Dominick Alcid, Federal Bar Association NABE Communications Section Chair
Dominick (Dom) Alcid is our brand new Communications Section Chair – sworn into office at the NABE Annual Meeting in August. Learn a little about Dom in his bio below, and be on the lookout for his Chair’s letter in the next issue of Communicators Talk.
Dominick Alcid is the Director of Membership & Marketing at the Federal Bar Association. He has been a loyal NABE member for over 15 years and has served as a panelist, moderator, Committee Chair, and as Treasurer for the Communication Section Executive Council. His bar association experience covers section programming and marketing, membership recruitment and retention, affinity benefit programs, video project management, membership data analytics, advertising and sponsorship sales, leadership volunteer relations, non-dues revenue development, contract negotiation and more.
Eliza Gano, Communications Manager American College of Trial Lawyers (Newport Beach, CA)
How long have you been a member of NABE Comm? Five years
When you were a kid, did you dream of being a Bar Association Executive? No, those are three words that never popped into my mind as a child.
If not, describe how you got to where you are today: I attended grad school at USC (University of Southern California) for print journalism and had various editing and writing jobs in magazines, newspapers, online, different industries. It was a stroke of luck and timing that I found my current position. I had no idea about the association world until I applied for the job but was happy to discover that it combines a lot of the things I did in my previous journalism-oriented positions.
What is the most rewarding part of your job? Being able to help our members and the committees they work on to achieve their goals. The mission of the organization is to improve the standards of trial practice, professionalism, ethics, and the administration of justice so when I can help move the needle forward in some way, that is gratifying.
What is the most challenging part of your job? Juggling the different deadlines and expectations and, of course, wanting to do it as best as I can.
If you weren’t a bar executive, what would you want to be? A reporter with a side gig as a photographer/musician/yoga instructor
What is your greatest accomplishment? Two come to mind: being a cancer thriver because the experience made me healthier and stronger, physically and mentally, it also increased my attitude of gratitude to everything in my life. Helping to raise funds to build a birthing clinic in Rwanda, so many women in developing countries don’t have the access or facilities to the healthcare we have as a First World country.
What is the best piece of advice that you ever received through NABE?: Do it with style.
What would you tell someone new to the crazy world of Bar Executives? Be flexible – change is constant, especially if you work in a small staff, and you’ll need to adjust. Be curious – learning things from outside your position or area of expertise can help in unexpected ways. Be open – to questions, to listening, to other people.
What makes you successful in your position? As a former college athlete, I understand and appreciate the meaning behind hard work and persistence, which has helped with achieving my goals. Other qualities that have helped include my penchant for paying attention to details, resilience through whatever gets thrown my way and being able to laugh at the little things.
What does your bar do better than most? Where do you shine? We shine in the meeting experience. Our meetings (the spring and fall meetings) are held at top-notch locations with speakers meant to educate, entertain and engage not just our members but also their guests. This sentiment has been passed along to meetings that are held on the regional and local level, where most members stay connected to the organization. Those members who are elected to leadership positions are truly engaged with the work of the organization, and I think this comes from the thoughtful framework created by the organization to ensure it happens.
Favorite quote: This is a recent fav: “Solvitur ambulando” – It is solved by walking.
Favorite sports team: Any LA team (Lakers, Clippers, Sparks, Dodgers, Rams, Chargers, Galaxy); Pac-12 teams; St. Louis Billikens (my undergrad school)
Any interesting celebrity sightings or run ins: Casually trying to ask Keanu Reeves a question while he was smoking outside a bar in Hollywood. More recently, seeing John Stamos talking to Dick Van Dyke after an acapella show. As an aside, I used to work for Us Weekly magazine (yes, the celebrity magazine) and saw more than my fair share of celebrities.
Person you would most like to have dinner with (alive or dead): I couldn’t pick just one: Beyonce, Maya Angelou, Zelda Fitzgerald, Hedy Lamar, Krista Suh
What do you do for fun? Spend time outdoors (hike, bike, going to the beach) and with loved ones (human and furry); yoga; read; explore the area I live in like a tourist
“I need to lose some weight,” an old friend proclaimed recently, clutching his midsection. “When are you going to write that book on losing weight?”
Now.
The chapters might be a little longer than your typical newsletter article, but this is a digital publication. It’s not like we’re going to run out of cyber.
