Mourning Dogs

The morning after Moky died, I made a single phone call to a neighbor - a woman about my age whose family has been close to ours for a long long time. In what seemed like an instant, there were four women in the kitchen with my sister and me, drinking coffee, laughing, eating bagels, sniffling - someone called it "sitting shiksa".

The day after the memorial party, my brother and my sister and four of the grandchildren and I went for a walk down to the water, where the little people turned over rocks looking for crabs.

We're not Jewish. We don't sit shiva. But somehow, our walk to the bay was like what Jews do at the end of the shiva, a walk around the block to signify a return to daily living.

On the way back, we saw a lost dog sign plastered to a telephone pole. Moky would have liked the sign, and I believe she'd have assumed that the dog ran away because his owner is grammatically and punctuationally challenged:

Missing dog
Dogs name is jack
Problem is he is afraid of
people, so if you see him
call me at...

Or maybe his owner's a poet.