Angels with four legs
Though they may not have wings to fly
Back and forth between the earth and sky.
They never question the reason why?
But, will give of their life, if do or die.

When we’re in trouble they never run or hide
For this I am thankful and full of pride.
They aid and comfort the disabled and sick.
They even employ a special trick.
If the need arises, they will even give your face a lick.
When you come home after a hard day’s work
They just want you to pet them; it’s their only quirk.
For no matter what time you arrive home at night,
They never fail to greet you, what a beautiful sight!

So be kind and loving to the very end.
For this four-legged angel is your very best friend,
And will always remain faithful to the very end.

Copyright © 2004 Joseph P. Martino

Thanks, Mr. Martino, for providing some comforting words in a very depressing situation.

In the middle of this student’s final services – which were held on Christmas Eve – my Mother called me in tears to tell me that she had to put down one of our dogs that morning. Folks, if you ever find yourself wondering how to make a bad day even worse, then find out that a family pet was just put down while you’re at a young person’s funeral (in the cemetery, actually). Before this dog – Odie – had to be put to sleep, my Mom had three dogs. But this dog was absolutely “my” dog even though he lived with my Mom. I rescued him from the Monmouth County SPCA several years ago and he never forgot that I saved him from the shelter. Whenever I would go home to my Mom’s house, Odie would get up and come over and sit by me no matter who else was around or whatever else was going on.

It’s a very sad thing to lose a family pet – especially one that was as loved and loving as Odie was to our family. I remember when I first saw Odie at the shelter. Earlier that day I looked online at the Monmouth SPCA website and noticed that they had a pug available for adoption. My Mom had been talking about getting another pug and finding one in an animal shelter is extremely rare, so I went over to the shelter and walked around for a while, but couldn’t find the pug. Just when I was getting ready to leave, I went down a hallway that appeared to be infrequently used and amid the stacks and stacks of empty cages, there was a note on a cage in the corner of the hallway. The note said “Pug – Odie” and I bent down to look in to see what was in the cage. Lo and behold, there was Odie – skinny as could be and a miserable looking thing. He glanced up at me with the most pathetic, miserable, desperately sad look that you’ve ever seen and then put his head back down.

Seeing an animal like that will break your heart on the spot.

I got up and walked out of the hallway, went to my car, started it up, and drove away. After about 3 minutes of driving, I frantically got on my cell phone and called the SPCA to ask if anyone had adopted that pug yet (remember – I was there 3 minutes earlier… who is going to adopt a dog in a nearly-forgotten hallway that quickly?!). They said no and I told them that this pug was MY dog and I didn’t want anyone adopting him besides me. They said okay, but that I had to come back and fill out the paperwork and pay the required fees. I told them no problem and to wait for me. I finished the short drive home, picked up some stuff, turned around, and went back to adopt Odie.

When I went back to the SPCA, they allowed me to sit in the same room as the dog to see if we were compatible. I remember sitting on the floor in a kitchen-like area as someone brought Odie in and left him on the other side of the room. The dog sort of looked at me and I sort of looked at him. I tapped my fingers on the ground and Odie looked at my fingers and slowly started walking over. When he finally reached me I opened my hand with my palm facing up and he sniffed my hand. Odie must have approved of what he smelled because he allowed me to pet his head, his neck, and his back. After a short while, he sat down in front of me and really enjoyed the petting that he was getting.

Overall, this went on for about ten or fifteen minutes until the caretaker came back and had to take Odie away. I went to the front desk, filled out the paperwork, paid the fees, and was told that I had to wait several days for my dog to be neutered.

Over the next few days I went out and bought all of the doggy accessories that new owners typically get: a brand-new brown collar with a matching brand-new brown leash, a retractable leash (an expensive one because my dog was going to have the best stuff available), doggy toys, treats, dog food, etc.

I picked Odie up from the Monmouth County SPCA on Friday, August 24, 2007 – the beginning of a week and a half-long vacation that I had from work. What I remember most about having Odie with me in my apartment on that first day was the way he walked around and cautiously explored everything around him. There was a lot of this going on:

And then that was followed by chewing on a treat:

Which was, of course, followed by some laying around:

And then came something that I’ll always remember. You know, some people say that dogs can’t smile; that they’re muscles aren’t arranged in their faces to allow for a smile. Well, after Odie explored my apartment for a little while and after we sat on the couch and watched some television while I rubbed his back, it was time for dinner. I know that the shelters feed these dogs dry food for a number of reasons including that it is cheaper and easier to manage. For his first meal at my apartment, Odie ate wet food for what must have been the first time in ages.

