Handolf’s Reviews > The Art of Racing in the Rain > Status Update

I would like to tell you that I am such a master of my destiny that I contrived the entire situation, that I made myself crazy so Zoe could calm me on this trip, and thus would be distracted from her own agitation. Truth me told, however, I have to admit I was glad she was holding me; I was very afraid, and I was grateful for her care.

I marveled at them both; how difficult it must be to be a person. To constantly subvert your desires. To worry about doing the right things, rather than doing what is most expedient.

Such a simple concept, yet so true: that which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought in by none other than ourselves.

She wasn’t asking me. She was asking Denny, and I was merely Denny’s surrogate. Still, I felt the obligation. I understood that, as a dog, I could never be as interactive with humanity as I truly desired. Yet, I realised at that moment, I could be something else. I could provide something of need to the people around me.

And while I greatly resented the attention Eve lavished on her unborn baby, in retrospect, I realise I had never given her a reason to lavish that same attention on me. Perhaps that is my regret: I loved how she was when she was pregnant, and yet I knew I could never be the source of her affection in that way because I could never be her child.

But what I’ve always liked best is when he talks about having no memory. No memory of things he’d done just a second before. Good or bad. Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

My littermates and I were tussling around like we always did, and a hand reached into the pile and found my scruff and suddenly I was dangling high in the air.
“This one,” a man said.

It was my first glimpse of the rest of my life.