30 Days of Blogging, Day 30: A letter to yourself at 20

We're at the finish line!  Thank you everyone who has read this past month's worth of blogs and told me about it.  I've appreciated knowing that I wasn't just talking to myself for the last 30 days.

Dear 20-year-old Pam,

You've spent most of your life being told that you're smart.  But here's something you need to know:  you really don't know much.  Remember that the next time someone tries to give you some advice--it's possible they know what they're talking about and you, smart one, do not.  Here are the words of advice I hope you'll accept from me.  


1.  Keep a low overhead.  It will be many years before a famous writer says this to you, and by that time it will be way too late to heed this very sensible advice.  So let me just tell you right now:  there are many, many things you can do without.  (That peach silk dress, for example--don't buy it.  You'll never wear it, and you'll feel sick to your stomach every time you see it hanging in your closet.)  Keep in mind that money is freedom.  The more of it you have, the more control you have over your time.       

2.  You don't have to be a prodigy.  It really doesn't matter how quickly you do things; doing them is the point.  Give yourself a break.  It takes time to figure out what you're doing, especially with something like writing, which gets better the longer you do it.  (And seriously, does anyone even remember those writers who were the prodigies of your generation?  Either they're still writing or they're not.  No one remembers when they started.)    

3.  You're fine on your own.  Perhaps it's because you grew up with parents who were joined at the hip; I don' know.  For some reason, you're pretty much convinced that you can't live a long and happy life without a romantic partner.  But here's the thing:  you're going to drive across the country to go to graduate school all by yourself.  Then you're going to figure out how to do graduate-level research and write award-winning papers and short stories. You will do all of this without a partner.  (He'll be along presently.  And trust me, he's more than worth the wait.)  So believe me when I say that you're fine.  In fact, you will come to the conclusion that you're not interested in marriage at all.  And this is when you'll meet the guy who will convince you that, actually, you are.       

4.  Don't be so afraid.  People make mistakes, and most of them don't end in disaster.  They're not always the result of carelessness.  You'll learn, you'll move on--it's part of life.  But being afraid of making mistakes will keep you from doing a lot of things, and being afraid to ask questions will also keep you from learning. You're not supposed to know everything.  Smart people know enough to recognize what they don't know.  In fact, smart people know there's always more to learn.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 29: Something you hope to accomplish

I'd really like to be able to making a living from my writing, at some point in my life.  It doesn't have to be limited to fiction writing; I'd be very happy to get paid for writing my food blog, or any other kind of blog, for that matter.  It would make me very happy not to leave the house when I go to work in the morning.  (That's my borderline agoraphobia showing itself again.)  I love teaching, but that's something I could certainly do part-time if writing were my primary gig. 

Everything I've read suggests that establishing a money-making blog takes at least three years, so this is a long-term goal.  And, of course, I have two children who will need to go to college in the next ten years--so it's very unlikely that I will give up working a full-time job anytime soon.  But if I were able to retire a little early because of my writing income, that would be good enough for me.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 28: Something you have to forgive someone else for

Like the "someone who disappointed you" post, this is stuff I'd rather not think about.  I like to believe that I forgive and forget the past, and generally I think that's true.  I'm not a grudge-holder; that takes way too much energy away from much more important things.  Holding on to anger punishes you, not the person you're angry at.

With that said, I'll admit that there are people I find it difficult to forgive.  One of those is a former professor toward whom I still harbor some hard feelings.  She's very famous, and having her name on my resume has always been an enormous benefit to me--my usual reply, when someone mentions her, is "I was very lucky to have the chance to work with her."  That's true, so I don't mind saying it.  And I know that saying anything negative about her just makes me look bad, because she's accomplished a lot and I can't say the same.  So I just don't say anything about her, most of the time.     

But I still believe that she didn't need to be as unkind and dismissive as she was.  Once you've had some measure of success, I think you can afford to be a little more gracious to people who are struggling and just getting started.  She said things that honestly made me question whether I should even bother to continue writing.  If she didn't think I was good enough to get published, she might have just let me find that out when I didn't get published.  Instead, she seemed intent on letting me know that my work wasn't even worthy of her attention.

I don't know if I hold a grudge against her, exactly.  I don't think I do.  I don't feel angry when I think about her; I don't feel like she's undeserving of the success she's had.  But I do feel like I'll have to forgive her, eventually, for offering so little of what I expected when I signed up for her workshop, and for having a heart so much less generous than her work suggests.
   

