Chapel Talk Essays - English-language Films, Breda, Citizen Kane, 9

Chapel Talk Good morning. I don't think I can even begin to relate just how terrifying this is, so here's what I'm gonna do instead; I'll mumble, speak much too quickly, avoid all eye contact, and use overly-dramatic hand gestures. And since it's too early in the morning and school year to picture any of you naked, this'll have to do. In my lifetime, my family has owned and sheltered over one hundred and fifty dogs, cats, horses, goats, sheep, and various other species. My residence has acted as both a foster home and a rehab center for any animal we could make room for. Most stay with us permanently, but we haven't been lucky enough to help every animal we've come across. But the bliss of the successful adoptions greatly overshadows the disappointment of those unsuccessful. It really all began with my mother. Having grown up in a city, she didn't have the luxury of pets until she had a house of her own. She soon made up for all the animals she didn't have as child - three times over. She taught my siblings, myself, and even my father to respect and adore our fellow mammals. But even she has her favorites, and so we've owned more dogs than anything else. Her absolute favorite, (and everybody else's), was Breda. Breda, (who was, incidentally, named after a mispronunciation of a German town), was a German Shepard/ keeshond mix, and the first dog my parents adopted when they moved into their first house back in 1978. It was three years before Breda gave justice to her breed, fiercely guarding, or sheparding, if you will, my newborn sister as if it were her own. Her most incredible feat involved my little brother, Myles. Since both my parents work full-time, my sister, brother, and I were juggled among multiple babysitters. The one who was watching us when M yles was just under two years old made the horrendous mistake of staying on the phone long enough for him to toddle quite a few miles away from the house, down long, winding roads, fast cars, sharp turns, and everything else you could possiblly imagine. While my mother was at work, she received a phone call from a not-so-nearby neighbor, informing her of my brother's little odyssey. It turned out that Breda had followed Myles closer than his own shadow, all the while trying to steer him back towards the house. She wasn't successful in these attempts, but it appeared that the only was our neighbor were able to recognize my brother, who was a fairly new addition, and know whom to deliver him to, was Breda. The woman knew who the dog was, just not the baby it was following. Breda lived another fourteen wonderful years before succumbing to a spinal condition hereditary to many German Shepards. Chloe was a genuine freak of nature. Chloe was also one of the few animals that my family hadn't needed to rescue. She was adopted as a kitten by my parents around the same time as Breda. She died six months ago at the ripe old age of twenty-two. But that isn't the only thing that made her 'unique'. Chloe somehow managed to outlive feline leukemia, an overactive thyroid, deafness, cancer, kidney problems, and a quarter-of-a-decade's worth of being chased around by canines twenty times her size. I remember that when I used to call home, I could tell what room the person who answered the phone was in judging by Chloe's incessant meowing. Rusty, a German Shepard /Collie mix, was abandoned in a boggy salt marsh in southern Canada, in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record, when he was only two weeks old. For anyone who isn't familiar with a marsh, it's basically large tracks of rather barren, open land with sporadically placed craters that're filled with mud and cold sea water. I was never told exactly how anyone found him in such a desolate, isolated wasteland, but it goes without saying he was quite alone in the world. It took months of treats and numerous bites of which I still bare the scars before he would even allow me to approach him. Genuine Ticket