While I Was Gone Read Online Free PDF

INTO MY LIFE ALMOST BY ACCIDENT,
    when I was twenty-three. I’d just separated from my first husband, and for this and other reasons, I felt that my life was ruined—I didn’t believe then in second chances. Broke and full of despair, I retreated from everything and went home to Maine, to my mother’s house.
    There I wouldn’t have to worry about rent or food for a while..
    But I still needed a job. Any job. Any job but waitressing, I told myself. I was done with that. What I had in mind was some mindless secretarial position, and that’s what I got. I thought. I was hired as a receptionist-assistant in a veterinarian’s off fice
    And so it began before I recognized it—my second chance.
    Dr. Moran, my boss, was about sixty-five then, I suppose.
    Of course, he seemed ancient to me. He was unsentimental, but gentle and slow-spoken. He called the animals we saw—the cats, the dogs, even the snakes and guinea pigs and gerbils—“our friends” or “our silent friends.” He was fairly silent himself, but I learned to watch the way his hands did his talking for him with the animals. He was small, portly and neat and almost completely bald, but he had large square hands, the hands of a young, strong man. As they moved over the pets, the animals gentled and stilled. He used his voice, too, but only a little.
    It was his hands that did the trick, and it was the way he used his hands that I imitated when I began to work with the animals.
    I worked seven days a week, including the cleanup and feedings on Sundays, and I was grateful for every minute of it, every minute away from the consciousness of my own failures, away from my misery. Gradually Dr. Moran trained me to take over more responsibility in the clinic, though the chores were still menial—giving medications, changing dressings, removing sutures, preparing injections.
    I’d never had pets as a kid—my father, plant-lover that he was, didn’t believe in it—so I was startled at how easy I felt with the animals, even when, at first, they were aggressive. I learned to touch them, to move with confidence around them. I was surprised at how much their need and trust affected me. I was surprised when they touched me back-the unexpected flick of a rough, warm tongue, the deliberate gentle nudge of a wet nose. The first time it happened, I started, and then had to swallow several times to keep from crying, I was so oddly moved.
    Slowly, then, over the first weeks and months of my life in the clinic, I began to believe again in the possibility of a simple kind of goodness, the goodness of the animals’ dependency and trust. In response to it, I felt some shift, some opening up, in what I’d thought of as my hardened self. I remember the first time I woke in the morning and was aware of anticipation, of eagerly looking forward to getting up, going to work, just to take care of, to be touching again, a young hunting dog I’d nursed through a chest injury—he’d been ripped open by a barbed-wire fence he tried to jump. A few months after I’d started the job, I signed up at the university for the first of the science courses I’d need for vet school, and a year and a half later I was enrolled and beginning my training.
    Even now, at this point in my life, when much of what I did at work was routine, when very little could happen to the primarily dogs and cats I had in my suburban practice that I hadn’t seen and dealt with dozens of times before, even now I enjoyed it, enjoyed the falling away of other concerns when I came into the off fice enjoyed the differences among our “silent friends.” I took delight in the humor in much of what went on, and felt grieved, but enlarged, too, by what was sad or painful in the powerful bonds between animals and humans.
    That Tuesday morning I had some puppy shots, a suture removal, two rabies vaccines, a dog who needed his anal sacs emptied, a cat ca the erization, and an abscess to clean on a cat named Henry, who was