sad news

We must now interrupt your regularly scheduled film talk to deliver a special message:

My dog died tonight. Just a few minutes ago. She ran out in front of a car. Crazy little bitch.

She really is crazy. She's been totally hyperactive her whole life. She was particularly hyperactive tonight, I think, because she'd just gotten her conehead contraption off. She'd had surgery a couple of weeks ago and had to wear one of those little cone/funnel type things around her head, so she wouldn't mess with her stitches. She got the stitches out just yesterday - my sister and I took her to the vet together to get them taken out - so she got to have the conehead thing taken off, too. So, we all assume, she was feeling particularly feisty and ready to rumble tonight. So much so that she found a way out of the yard and onto our busy street (made extra busy by all that holiday traffic), so she could run around like crazy.

And she could run really fast - faster than a speeding bullet. She would always run in these little circles, out in the yard, not to go anywhere, really... just to run. Maybe even to see how fast she could go. She was a feisty little bugger, that one.

In retrospect, I feel like I could almost see it in her eyes... all that plotting, planning, waiting to get out and let loose, safety be damned. Little bitch.

She was so loving, though, too... most of the time. She was moody. She served all of our different needs, when she felt like it. One minute, she'd be roughhousing with Dad or me - she liked to play tug of war with little toys - the next, she'd be lying like a baby on my sister's lap, all still and angelic... and then the next, she'd growl at us if we even tried to touch her (sometimes, she just wanted her space).

She was a good little dog, though. The perfect dog. Her name was Hershey. It was partially a nod to her being the color of chocolate (or close to it, sort of a chestnut brown), and partially a riff on how she was a girl dog (the name being phonetically pronounced "her-she"). Anyway, we liked the name. It suited her.

I guess this makes sense, in a way. Only the good ones die young. I could never really see Hershey getting old. She was just too damn feisty, god bless her. Wouldn't settle for anything less than freedom.

Little bitch.

My friend Weldon has a phrase to describe situations like these. She would say that Hershey has been "liberated from bondage". This is the euphamism Weldon used for her less-than-moral decision to steal a shopping cart from outside a frat house, at a time when she was very troubled. "I didn't steal it," she'd say, grinning cookily. "I liberated it from bondage."

Hershey didn't die. She was liberated from bondage. As my mom reassured us, she didn't suffer. She was just doing what she loved to do. She loved to run. And she could run fast. She probably never even knew what hit her.

I do have a way to relate this to film, though... actually, the first thing I thought (after "ohmygod, what I was the one who left the gate open?") was how Hershey's final minutes reminded me of the ending in Thelma & Louise. Like them, she was liberated from bondage. Completely. Like the girls, liberated from the bondage of their dead-end lives, Hershey was liberated from the bondage not only of her conehead, but of her whole life. She was running in the wind, like a bird in flight. But there is a price to be paid for such freedom... a big price.

Rest in peace, Hershey. We'll miss you.