Let’s go with “Did You Used To Be Russell Rawlings?” as the working title. An innocent youngster asked that very question of me in the fall of 1978 – the year in which I graduated from college and lost more than 100 pounds.
“Did you used to be Russell Rawlings?”
I still am.
The tone will be conversational. This isn’t a speech and it certainly isn’t a sermon. It is meant to come across as personal, as if we’re just talking, one-on-one.
Losing weight is not an easy subject to talk about, or at least it never was for me. Only a few brave souls ventured into these waters when I was at my heaviest for risk of hurting me or alienating me.
Bottom line – the ones who did loved me enough to tell me the truth. It wasn’t easy and it still isn’t, but I succeeded then and I am still succeeding when it comes to battling obesity and maintaining a healthy weight.
The key back then, as it is today, is the same: I keep trying. You have to keep trying.
I apologize in advance if my words come across as harsh or insensitive, for that is not my intention. All I want to do is help, to break through, by whatever means necessary.
And if it ever seems as if I’m talking to myself, it’s because I am.
Given that this is a work in progress, forgive me if the chapters appear to be out of order. There is no order, actually. This is a complete and total download of virtually everything I have learned about losing weight in my lifetime. Lessons learned, tricks of the trade, so to speak, and I would never expect all of it to resonate with anyone.
But some of it will.
The part about trying – let’s start with that. The old friend mentioned in the first paragraph said that he wanted to lose weight, but he didn’t indicate whether he was ready to lose weight. He didn’t say whether he was ready to try, and keep trying.
But I know him well enough to know that if he truly sets his mind to it, he will succeed. When he was a younger man, he was a good athlete. If he’s ready to lose weight and adopt a healthier lifestyle, he will.
And so will you.
Get off your ass.
Pardon my language, Dean Smith and anyone
else who’s ever reminded me that profanity is the tool of an uneducated man.
Every now and then, nothing else will do.
It’s a message that I preach to
myself on a daily basis. The welcome screen on my fitness device reads “GOYA,”
and that’s what it stands for: Get Off Your Ass!
The message was hammered home to me
many years ago when a backsliding episode had reached near-epidemic
proportions. Sometimes life, or more specifically work, gets in the way. Or at
least that’s the excuse I was running with at the time, and it’s the only
running I was doing.
Sensing the matter was approaching
rock bottom, I set the alarm clock for 5 a.m., which had been my gold standard
in previous years. “Three miles and a bowl of oatmeal” is how I had once
described my morning ritual.
But I had gotten away from that
good habit and replaced it with a lot of bad ones. So I determined that I was
going to get back into the practice of getting up at 5 in the morning, rain or
shine. If I exercised, that would be all the better, but even if I just sat on
the old exercycle and read the paper for an hour, it would be an improvement
over what I was doing.
Which was nothing.
Slowly but surely the strategy paid
off. At first I set my goal at peddling for 40 minutes, in 20-minute shifts.
Then I built up to peddling for 45 minutes, non-stop. Over time I set the
resistance level higher and increased my speed as well.
It worked. Before long I developed
an enormously successful routine of peddling over the course of the first hour
and walking three miles in the second hour. I was done by 7 a.m. and ready for
the day ahead.
It was also during this period that
I adopted another great habit, albeit one for which I have been ridiculed unmercifully
over the years by friends and family alike: I go to bed early. The general
target is 9 p.m., some nights sooner and some nights later, but typically
around that time.
Which brings us to the final
thought for this conversation.
Tomorrow starts today.
Losing weight is a psychological
experience unlike any other, because in so many ways it is a mind game. The
mathematics might indicate otherwise, that it is simply the summation of
calories in vs. calories out, and that is indeed worth noting.
But both sides of that equation
hinge upon decisions that we make, be they good or bad. We typically start a
diet from a low point, from a point that can be and often is daunting if not
downright depressing. We’re in a hole, we’re in a ditch, and we’re trying to
climb out.
Even if we know how, that doesn’t
make it easy. Simple perhaps, but never easy. In many instances it will be one
of the hardest things you will ever do, and the most rewarding.
So please remember that no matter
what has happened in the past, be it over the course of your lifetime or the
past 24 hours, tomorrow is a new day. It is a gift, filled with challenges and
opportunities that encompass this thing we call life, and you owe it to
yourself to live it for all it is worth.
