Well, I’m not one to get all weepy over a thing I’ve already mourned, but two things pertaining to our late pet Moby have made me want to post about him briefly again.

The first is that because our approach to photographing our lives has been irreparably damaged by the convenience of smart phones and the ubiquity of Facebook, so that we haven’t in a very long time used real cameras and carefully catalogued our photos in a useful way, I couldn’t find a photo of our pup when I wrote about losing him. I did recently come across a photo and wanted to put it somewhere easily searchable.

Somewhere we do have better pictures of him. There’s one of him as a tiny little guy biting hard on my nose. There are surely some of him running around in the yard. And I have recently seen one of him in a family photo in our backyard, tucked right in with the family as if we had been really good, attentive owners, but I don’t like sharing pictures of my kids in general, so I hadn’t posted that one. So here’s Moby at around Christmas in 2010. You can see a little cloud in his eyes, and he looks almost downtrodden and sad here. He had a sweet face and earnest eyes, however weird it sounds to describe a dog’s countenance in that way. The picture doesn’t really capture this.

The second thing I wanted to mention for my own future memory was a dream I had the other night. I dreamed that I was out in our yard, doing something under or near the deck, which is basically a death trap. Suddenly I looked up and here came Moby sidling up sheepishly, figuring he’d been a bad boy for staying away for so long. I think he may have been wearing one of the jaunty little bandanas that the groomers tended to put on him. The conclusion I drew in the dream — non-supernaturalist that I am — was that we had somehow mistakenly cared for and euthanized the wrong dog, that our Moby had simply gone AWOL somehow and left an unwell replacement behind. And so in the dream, I got my dog back. It was nice, but also sad.