Marley and Me and Me

My younger brother is studying to be a veterinarian. My bestfriend is a veterinarian. I have a cousin who is also a veterinarian. And so I need to mention that I have more than 10 good friends who are all veterinarians. I once filed for a leave of absence from UP to consider studying Veterinary Medicine at the University of Southern Mindanao, a leading institute for those dreaming to be excellent veterinarians.

I never became a veterinarian, and I believe I could have forced myself to become one but my passion for the discipline could only be limited to pure academics. I do not like dogs, or cats, or rabbits and iguanas. I cringe at the sight of someone kissing a dog's mouth wet with rabid saliva. And the smell of a cat's poop, I believe, is equivalent to a thousand rafflesia. I do not understand why some people get pets when there is so much more to do in life.

Chico and Delamar of Monster Radio once had a passionate discussion over this movie called Marley and Me. I remember Chico relating to the listeners that he was all in tears watching the film. Delamar was also in full affirmation with her squeaky yet endearing and intelligent voice. Listening to them while carefully trying not to fall asleep in a packed bus in EDSA somehow got me into a serious dialogue with myself: first issue was the accuracy of the term dialogue when in fact talking to myself would have been a qualified monologue; the other one was that I should try watching that film and find out for myself if I can laugh at or share in their sentiments.

And so today I watched the film, and boy I cried big time.

It is a story of a young couple played by Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. They got themselves Marley when they moved to their South Florida home. They eventually had children and having Marley as a difficult dog to handle only made housekeeping and child rearing extra difficult for the couple. They brought Marley with them when the head of the family had to move to Philadelphia for a new writing job. It was in Philadelphia where Marley died and got burried by the family.

But the story of Marley is not just a word in a sentence, or a sentence in a paragraph. Marley was a labrador that bore witness to the growth of a marriage and a family. He was the first child that brought joy when the couple didn't have one yet. He was the pain of the household when he would cause havoc in the family living room. He was the unnecessary inconvenience for the couple when he would run amuck in an al fresco restaurant. He was the constant odd creature that had come to be part of a family's normal daily affairs. It was not just a labrador dog, he was Marley. And when he died, he was a brother to the children, and a dead child to the couple. He was the reflection of a pursued joy when getting there was against a person's perceived satisfaction. And his passing did not terminate the valid exercise of evaluating one's true desires.

Just like John, Owen Wilson's character, I am in a state where I feel there is a serious call for introspection. He moved to Philadephia Inquirer to write reports when he was already a good and popular columnist in South Florida only to find himself convincing his boss to allow him to go back to writing columns. The part in which John's ordeal with his imagined destiny as a writer was imposed in the movie in the course of Marley's death; and the angle of John's predicament in the workplace all shrinked to a measly dot on a plane of cosmic realizations of the importance of relationships and valued memories of an orchestra of what seemed to be a chaotic parade of life's defining events.

So the next time my veterinarian friends talk about their experience of calming down pet owners who worry much beyond the expected reaction of human beings over sick animals, I will no longer laugh at their poor estate. I will have the open mind to imagine how their lives, and dreams, and dissappointments have been shaped by creatures who cannot talk and advise but can only bark, and meow and yet be more human than me.