Not tomorrow, not next week, not
next month, and not next year.
Today.
Russell Rawlings serves as director of
external affairs and communications for the North Carolina Bar Association, and
welcomes the opportunity to write and speak on the subjects of wellness, weight
and walking.
Tim Eigo, State Bar of Arizona Immediate Past Communications Section Chair
The
State of the Section is sound. Generally.
For
the political junkies out there, you’ll recognize that first confident and
self-serving sentence. A version of it has been uttered by presidents at State
of the Union addresses for generations. (Don’t watch the SOTU? Can’t say I blame
you.)
When
it comes to the Communications Section, the sentence is correct in a lot of
ways. As I end my term as Section Chair, there is much for me to admire in our
comms community. All of the following continue to be awesome-sauce:
Our in-person Workshop continues to be the gold standard at NABE – and beyond – for timely and high-quality education delivered at a modest price.
Our online interactions continue to be one of the best Section benefits – and interaction is still robust, even after the sunsetting of the traditional listserv and adoption of an online community. Nobody puts NABE communicators in a corner!
The one-on-one interactions between communicators still make my heart swell with pleasure. I have benefited so much from those relationships, and I hear the same from others. Whether by email or phone call, those mutual-mentoring sessions have changed my professional life.
By the way, all those terrific results are made possible by a very deep bench of people. No single Chair, or even Section Council, can do much alone. So I thank everyone for their talent and perspiration. And I am thrilled that Dom Alcid of the Federal Bar Association is here to take up the mantle of Section Chair. Buckle in – things are about to get better!
Given
all that, why did I open by adding the weaselly word “generally” to qualify the
state of the Section?
Because
the profession and the world are changing around us. The needs of our members
are changing too – growing more acute, more time-sensitive, and more demanding
of a return on investment.
Surprised?
NABE shouldn’t be. We’ve seen our own associations’ members ramp up their
expectations in similar ways. Turns out we have met the challenging association
consumer, and they are we.
I’ve
been giving this a lot of thought as I begin a new role: Chair of the NABE
Professional Development Committee. This hard-working group of members –
formerly called the Program Committee – has an ambitious charge. It used to
oversee and create the in-person programming for the Annual and Midyear
Meetings. It still does that, but now it also serves as an umbrella for webinar
and online educational offerings.
The
idea is that better collaboration will result in better programming. Absolutely
true. And this sensible change forces us to recommit to serve the members, and
to take a clear-eyed look at where we need to improve.
So
in that regard, I ask you to keep reaching out to me – anytime – with
programming and engagement ideas for your entire NABE experience. I’m at tim.eigo@staff.azbar.org, and my cell is
602-908-6991.
Yes,
I know, NABE ain’t Google. (And I know Google can be problematic.) But I was
struck by the willingness of its participants to imagine broadly. As the
article says, “Moonshots don’t begin with brainstorming clever answers. They
start with the hard work of finding the right questions.”
How
do I know this works? Because every great development I’ve witnessed at NABE or
my own workplaces has come from thoughtful thinkers like these. Those creative people
work among us, and NABE will thrive if they begin imagining what our own
successful Moonshot looks like.
Too
exhausted to brainstorm a Moonshot? I get it. But I urge you to do this: Seek
out the new communicators in your office and talk about professional
development. Be an ambassador for the value of a NABE membership. And advocate
in your organization for the budget line that allows comms people to meet and
learn from their colleagues nationwide. Together, we can get to the Moon – and
beyond! #NABEmore
Jason Cecil Chief Technology Officer, State Bar of Missouri
Google Analytics is a wonderful tool that provides insight
about the people visiting your website. The best part? It’s completely free.
After creating an account and entering details about your
site into the tool, you are given a small code snippet that must be added to
the pages in your website. Most websites utilize Content Management Systems
that already have a place built in for this code. Once the code is in place,
Google will begin collecting statistics about your visitors. At this point, it
is beneficial to familiarize yourself with the tool and the terms it uses.
What to look for
In the early days of the internet, hits were the statistic
most often cited. However, this statistic can be very misleading and is often
not very useful at all. Pageviews are a better statistic for gauging the amount
of traffic your site receives because one pageview can generate many hits.