He went insane after dinner.

Odie ran around my apartment like a wild dog. He was running anywhere he could find space to run. I’ve never seen a dog so happy. He wouldn’t stop running back and forth even when I called his name. After letting him run around for a while, I yelled out, “Hey! Odie! What’s up, buddy?!” Odie then slowed down a bit and ran over to the coffee table in front of me as I sat on the couch. I was able to snap this picture when he stopped in front of the coffee table:

Now don’t tell me that dogs can’t smile!

The rest of the week was filled with Odie being a happy, happy dog. He slept with me in my bed down by my feet. He even managed to sneak under the sheet one night (it was summer so I wasn’t using a blanket – just a sheet). I remember the morning after he slept under the sheet, I wondered where he went. I picked up the sheet as I was laying there and I saw Odie, eyes wide open, looking right at me. Once he saw that I was awake, he pretty much army-crawled up to my face to give it a good morning lick. This was a grateful, happy dog! Here are some more pictures from that first week with Odie in the apartment:

Sometimes, Odie would like to go into small spaces and lay down. Wherever Odie came from before he wound up at the Monmouth County SPCA, he was definitely well-trained to stay in a crate or a cage. He loved going into tight spaces like you see in that last picture above.

On Thursday, August 30, 2007 I brought Odie to my Mom’s house to see how he interacted with her pug. There wasn’t much interaction, really. The other pug, Yoda, is your typically pug who just sort of rolls with the punches. Odie was a little leery about being in a new place and walking around a new house, but I was there with him so he was okay with it. My Mom got used to Odie and after spending a few hours up there, I managed to sneak away while Odie was preoccupied with eating dinner or while someone in my family was petting him.

That was a tough drive back to my apartment, but I knew that staying with my Mom was the best thing for Odie. Over at my Mother’s house, my Mom and my younger brother bonded to the little guy relatively quickly. From a dog’s perspective, my younger brother and I must have a similar human scent because Odie took to my younger brother. I remember going back up to visit and watching as Odie would bark and get aggravated when my younger brother would leave the living room, go outside, or go into his bedroom with the door closed. Odie loved companionship and he got annoyed when someone that he liked wasn’t nearby.

Odie was a bag of bones when I picked him up from the shelter, but he gained weight in no time as he became a healthy, happy, well-loved member of the family. Here are some pictures of him in chronological order from late 2007 to late 2011:

No matter how many months or years went by, whenever I went back to my Mom’s house Odie would come over to me. It didn’t matter if it was Christmas and there were family and friends visiting or if it was just me and my Mom in the house – Odie would come over and sit down next to me. Just like he did in the kitchen area when I went back to the SPCA to claim him from the shelter back in August 2007. That’s what I’ll probably remember and miss the most about Odie – his loyalty. That’s a hard enough trait to come by in humans and here was a dog that didn’t think twice about dropping everything to come sit next to the guy who rescued him from the shelter and gave him a real home for his final years.

This past Thanksgiving we all noticed that Odie was coughing quite a bit. My Mom said he had been doing that since the hurricane knocked out the power to her house for 2 weeks. He went to the vet, but Odie didn’t like being bothered with by the vet so the x-rays were mostly inconclusive, though the vet said that the coughing was probably caused by lung cancer. He prescribed a treatment for him in the rare event that it was pneumonia, but that treatment didn’t help. Odie didn’t have pneumonia. He had lung cancer.

A week or so before he took his final nap, my Mom started Odie on a regiment of steroids. Remarkably, the steroids helped to ease his cough and Odie began eating regular food again. But the easement didn’t last long enough. On Christmas Eve, my Mom found Odie in convulsions. My younger brother picked up the entire bed that he was laying in (see the last picture above from a few years ago) and put him in my Mom’s car so she could take him to the vet to get help. Incidentally, dogs have a sixth sense about when someone is helpless and needs to be protected. Yoda got in front of Odie’s bed and growled at my younger brother and my Mother when they tried to help Odie. He was trying to protect Odie because he was defenseless.