30 Days of Blogging, Day 27: Something you have to forgive yourself for

A couple of weeks ago in Sunday school, I was talking to the Confirmation class about baptism.  We were discussing how you have to live your baptism every day by believing you start with a clean slate, as far as God is concerned.  I pointed out that, once you get to be my age, you have lots of things you need to be forgiven for, but the hardest thing is to forgive yourself. 

I don't think I could single out one thing for which I need to forgive myself.  Generally speaking, I'm still working on offering forgiveness to my 18-to-22-year-old self, who made a lot of dumb decisions that I can hardly bear to think about as an older person.  There are any number of explanations for why this happened, but the bottom line is, I made those choices.  Plenty of people around me were making smarter decisions--I was just too lazy and selfish and generally immature to do the right thing, much of the time.
 
Fortunately, after I'd moved across the country to go to graduate school, I outgrew those traits very quickly.  When you're completely on your own, you learn that being a person others respect is pretty important--you can't expect much from them if they aren't able to expect much from you in return.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 26: Describe Your Dream House

I can't say the house I'm living in right now is my dream house, since it's not situated in the woods and doesn't have a spectacular view.  But I love my house.  I do wish I could make a few substantial improvements, though.

I wish the kitchen looked like this.  Right now I have a tiny galley kitchen, which makes it hard to do anything very complicated.  Also, there's really no room for more than one person in the kitchen at a time.  I'd like to have a kitchen where people can cook together comfortably.   

And I wish I had an outdoor office, like this.  I realize it would have to have a window air conditioner--otherwise, it would be unusable for six months of the year--but I like the idea of being able to leave the house without actually leaving home.   


 And, finally, I wish we had a piano like this in the living room:

I love listening to my husband play the piano.  He doesn't get to do it very often, since we only have a small keyboard right now, but in my dream house there's a baby grand piano where he can play anytime he wants.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 25: A song that makes you think of someone besides your significant other

There's a scene in the remake of The Parent Trap where California Lindsey Lohan has just arrived in London, pretending to be her identical  twin, London Lindsey Lohan.  While she's briefly taking in the major sights of the city, The La's song There She Goes is playing in the background.  My daughter once told me that this song made her think of me--in fact, when she was very little, she told me she couldn't watch The Parent Trap when I was away from home on a trip, because that song made her miss me too much.

So now, of course, whenever I hear that song, I think of her as well. 

30 Days of Blogging, Day 24: Make a Play List for Someone

I'm coming down with a cold and I feel like crap, but I'm certainly not going to punk out on a 30-day challenge when I'm this close to the finish line.  I am going to cheat a little bit, however; instead of explaining each song, I'm just going to say that my husband will know why each of them is on the list.

Is Your Love in Vain, Bob Dylan

Kiss Off, Violent Femmes
Straight up, Paula Abdul
Eternal Flame, The Bangles
The Flame, Cheap Trick
Under the Milky Way, The Church
Back in Your Life, Jonathan Richman
My Baby, Scruffy the Cat

30 Days of Blogging, Day 23: Something you wish you had done

One thing I wish I had done is start running sooner than I did.  I played a lot of sports when I was younger--softball, volleyball, basketball.  When I got to junior high, though, it quickly became apparent that some girls were much more serious about sports than I was.  I'd always just had fun with whatever I was doing.  So I stopped playing sports after volleyball season in 8th grade, and after that I didn't do much of anything physical.  I took the occasional aerobics class in high school and college, but that's about it.  I always had friends who'd run for fitness purposes, but it never occurred to me that I might do this. 

Flash forward about 30 years, more or less.  I've taken my daughter and two other girls from our church to a weekend Advent retreat at a local church camp.  During free time, one of our options is to hike up to the cross that overlooks the campsite.  This is what the girls want to do, and they beg me to come along.  I'm from Idaho; what's in front of me is not a mountain, not even close to a mountain.  It's a hill.  A steep hill, but a hill nonetheless.  So I say fine, we'll do the hike.  When I say this, it does not occur to me that I haven't climbed either a mountain or a hill in a very long time.  Like, 30 years, more or less.