Another great statistic is the number of visitors. A single
visitor could visit multiple pages, thereby generating multiple pageviews. This
statistic gets us close to the number of people who are visiting your site, but
fails to account for duplicate viewings, so the visitors statistic will count
the single visitor multiple times. Opting instead to view “unique visitors” provides
a more advanced look. Unique visitors is a statistic that attempts to count
visitors only once, no matter how many times they visit the site during a given
time period.
When you first launch Google Analytics, you are greeted with
some overview statistics about your site as a whole. However, the real value is
being able to drill down to individual sections, and even individual pages, to
get statistics about that particular piece of content.
Tracking your goals
It would take far more space than I have here to review
every feature on the platform, a key one to note is the Goals feature. Goals is
part of the tool that helps you track conversions; it allows you to identify
target pages that represent the end of an action taken on the website, such as
a “thank you for registering” page or a “membership renewal confirmation” page.
When visitors land on these pages, Google Analytics will track and tally them.
You can later use the data to discover how they were funneled into the
registration process and to create visual dashboards tracking progress towards
your goals.
Overall, I like to think of Google Analytics as a tool to
help us make better, and more useful, websites for our members. The data can
show us if our members are having trouble finding specific pieces of
information. It can show us how long they stay on the site and help us identify
stale content that is no longer useful. You will get the most out of the
platform by understanding your own content, how you want that content to be
consumed by your visitors, and by identifying which statistics are meaningful
to you. Which statistics are most useful can be different for each piece of
content depending on how you intend it to be consumed by your visitors. With
the flexibility and features it offers, Google Analytics should be in every
bar’s web toolbox.
Jordan Leasure Chiropractic Physician, Healthy-Lawyer.com
Looking for wellness content for your blog or social media? Feel free to use this article or each tip individually ( with attribution).
Top Five Daily Habits Healthy Lawyers Implement
Wellness is suddenly at the forefront of all
law association publications. You’re overworked, anxious and possibly even
burned out. Law is oftentimes a very rewarding vocation but it is always a
trying one. Whether you are a litigator or in house counsel, trying to balance
your professional responsibilities with personal relationships as well as
self-care can be a daunting chore.
Those that seem to have greater resilience or
vitality are those that take small bites daily. They have created a lifestyle
that is sustainable and incorporates healthy choices into both their personal
and professional lives. Below we’ll outline five seemingly simply tasks you can
engage in to become or continue to be a Healthy
Lawyer.
Practice Gratitude Daily
Gratitude is the feeling that comes from happiness that comes from appreciation. There are many days it can be a challenge to be grateful overall – but there is ALWAYS something to be grateful for – even if it’s the fact that a challenging day is over!
The practice of
gratitude is of supreme importance to personal satisfaction and professional
success. A gratitude journal, thank you notes and positive self-talk are all
pieces of a positive mental attitude.
I find the easiest way to implement gratitude on
a daily basis is to keep a notebook next to the bed and record 3 things each
evening that I’m grateful for. It may be closing a large client, having another
settlement close or something as simple as seeing a child laugh on my way into
work. What brings you gratitude or an appreciation for life and living doesn’t
need to be grand – be grateful for the little things.
Stay Hydrated
Drinking water is a requirement of human health, yet a lot of us consume much less than we should. We find solace in a grande double shot latte or a second cup of merlot yet consuming a literal elixir of life is somehow inconvenient. Proper hydration not only maintains the quality of your skin, helps with sleep but even improves cognition – and who couldn’t use better recall! An easy benchmark is attempting to drink ½ your body weight in ounces of water. I don’t go anywhere without my S’well bottle. Obviously, if you’re living in a warmer climate or if you are exercising you will want to be drinking more but the above recommendations are suitable for most.
Sleep
When every hour has a price tag, the number of hours you sleep can be at a premium. How can something so intuitive be so challenging at the same time? Sleep is required for restoration and recuperation. Keep the bedroom activities simple! The bedroom should be for two things – sleeping and sex. No need for a television, reading, texting, etc. Don’t work in bed – it weakens “the mental association between your bedroom and sleep,” according to Harvard’s Division of Sleep Medicine. If you bring work home keep it in a dedicated office space.
Supplementation
This is one of the easiest and least time-consuming habits. The quality of the soil our food is grown in becomes less nutritious every year. We’re eating on the run, eating fewer vitamins and minerals and more processed foods. Always check with your physician before starting a supplement regimen but I typically recommend a high-quality multivitamin, vitamin D, omega 3 fatty acids and probiotics to my clients in the legal sector. It’s an easy place to start, you should see an improvement in your lab work after about 90 days and you may even see a decrease in joint pain and an improvement in mood and motivation!
