.
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