Life unfolds in a series of epiphanies.

So they say.

But one with razor sharp claws, pleading eyes, jaws in perpetual chomp-on-that-thing mode, highly mobile ears that move like radars searching the heavens for extra-terrestrial life, and thievery bred in the bone?

Seems I was not ready for the unquenchable energy of the 4-month-old German Shepherd puppy who became part of our home in April 2024.

We got her from a friend of Ann’s, as one of the two remaining pups from a litter of nine. Ann’s idea had been to train her up to be a service dog for me. Sounded like a good idea. After all, how tough could it be to raise a puppy? I was willing to give the young’un a go.

Ann and I leaned toward naming the pup Heidy (Hidey?). Seemed fitting as the timid creature immediately dove under a table and would not come out for weeks. Because she was born on Christmas Day 2023, however, my sister, Diane, suggested we call her “Holly.” So Holly she became.

That I had zero experience raising puppies was evident right away. Although our family had a dog when I was a kid, she was grown by the summer day in 1969 when we got her, hidden in my brother Jim’s Seattle Times delivery bag in doomed hope of sneaking her past our mother. As I learned over the years, Irene Whale knew everything that happened in our house.

“Oh, you saw,” Jim said. But we kept her.

When Holly was small, it was easy to hide things from her, keep them out of her ever-eager jaws. But there were surprises. Starting with the dirty object she dumped on our bed one night.

“What the hell is that?!” I cried.

“And where’d she get it from!?” cried Ann.

Turned out to be a chunk of decaying wood Holly had dragged in from the backyard, flaking off dirt as she moved, alive with the sorts of nasties and crawlies that only come out when the bat in the moonlight flies.

We soon discovered Holly’s ravenous appetite for eyeglasses. To date, she has wracked-up two casualties, a pair of Ann’s and one of mine, including the glasses I’d only had for two days until she brought them to their untimely end.

Likewise, I had not anticipated Holly’s constant need to play, day and night. Many times a thud or a toy squeak in the darkness declares, “Hey, humans, it’s 3 a.m.. That’s wakey wakey, time, so get up and play with me.”

Time has advanced so that today Holly can stretch to heights we had once thought safe from her after-my-peeps-are-asleep predations and disgusting dig-em-ups.

The more constant bone I have to pick with Holly, however, is shoes. That is, no matter where we put those suckers in the evening, in the morning one or both will be missing. And even if we should be lucky enough to find one, perhaps out in our backyard where footwear goes to die, when we find it, it is likely to be “all chawed up.”

When I think of Holly’s antics, a line from the Bhagavad Gita – slightly altered here for my purposes – comes to mind, the one that Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted as he watched the explosion of the first atomic bomb in the deserts near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in in the summer of 1945.

“Now, I am become [Holly], destroyer of (shoes).”

Of course, there’s also plenty of positive stuff this dog is teaching me.

If I get angry at Holly or impatient with her for something she’s done, I know now she is not to blame. She’s just a dog, not to mention a German Shepherd, a highly intelligent breed.

In her wounded eyes I see reflected my wrong-headed tendency to project human understanding into her thought processes. As if she could somehow understand that the shoes she has spirited away, now hidden and chewed, are important to me. Or that the eyeglasses she’s destroyed are important to me. No, the fault is mine because I left them someplace where she could get to them at night. After all, like all puppies, this one chews on everything. Once Ann even caught her trying to gnaw the floor!

If we are observant, if we care about becoming better versions of ourselves for the people around us and the world in general, we need to be vigilant as to where the other stops and we begin Even when the other is animal.

Projection is the problem. We think we’re reading those annoying shortcomings and faults into the other when many times they actually flow from us unconsciously, turn and face us, and then we this projection of ourselves “the truth.” Coming to grips with this is not easy. It’s agonizing. But in the end, it’s simply about being honest with ourselves, seeing others for who or what they are, and not casting blame for whatever goes wrong in our lives and in the world onto somebody else.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.