When my Mom arrived at the vet, the vet made it clear that it was time. Odie was given one shot that put him into a deep sleep and that allowed my Mother to give him a last look and see him taking long, deep, peaceful breaths. After that, my Mom went into the waiting area as my younger brother’s girlfriend watched the vet give Odie his last shot.

My Mom opted to have Odie cremated; the ashes arrived in a wooden box the other day.

So Odie is gone from this world and, thank God, no longer coughing and in pain from his lung cancer. He was with my family for exactly 5 years and 4 months – not nearly enough time for us to give him all of the love that he deserved, but more than enough time for him to give us every bit of love and appreciation that he had to give. My family and I will miss Odie – he had a great amount of personality and will not be forgotten.

Odie was definitely man’s best friend. And even though we are all sad about him no longer being with us, I find something very reassuring in knowing that when my time comes to leave this life, my dog Odie will be there to greet me on the other side. Odie will be without his limp, without his cough, without his pain…

And with his big doggy smile.

I don’t really remember much about the interview other than I couldn’t get an immediate read on whether or not the kid was telling the truth. Sometimes you watch these young kids on television and you can sense that they are coerced into saying certain things by their parents. Other times you watch these kids and just get a bad feeling about the entire story. It’s hard to explain, but if you’ve ever watched a person tell a lie or bend the truth to the point of nearly breaking it in half, then you know what I’m talking about.

I didn’t get that sense from Colton’s story, but I didn’t give it much thought.

The reason the interview was taking place was because the kid’s father wrote a book about his son’s experience. Over the next few months I would pick up the Burpo book at my local Barnes & Noble, flip through it a little bit, and then put it back on the shelf and move on to the next story. Quick side note – even though I own a NOOK Color I still head over to the local Barnes & Noble store to flip through some books to see whether or not I’d want to buy them and also whether or not it would be better to buy the NOOK book version or the paper version. Plus, I like spending a few minutes in the Barnes & Noble – it’s nice and quiet (most of the time).

Anyway, I didn’t consider reading the book until last week when I got my hands on an electronic copy on the NOOK. And, since the book is a relatively short read, I buzzed through over the last few days. I have a few thoughts about the book which are in no particular order below.

• The first half of the book. No offense to the Burpo family or the writing of this book, but the first half of the book is a bore. Sure, I understand that the first half of the book is written to give a base for the second half of the book and the stories about Colton’s experiences, but if you’re picking up this book to read about Colton’s accounts of Heaven and his experiences with Jesus Christ, then you can skip the entire first half of the book. The family stories, the stories of Todd’s physical trials and pains, the ups and downs of the family – all of that tells a certain story and it’s not the one that I wanted to read when I picked up this book. I’m a spiritual guy, I believe in Jesus Christ and the scriptures, I’m already into all of that. I didn’t need to read about the Burpo family’s seemingly consistent pains and their life in the great wide open of middle America to have the point hammered home that these are regular, everyday Christian people. The entire first half of the book could have been summed up in 2 – 3 pages, which would have allowed this reader (and any other number of readers out there) to get to the real heart of the story.
• Weird Parental Reactions. This is definitely a regional perspective, but I was shocked at some of the reactions that Todd and his wife Sonja had to Colton’s comments. For example, when Colton tells his father that he sat in Jesus’ lap and that Jesus talked to him and angels sang to him when he was in the hospital, my mind immediately went to a place that wanted to know what the father was going to do about people approaching his son while he was in the hospital. In other words, my immediate reaction to some of what is written in this book is a reaction borne out of living in the northeast United States for all of my life. Almost subconsciously, people in this part of the world process and assess what they hear and come to an immediate, negative conclusion. You might say we judge a book by its cover. The point here is that Todd and Sonja responded to Colton’s experience in a different way than, say, Sonny and Maria would have responded if little Vinny was telling them about people visiting him in his hospital bed in New York City.
• Colton’s Description of Jesus Christ. All in all, I’m still not sure whether I believe this kid’s experience or not. In truth, I actually believe more of the story than I think could be made up (see next point). Aside from Colton’s knowledge of things that he was never told (like his miscarried sister and his great grandfather Pops), the biggest draw for me to believe his story is his consistently noting that the current vision of Jesus Christ that we have is wrong. I don’t mean that we have the wrong impression of him as our Lord and Savior. I mean his physical appearance is a bit off. Frankly, Jesus Christ was born to a young Palestinian woman (Mary) in the Middle East and yet we show him to be of Anglo-Saxon descent. Something doesn’t seem right in that to me… Colton says that this picture is the best representation of what Jesus Christ actually looks like:
  
