Not a Zero in Life: John Skoyles wrote a beautiful editorial (Boston Globe, Monday, December 21, 2009 link below) entitled “Pawing her way into my heart.” My heart ached and I cried at the end of it for the little bull dog runt-of-the-litter pup Mr. Skoyles embraced despite the blindness and other severe orthopedic disabilities with which the dog named Zero, was born. She could not see and barely walk but she tried and he stuck with her until the dog’s body couldn’t suffer anymore.

I could relate to orthopedic disability being a polio victim since age five. Now at 61, paralysis plus the cursed reality of aging, severely compounds my ability to do what I always wanted to since a child – dance, run, skate and ski. I marvel at the birds whose mighty wings catapult them to places about which I can only dream and envy my cats whose run is like a prance of lithe beauty with swift speed climbing trees and, best of all, they never seem to fall. How I wished and still do I could dance, run, skate, ski and most especially never fall.

The end of the article, though, touched me the most. John Skoyles says of his deformed and pain-plagued runt-of-the-litter bulldog named Zero“I could only think she never seemed meant for this world, and I recalled the hunchback’s words when he hugged the gargoyle along the ledge of the cathedral, ‘why was I not made of stone, like thee’?” I can relate to the harshness of life with its physical pain when one wishes, at times, to be even an inanimate object rather then face the pain a body not of one’s choosing can inflict.

Zero may have been the little pup’s name because of a white zero-like tuft of hair on her back. She was, however, anything but a zero in life despite the short one she lived.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/12/21/pawing_her_way_into_my_heart/