Halfway up the hill--maybe not even halfway, actually--I start to realize that I'm in big trouble.  My legs and shaking and my heart is beating faster than I think it's ever beaten before.  I can just barely breathe.  But there's no way to give up and go back down the hill, because we're hiking in a line.  Also, I don't want to abandon the girls.  So I keep climbing, and I start praying, and I make it to the top of the hill.  This is when I start considering that I might have to tell the counselors who've led us up here that I can't make the climb back down, because my heart is really racing and I really can't breathe.  I have visions of being taken down the hill by EMS people, on a stretcher, wearing an oxygen mask.  I can't do that to these girls, though.  I can't scare them that way.  And I certainly can't have the camp director calling their parents and saying Please come pick up your daughter.  The chaperone from your church was too fat and out of shape to make it through the weekend. 

So I say a very earnest prayer:  God, please get me down off this hill.  I know I'm too young to be this out of shape. But I swear, if you get me down off this mountain, I will change.  I have to be able to get these girls back to their parents.  Please, God, just let me get these girls back home and I'll do better.

And somehow, when it was time to start hiking again, I got down the hill.  I fell once, because my legs were weak and shaky, but I made it back to the campsite.  And when I got back home, later that day, I told my husband what had happened and started looking for a treadmill.  I didn't want to be able to make any excuses--rain, heat, whatever.  I wanted to hold up my end of the bargain, since God had taken care of me when I asked for help.

At first, I could barely walk a mile on the treadmill.  That's how out of shape I was.  It's humiliating to think about this now, but it's true.  Before too long, though, I'd moved up to two miles.  Then, as I was trying to improve my speed, it suddenly occurred to me:  maybe I could run.  I had never, ever thought of myself as a runner, so I really wasn't sure if this was something I could do.  I started off very slowly, holding on to the arm rails of the treadmill while I ran.  When I gained a little confidence, I let go.  Then I kicked up the speed.

Now I love running.  I love the way I feel after a good run, tired but full of energy at the same time.  I love the way deep breathing clears out your brain, and the way an endorphin rush just lifts off the top of your skull.  When I'm in a good routine and running several times a week, I feel really powerful.  Like I could run anywhere.  I'm not competitive about it--I don't run 5ks, and I didn't join the team my university put together for the upcoming Rock-n-Roll half marathon--because I'm hard on myself, generally speaking, and I know I'd start feeling bad about running if I didn't do as well as others.  That's why I don't run with a partner, either.

This is something I do for myself.  And for God, of course.  I just wish I'd started sooner.     

30 Days if Blogging, Day 22: Something you wish you hadn't done

Once you become a parent, I think your list of regrets in life multiplies exponentially.  Every day, it seems, there are choices to be made, and you never know if you're doing the right thing.  You make what you think is the best decision at the time.  But lots of times, you only get one shot--you can't go back and fix what you did, if it turns out you did the wrong thing after all.

When we first moved to Texas, Jordan was starting first grade and Andrew was still in preschool.  He was four years old, so he needed just one more year of day care before he started kindergarten.  I found a center close to our house, checked it out, and made arrangements for Andrew to start spending his days there.

We'd had terrific child care in Columbia, Missouri--it was university-sponsored, led by teachers with college degrees and staffed by students studying to be teachers.  I knew it wasn't likely we'd find anything we loved as much as our previous day care center after we moved.  So when I started having some misgivings about the place I'd chosen, I tried to write them off to an unfair comparison.  I never had any concerns about Andrew being unsafe or in danger, but he obviously wasn't happy.  He's always been a shy kid, so I told myself that of course the transition to an unfamiliar place would be difficult.  He'd adjust. 

But when his feelings about day care didn't improve, I told myself he only had to be at this center for a short while.  Less than a year.  I'd just started a brand new job at my university and I was nervous about proving myself.  I was trying to earn tenure.  Looking for a new day care would have taken me away from work during the day.  I didn't want to make it look as if I couldn't balance being a mother and a professor just when I was at the start of a new career.  I'd worked so hard to get where I was.  I tried to focus on the big picture and keep in mind that I was supporting my family. That without my job, we'd all be much more unhappy than Andrew seemed to be.       

When the academic year ended in May, I took Andrew out of day care as soon as I could and spent that whole summer at home with him and Jordan.  I hoped some time (and a super fun summer with Mom) would just erase that whole awful year from his memory.  While I don't think he suffered any long-term damage, he still says "I hated that place" every time we drive by it.  Clearly, he has not forgotten that experience. 

