"Was the story about Ugly real?"

Today, on the way home from the Bark Park, Maia asked me whether the story about Ugly was "real." She was asking whether the story was true. I had heard her telling Kristina about the story two nights ago. Maia had been very upset. She had difficulty in getting the story out. There had been a cat, it was homeless and ugly, so ugly that they called it Ugly. It only had one eye, people had thrown stones at it, and finally it had been mauled by dogs. It had died before this person--the narrator--could save it. It had just wanted to be loved. Maia was crying as she recounted this story. She wanted to know if it had been a real story or "they had made it up." She wanted to know why people had thrown rocks at it and been mean to it, why they had named it Ugly. Maia doesn't particularly like cats--one of ours scratched her in the eye when she was little, and she's been wary of cats ever since. She's a dog person. But she was completely undone by the story. "No," I told her, "it didn't really happen. It was made up." "There wasn't a cat? They didn't throw stones at it?" "No," I reassured her. "It affected me," she said. "Yes," I said. "That's a good thing. It means you can feel what somebody else feels. Not everybody can do that." I told her to pay attention to that feeling, that it would steer her to do the right thing. She's so sweet with animals and little children. There's a dog at the Bark Park named Ahi. He's part of a group of three or four people and about six dogs. He has the dominant personality among the dogs and chases much bigger away. Whenever he sees Maia, he trundles over on his little legs to see her. She scratches his back, and he loves it. That's a picture of Maia and Ahi that I took on October 28th. Maia is such a good girl. It's nothing we've done. It's just what is in her, despite all that she's been through. "I have to change it," Maia said, changing the radio station. It had been to a classical station, and the music had been sad. "It makes me think of the story," she said. John, Thursday, November 8, 2012