  

    I don’t know about you, but I see that picture and I think, “Now that’s a better representation of Jesus Christ!” The picture above looks more like a guy who could have been born in the Middle East, right? Plus, that portrait just happened to be painted by a young girl who claims to have also visited Heaven and whose account nearly matches Colton’s account…

• The swords in Heaven. This was the one part of the book that I thought didn’t flow correctly and, for some reason, made me think that something might be up with the whole thing. It’s all of Chapter 25 that really made me think twice about this story. In short, Burpo tells how he and his family watched The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (an openly Christian-themed fantasy story that became a major motion picture a few years ago) and how Colton positively responded to the White Witch being taken down by Aslan. After some discussion, Colton tells his parents that there are swords in Heaven because Satan isn’t in hell yet. The swords are for the battle that has yet to come (Armageddon) and how Jesus told Colton that he couldn’t have sword because he’d be too dangerous. The parents ask Colton if he saw Satan and he responds that he had seen him. When they ask what he looked like, Colton didn’t respond. When the parents continued to ask Colton about Satan after that night, he still didn’t respond.

    For some reason, that didn’t sit right with me. I understand that this is a young kid and that the thought of Satan, much less the sight of him, must have frightened the kid. Okay, I get that completely. But here is a young kid who is telling wonderful, amazing stories about Jesus Christ and Heaven and then he totally freezes up when the topic of Satan comes up? I don’t know about that – just seems odd.

• The story just sort of ends. There’s no happy conclusion to Colton’s stories about Jesus Christ and Heaven. They just sort of end. The book is brought to a nice conclusion by Burpo and we even get an epilogue to read through, but that’s it. There’s no summation of salient points and no final dictum from Colton about Heaven or his experiences with Jesus Christ (other than that Jesus really loves children and there’s no way to possibly describe God’s overpowering love for us). The book just kind of… ends.
• No heavy issues. This one seems obvious, but you’re not going to find discussion of any heavy issues in this book. As a happy Roman Catholic, the big theological issues in my Church revolve around whether or not women should be priests, whether or not priests should be allowed to marry, whether or not homosexuality is acceptable, when abortion is acceptable (if ever), etc. Obviously, a book about a kid who sees Heaven isn’t going to cover those issues. So, if you’re thinking about picking up this book to understand what Heaven thinks about these major issues, don’t bother reading the book.

Those are some of the bigger points that I have about this book. With respect to a recommendation, I’m not against anyone reading this book. In fact, if you can get it at a good price, then I recommend reading it just because the insights that Colton gives about Jesus Christ and Heaven are fun theological points to ponder. Of course there is the big question…

Do I believe Colton’s account of visiting Heaven and spending time with Jesus Christ?

The answer is… more yes than no. That story about the swords in Heaven and the battle yet to come was really improperly placed in the book and is where my doubt (if you can even call it doubt) rests. Let’s be honest – a young kid who just watched the final battle of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (an epic battle between good and evil) is probably more likely to substitute those images for a heavenly battle that will happen at some point in the future. The chapter didn’t sit right with me.

What did sit right with me was the image of Jesus Christ above that Colton confirmed is what our Savior really looks like in person. The fact that the image was drawn by a young girl who was eight years old when she drew it and also had visions of Heaven and Jesus Christ when she was four years old helps to add some credibility to the story.

In the end, as a happy Roman Catholic who tries his damnedest to practice his life the way that Jesus tells us to in the Bible, I stick with my comment above. I believe more of Colton’s story than I disbelieve.

And now they’ve given her a makeover, damn it (take a look after the jump).

Look at what they’ve done to her! Ms. Boyle has gone from the charity worker living in a small village in Scotland to the fashionable mother who gets her “tea” at the fancy eat-ins and attends wine and cheese tasting events in her spare time. She’s wearing a Burberry scarf for Heaven’s Sake! Do you think anyone in her village wears Burberry? And is that a leather jacket? Good grief…

Sure, Ms. Boyle didn’t appear to be a “superstar” when she appeared on Britain’s Got Talent, but it was that lack of that typical image that actually made her a superstar. Here’s hoping that even though she’s received a makeover, she retains that village charm that made the whole world forget about their problems – even if for just a few minutes – and root her on.