Frozen

 ***Rabbits, plinkity plink***

While walking Bernie seven or eight years ago, I came across a man down the street a ways. We talked for a minute, he mentioned his dog. She had died ten years before, "I still miss that dog every day." Yesterday, I started a book and within the first three pages, the author fondly recollected about a dog, one whom he misses. The dog died 40 years prior, and despite having several fantastic canine companions since, he still misses that one dog.

There are bunches of people whom I grew up with that I have not seen since we graduated high school. Others I saw sporadically through our college years, and there are only a handful I've spent time with post-college, since I moved far, faraway. Not frequently but regularly I have dreams about my hometown and the characters within. The people in those dreams, they are all still of school age, teenagers forever in my mind. There are times, relatively frequently, when I dream of someone I have not seen since grade school. Depending on who you are, you just might be one of these people.

I still dream about Bernie, how often I'm not sure but more than once a week. As I have said, there will be no other dog to me like Bernie, no matter how many I have in my life. I do think in 40 years I will still miss her, and I will still dream of her . . . me and her circa the 1990s and early millennium. Memories, fond ones, all frozen in time.