If I could go back and make a different decision for him now, I would.  Even if it meant ending up at a different university, or in a different career altogether.  I had other options.  I didn't take them.  And I really wish I had. 

30 Days of Blogging, Day 21: A story about your best friend, past or present

I could tell you something about my friend Susan, from high school, or my friend Jayne, from college, but instead I'm going to tell you something about Steph, from grad school.  I met Steph toward the end of her undergraduate career, right after I'd started my M.A. program.  I've always thought she was incredibly cool--she's one of those effortlessly hip people who exist entirely in a world of their own making.  I'm still jealous of her ability to just sit back and let life happen.  Whatever comes up, she deals with it and moves on as if that were always part of the plan.   

Steph grew up in Kansas, which is where I met her, via our mutual friend Bruce.  Later, she moved to Idaho--where I grew up--because both she and her husband were looking for jobs, and the university where I was working always needed adjunct faculty.  About a year after that, I moved away from Idaho again, to work on my Ph.D. in Missouri.  (Steph drove cross-country with me during that move, since I was traveling with an infant.  She was my co-pilot/car nanny, and indispensable in both roles.)  In the meantime, our friend Bruce had moved back home to the southwest, decided on a career in medicine, and gone to med school.  Later, he accepted a job that brought him back to Kansas.

So now Steph lives in my hometown and occasionally checks in on my elderly parents.  I live in the southwest, Bruce's old stomping grounds.  And Bruce lives in northwestern Kansas, near the tiny town where Steph grew up.  Steph tells me that there are days, even now, after 16 years of living in Boise, when she looks at the mountains and thinks "I live in Idaho."  But, no doubt, those moments are followed by her realization that this is exactly as it should be.      
    

30 Days of Blogging, Day 20: A book that meant something to you

I love books--hence the career path I have followed thus far--but I'm not sentimental about them.  There were books I loved as a teenager that I can see as deeply flawed now (pretty much everything by F. Scott Fitzgerald falls into this category, with the exception of The Great Gatsby.)  There are books I didn't like as a young reader that I now love (pretty much everything by Faulkner falls into that category.)  And then there's the occasional book that changed my life.

The Poisonwood Bible is one of those books, for about a billion reasons.  Most important among those reasons is the fact that it made me think of Africa in a completely different way--not as a shape on a map, not as a continent, but as a place where people live.  Reading about the U.S. government's involvement in the murder of Patrice Lumumba made me deeply ashamed; realizing this was a piece of American history that conveniently gets left out of the official story told in textbooks made me furious.  I loved the Price family (except for evil Nathan, of course) and found myself a little horrified to realize that I sympathized with vapid Rachel as often as I did with compassionate Leah.  That's Kingsolver's point, of course--that we're all a little bit selfish and a little bit selfless.  The important thing is to balance those impulses for the greater good.

On top of that, this book contains a moment of genuine surprise that I wasn't at all prepared for.  That's a rare treat, when you've read as many novels as I have.  The Poisonwood Bible restored my faith in the ability of a book to suck me in, surprise me, and make me sad when it was over. 

30 Days of Blogging, Day 19: Your Faith

I was raised Lutheran--by which I mean, I grew up going to a Lutheran church every Sunday.  My father had grown up without any sort of religious training.  My mother didn't know a lot about what it meant to be Lutheran, specifically; she just knew that she'd always gone to a Lutheran church, and she was Confirmed in a Lutheran church, and therefore she kept going to a Lutheran church.

I hated church, as a kid, and hate is not too strong a word.  Our church was in the old part of town and had no youth program to speak of.  Occasionally there would be some spurt of youth-oriented activity, and my mother would insist that I go and hang out with people I didn't know at all.  I went to church because I had to, and when I didn't have to go anymore--when I moved away from home to go to college--I didn't.

Having kids of my own is what changed my mind about all of this.  When you have children, the world starts looking like a much different place, full of potential dangers and injuries.  I didn't want my children to grow up vulnerable to twisted people who might claim to know something about the Bible and the afterlife;  I wanted my kids to have a certain amount of Biblical literacy that they could claim as their own.  And when I started looking at the Bible myself, I realized that I actually believe what the Gospel says.  Like, really believe it.  I realized that social justice and Christianity go hand in hand, in spite of the fact that many people who call themselves Christians work very hard to prove that's not the case.

