Cyberspace as a Warm and Loving Place

In the two days since Oscar died so suddenly, an amazing 182 comments have been left on his blog. So many of us, devastated at his loss, rushed to share Katy and Martin's sorrow.

It set my Mom to thinking. As always, when she is musing about something, she asked, "Jake, what do you think?" And (with apologies to the New Yorker cartoon) I told her what I always tell her: Woof!!

Which she interpreted in the following way:

Writing a dogblog is incredibly captivating. There's the dog's unique personality and then there's the human's own personality and they become so intertwined that it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins. But then, in expressing sadness and sympathy to Oscar's family, so many humans took off their dog masks and said, "Here we are. We feel for you and we are grieving with you. And so are our dogs."

It's a fascinating, previously unimaginable, form of communication. It's called "virtual." But an ocean of real, not virtual, tears were shed behind those 182 comments -- and perhaps only five or ten, if that many of us, actually met Oscar and his family other than through his fun and friendly blogs and comments on other's posts.

I guess what Mom is trying to say is that we are on to something wonderful. So: Woof!!!

(I guess many of you have already figured this out -- but we're still kind of new at this.)

Jake