Changing Speed

CHAPTER SEVEN: A NEW LIFE

My life would from now on be forever different. It could not go on as before. This much was obvious. What was less obvious to me was that my life had not reached the end. I had not even reached the final stage. I was merely changing direction. Changing speed. The new speed might be neither better nor worse, but it was new.

Just over one month after I had returned to being a single man in the eyes of the law, that being the same judicial system that proved itself to be as unjust as anything I had ever had the displeasure to have experienced, I moved into my new home. My first home. I had lived in numerous houses over the past and this one might not have been as grand as some of those, however it was home. The past was something that I still had not dealt with. The future was not something I had thought about. The present was just a place I happened to be. At least I now had somewhere to live and it was mine. Actually some of it was mine. The rest of it belonged to the bank.

I bought myself a dog. I had always had a dog. My last dog had stayed with the family (together with most of my belongings) that she was part of. Dogs had been in my life from my earliest memories. My father had always kept dogs. His father before him bred Greyhounds. He raced them for a living. Even though I am told he was a fit young man, he never actually got to the finishing line ahead of any of them. I had always wanted a German Shepherd. My ex-wife did not feel comfortable around German Shepherds, but then she did not feel too comfortable around me.

Either way, I have my German Shepherd. To this day he is my best and most loyal friend, as long as I neither mention the war nor argue over beach towel placement. I do spend a lot of my time talking with him. Occasionally, always late at night and only when I have had several beers, he talks back to me which can be slightly disconcerting. The bad news for my dog is that whilst I don't speak German my father does, fluently. He seems to take a perverse sort of pleasure testing his German out on the dog. My father also enjoys talking about his time during the war. Even the dog's ability to adopt selective hearing cannot protect him against my father.

For some reason my dad also talks in German to any of the girlfriends that I introduce him to. He is convinced that the blond ones are clearly Arian. At my age the blond girlfriends are not even blond. 

I was recently ironing in the kitchen whilst at the same time listening to the radio. I can even recall the song that was playing. It was Hotel California by the Eagles. I was singing along with the guitar lead break as one does when in walked a small black cat.

I waited for the dog to react. I guess the dog waited for me to react. I gently enquired of the cat as to whether or not he was suicidal. To this day I still assume he is a male cat. My Cat language is clearly as good as my German. Up until this point I had never much liked cats. I had not really disliked them either. I'm just a dog person. Now my dog is different. He loves cats. He loves cats with a bit of salt on that is.

Neither the dog nor I moved, frozen with incredulity, as this cat first brushed past me and then nuzzled up to the dog. The cat continued to nuzzle the dog until the dog stood up in his bed. Immediately the cat crawled underneath the dog and fell fast asleep in the dog's bed. The dog sleeps on the floor nowadays.

It was a surreal experience but the cat has been with us ever since. Indeed I am grateful to the cat for allowing the dog and myself to continue living in his home.

It was by now some two years after the divorce. I woke to the sound of birds singing outside my bedroom window. The sound was deafening and yet I had no immediate desire to shoot at them. Instead I lay in bed for a few moments longer than I typically would do. I began to think. This was a luxury that I tended not to allow myself save from slipping into the past.

I had an income (having been retired from work some time earlier on a full pension) which was more than sufficient to provide me with a good standard of living. I was in a position to do almost anything legal that I had ever wanted to do, yet I was still feeling that I was somehow the injured party. I had much to be happy about and so very much more living to do. I had no time to waste laying in bed listening to birds sing. I walked the dog in the nearby wheat fields instead of the standard short walk to the park.