I go to church now because I believe in what it stands for.  I believe in helping people who need help, which is what Jesus did.  I believe in loving my neighbor, difficult as that is sometimes.  I believe that doing these things is the only way to heal this broken world.  I go to church to remind myself of that.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 18: Your views on a current controversial topic

It's a good day for this topic.  Or, rather, a sad day for this topic.  Yesterday our country missed an opportunity to repeal the shameful Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that's been in place since 1993.  An overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of repealing this policy--including my dad, who was a 22-year Army veteran, an officer, and a soldier in two wars.  He once said to me "It makes no sense to make people lie when you're asking them to pledge to serve their country with honor.   There's no honor in lying."

Amen, Daddy-o.

And to quote Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 17: Something you're a little OCD about

This one's also pretty easy to answer (although, sad to say, there are many things that fall into this category.)  I'm completely OCD about symmetry and evenness.  A framed photo hung on the wall at even a slight angle will drive me nuts.  If I'm starting a new project, generally I need to start it at the beginning of a week (or month), which is why I was pretty proud of myself for starting a 30-day challenge on September 5th.  The much more likely response would have been to wait until October 1st.  Or perhaps November, which actually has 30 days and wouldn't have one leftover day, like October.

I'm telling you, it's bad.

Whenever I'm painting a room, I can spend untold amounts of time trying to get a straight line at the top of the wall or around the doorjamb.  Even in spots that aren't going to show--if I know there's a blob of paint on the wall, I'm going to scrape it off and work to cover it up.  Trying to texturize the walls in my bathroom was a nightmare because I really wanted the lumpiness to be even across the wall, when of course the point of texturizing is random lumpiness to cover irregularities in the wall surface.

My friend Chris likes to come into my office and move the calendar on the corner of my desk.  It's always positioned at a 45-degree angle from the front edge of the desk, lined up with the right-hand corner.  One day he came in and nearly had a heart attack when he noticed the calendar had been knocked out of position by something I'd put on top of it.  (I'm not a neat freak, so clutter isn't unusual, but generally speaking my clutter is organized in piles.  To recycle.  To deal with.  To file.  Etc.)  After he moves the calendar, he likes to stand there talking to me because he knows I won't move it back until he leaves.  But he also knows I'm barely capable of holding a conversation while my calendar is askew. 

This passes for entertainment at my office.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 16: Something You Definitely Can Live Without.

Easy.

Television.

My husband will laugh when he reads this, because he hates the TV and doesn't like that it's on so much of the time.  I'm used to having the TV on, it's true, but I'm hardly ever watching it.  I've done writing residencies where no TV was available for two weeks, and while the adjustment is a little difficult at first, it's also pleasant.  I like the way quiet sort of takes over your life when there's no TV available.  (When I went to O'Hare Airport after two weeks without television, I almost started crying as the result of overstimulation.  The noise!  The lights!  It was all too much.)

But when you live with children--or, at least, when you live with children in a neighborhood like mine, where not having access to TV would be a pretty big deal--you get used to noise.  Including TV.  When the house is quiet (as it is at this moment), I actually get a little nervous.  Quiet is unnatural.  It's better to have some voices in the background to remind you that everything's fine.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 15: Something You Can't Live Without

I'm going to go out on a limb and say there's nothing I really couldn't live without (aside from the basic requirements--food, air, water, etc.)  I'm a pretty adaptable person and when I have to let go of something, I do it.  I may not like it, and I may not be happy about it, but I do it. 

There are several things that make life much less pleasant when they're out of rotation, though.  First among those is coffee.  With both of my pregnancies, I gave up coffee.  That was absolutely the hardest part about being pregnant.  There's conflicting research about whether pregnant women need to give up caffeine entirely or just cut back, and of course my mother insisted I didn't need to do either--"I drank coffee the whole time I was pregnant with you kids, and you were fine," she said.  You also drank alcohol and lived with a man who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, I could have added.  But the fact that we all dodged various bullets didn't make me feel inclined to follow her example. 

I knew it would be harder for me to limit my coffee drinking than to just give it up altogether, so that's what I did.  Toward the end of my second pregnancy I observed to my friend Denise that when you're pregnant is when you most need to relax with a drink or wake up with a cup of coffee, and you can't do either one.  It's so unfair. 

