A Prayer on Thanksgiving Day

On Thanksgiving Day, I had just returned back to the mainland from a 10-day trip on a cruise to Antarctica for a conference on psychedelics.

I was lying in bed in my hotel in Ushuaia, the southern-most port city in Argentina that serves as a gateway to Antarctica. My wife, who I had just reconnected with after we spent three months separated and considering divorce, called me and tells me that she can’t find one of our dogs, Rouxmina, or Roo for short.

At first I thought she was kidding, but it was clear that she was serious as she explained what happened. Apparently my wife was driving on Highway 1 to one of the state beach parks in Mendocino county with our two dogs. Normally she will crack a window to let them stick their heads out for air, and typically it’s not a big deal. Because the road is windy, my wife normally drives much slower than her usual speed.

However, this time, Rouxmina inadvertently pressed the window button on the door and opened the car window even further. Simultaneously, my wife was driving on a tight turn and Rouxmina, startled by the sudden movement, ended up jumping out the window and tumbled down the steep hill that was alongside the highway. When my wife had realized what had happened, she stopped the car and ended up searching for our dog for hours in the trees and brush.

Keeping in mind that I was still in Argentina, I could not do much except post a few digital flyers on a few Facebook groups and call a few people to see if they could help find our dog. The best I could do was call periodically to check in with my wife, who was also barely in signal range, and so we had to speak in broken, segmented communications and texts.

For some context, this dog is a very peculiar one that ended up in our lives. We had rescued her alongside her dog-brother, Cupresidian, back when we were living in Washington state a few years ago. What had happened was my wife and I were talking about getting an animal, either a cat or a dog, a few months earlier. I remembered I had a dream or vision about a cream or tan-colored animal walking down our stairway in our house. I honestly thought it was a cat and we were going to have a cat in our lives pretty soon.

But somehow we ended up fostering two smaller dogs for a few weeks, and found them a good home. Thinking we could be fine with fostering from the time being, we brought in a black puppy named Mickey. A few days later, my wife was looking at the rescue website and saw this tan dog named Rosi, and couldn’t stop thinking about her. She kept saying that there was something about that dog. The next day, the rescue coordinator asked us if we could foster Rosi.

When we brought her home, she immediately started playing with Mickey and it was clear they were going to be friends for a long time.

After Rosi got acclimated to our household, we took the two dogs for a hike, where we somehow ended up getting lost. At one point during the hike, there was no trail or walkway alongside a highway, and we ended up having to carry the dogs up a hill. Somehow I came out of that experience telling my wife that I’m pretty sure that these are our dogs. And so we adopted them the following day.

Mickey became Cupresidian (or Cooper) and Rosi became Rouxmina (Roo).

Rouxmina’s personality and characteristics reminded me very much of my mom. She’s a very stubborn dog who often does the opposite of the command that we want her to do. When she came to us, her puppy teeth had been rotting because she was born with and survived distemper, which can kill up to 80% of puppies but results in complications like the destruction of teeth enamel that prevent adult teeth from growing in. So we had her baby teeth removed. My mother suffered from dental cavities at a young age and had to remove many teeth as she became an adult.

Rouxmina tends to bark in a high pitched yelp when she is upset, that is very reminiscent of my mother’s shrill yell to get my attention. She somehow manages to get her way too, same as my mom’s. She also struggles with gastrointestinal problems, again not unlike my mom. She came up from the streets of Tijuana and has very much been a scrapper that fights dogs many times her size, not much different from my mom’s ability to take on people of any position, occupation, or background.

So this dog has a very special place in my heart, especially after my mom’s passing the year before and that my mom’s birthday was the same day I left for this Antarctica trip.

At some point, since my wife hadn’t yet reported any good news, I started considering the worst that either she would be lost or she had died from the impact of falling out the car window and landing in the ravine below. So I did the one thing I knew I could, which was meditating and praying. And I ended up praying to St. Anthony of Padua as the patron saint of finding missing objects and lost people. Mind you, I rarely pray to any Catholic saints but the thought came up after I recently connected with my friend’s mother, a devout Catholic, and her faith made a huge impression on me. Plus there are few equivalent beings to pray to for lost things or people in Buddhist canon.

I found a five-minute prayer to St. Anthony for lost dogs on YouTube, and kept playing and repeating the prayer for about 45 minutes. And each time the prayer came to this point of hoping for the dog to make safe passage to God if that is His will, I kept crying over and over again. But I continued to read out loud the prayer until at some point, I called my wife and told her I was wondering if Rouxmina may be dead. And she ended up sobbing as I told her I had to say this prayer with her. So I recited this prayer to St. Anthony, hoping it might bring my wife some solace and she might consider going home. She had already searched for three hours.

My wife seemed undaunted despite my own fears, and she continued on to search for our dog.

About 20 minutes after that phone call, she called me back to let me know that she had found Rouxmina. It was as if the path to her was a little more clear and had made more sense, and she followed her intuition to where our dog might be. It had turned out Rouxmina had fractured her hip and couldn’t move without significant pain. But with the help a kind stranger who lived nearby and had searched two hours alongside my wife, my wife was able to take Rouxmina to the emergency veterinarian. And later that week, we were able to get her in for surgery and have her hip repaired.

And that is the story of how we reconnected with our lost dog with the help of St. Anthony.