Healthy children are pretty good compensation for those temporary sacrifices, though.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 14: Your Favorite TV Show

Although the TV is often turned on at my house, I don't watch a lot of it--the television often serves only as background noise.  When I'm writing or working seriously, I need a quiet house.  When I'm just putzing around on the computer, or reading a magazine, the background noise of the TV is there to keep me company.  (Also, I find it very difficult to do only one thing at a time.  If I'm a reading a magazine, I have to be watching TV simultaneously.  And vice-versa.)

One of the main reasons I don't watch a lot of TV is that so much of what's on now is just disgusting.  It's vulgar and childish and just generally more offensive than anything else.  When I do have the TV on, I'll watch reruns of older shows (like Seinfeld) or something on Food Network.  The only current television I watch with any regularity is Mad Men--I do love me some tormented bad boy, as long as the torment is genuine and not self-serving--and, now that it's back, Parenthood.  I like that the family on this show seems real.  The adult children bicker with each other and carry grudges, like siblings (even grown siblings) tend to do; the younger children have real issues to deal with, not just the usual high school drama; and the couples are fighting over real problems, like whose job should take priority when family decisions have to be made.

I don't know if I could choose between those two, or which one I'd choose if I had to.      

30 Days of Blogging, Day 13: Your Favorite Band or Artist

I love music.  I was one of those teenage girls who felt like Top 40 radio was speaking about her directly.  When MTV made the scene--first as a half-hour TV show, when I was in junior high, and later as the All Music, All The Time channel it became--it completely changed my life.  I spent ridiculous amounts of time sitting around, watching videos and listening to music.

I have a very clear memory of the first time I saw the video of R.E.M. singing "So. Central Rain."  I loved that song.  I loved Michael Stipe's voice.  I loved Michael Stipe's hair.  And when I heard that song, I knew I was hearing something I'd never heard before.

R.E.M. has always felt that way to me. Hearing  "Cuyahoga" and "Fall on Me" for the first time felt very similar to that first encounter with "So. Central Rain."  I'm less crazy about their more recent stuff, but I realize bands and artists need to evolve.  Nobody wants to sing the exact same song over and over for thirty years. So I'll just keep listening to the old stuff and reliving the revelations of my youth.

30 Days of Blogging, Day 12: An old photo and a story

Some of you may have already seen his photo (if you're my Facebook friend.)  This was taken while my family still lived in a rental house in Boise, so I can't be more than five years old--we moved into the house where my parents still live just after my 5th birthday.

I really think I remember having this picture taken, because I remember striking that pose very purposefully.  I felt quite sassy in my cowgirl garb, and I wanted to let that be known--and, apparently, that was okay, or at least for as long as it took to capture this picture.

I'm not sure what I thought the poodle purse added to this ensemble.  (The knee socks and saddle shoes were, no doubt, my mom's contribution.)

30 Days of Blogging, Day 11: A photo that makes you sad

I belong to a Facebook group, Pawsitively Texas, that works to find homes for animals who are in danger of being put to sleep at area shelters.  The guy at left, Scott, was one of the dogs on their rescue list several weeks ago.  I see pictures of adorable, needy cats and dogs every day via this group, but something about Scott's picture just broke my heart.  His eyes looked so sad.  He reminded me of our dog, Hailey, when we found her at a local shelter.  Even my son, who was six years old at the time, asked me "Why is her face so sad?"  I told him she was sad because she needed a family, and that's why we needed to adopt her.  She's been a much-loved member of our clan ever since that day.

I knew we couldn't adopt Scott, but I kept checking back to see if someone had adopted him.  He did find a foster home, so at least he was safe from immediate danger.  Then I read that he'd tested positive for heartworm disease, and I figured his fate had been sealed.  In its advanced stages--as it is in Scott's case--heartworm is an expensive disease to treat, and a HW+ dog requires special care.  I couldn't imagine someone would adopt a dog, even one as beautiful as this guy, knowing he came with that kind of baggage.

But guess what?  Someone did.  Some beautiful soul looked at Scott's picture, saw the same sad face, and did something about it without regard to the cost or care Scott will involve.  His name is Chance now, which seems completely fitting to me. I swear he's smiling in this picture.