Exercise
When examining the physiology of your system it was designed to move -and not just from the car to the desk to the bed and vice versa. Most people spend 75% of their waking day seated. Health hazards of sitting, compounded by attorneys’ other poor habits are cutting not only careers short but lives as well. We all know that regular exercise is a fantastic stress reliever but with the cardiovascular benefits, you have the ability to improve blood flow to the brain. In a 2008 article, Exercise is Brain Food the following benefits were outlined that directly relate to attorneys.
While exercising, oxygen saturation and angiogenesis
(blood vessel growth) occur in areas of the brain associated with rational
thinking and as well as social, physical and intellectual performance.
Exercise drops stress hormones and increases the
number of neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine, which are known
to accelerate information processing.
Exercise upregulates neurotrophins (brain-derived
neurotrophic factor, insulin-like growth factor, and basic fibroblast growth
factor). These support the survival and differentiation of neurons in the
developing brain, dendritic branching, and synaptic machinery in the adult
brain (ibid).
The above benefits speak for
themselves. Get out there and move!
If the above suggestions are too
overwhelming pick one and start your implementation today. Whether for
yourself, a friend or family member – you’re worth it!
Karen Korr Full Korr Press (formerly San Diego County Bar Association)
Bar association member benefit partners are the bomb (do people still say that, or did we leave that back in 2010?). Not only do they make it possible for bars big and small to offer discounts and such to their memberships, but they support bar publications and bar events, and overall the bar world is better off with member benefit partners around. I know that often times bars offer our partners a menu of options for how they can offer support through sponsorship. But what do the benefit partners want in return? I asked long-time NABE supporters Tracey Gavin (TG) of LawPay and Fastcase’s Joe Patz Vineyard (JP) to share their thoughts.
What are the “must haves” for any sponsorship opportunity you consider?
TG: The ideal sponsorship opportunity would allow us to have the registration list approximately two weeks before the event and a post event list for follow up. We’d love speaking opportunities around our expertise. Even better, a CLE opportunity. “Vendor” presentations are typically not well attended as it has the appearance of just a sales pitch.
We would rather have the opportunity to educate and inform. We would also want to make sure there was plenty of foot traffic to the booth. Any way to make sure the attendees visit the booth – all beverage breaks near vendors, block time for attendees to visit exhibits, depending on the size of the meeting. If possible, we would love to have a spot where we could demo our platform.
How do you like to engage with event attendees? i.e. at the booth or do you want a seat at each meal?
JP: We consider ourselves partners not a vendor. When we attend a bar association conference we act as an extension of the bar association to train members on the Fastcase member benefit and get to know your members. This means, we will go into continuing education seminars, sit down with your members or leadership at meals to engage and hear from your members and leadership.
TG: A booth is always a nice home base as long as there is a lot of good, quality foot traffic. I think it is tougher for a sponsor to network with attorneys at meals because many times they are trying to network with other attorneys or judges. I think the option to allow sponsors to attend happy hours and meals is a nice to have but guaranteeing foot traffic at the booth is best.
What can you offer Bars that they often don’t think of asking for?
JP: Fastcase provides our partners customized ads catered their membership to keep the bar’s voice and message consistent about the Fastcase benefit. Our content marketing for your bar’s websites, social media, etc., help engage the membership with attention grabbing “how to” posts.
What do your most successful bar relationships look like?
JP: The most successful bar relationships are truly partnerships. Fastcase is a very different member benefit offering from other services because of how our partnership is structured. We collaborate with bar associations around the country to provide a benefit that is free for over 900,000 attorneys across the United States.
TG: Bars that truly see us as partners and not just vendors, understanding that we both benefit by working together. We understand you can’t just slap a logo on a bar website and call it a day and hope it brings in a lot of business. We need to collaboratively – benefit partners need to commit to a marketing spend and bars need to promote their partners within the bar channels.
Why do you think bars should partner with LawPay in particular?
TG: LawPay built a program to be partner with the Bar Associations in mind. LawPay isn’t just a product, it is a relationship. Every aspect of our product, company culture and marketing is relationship based. We want to build the best product for attorneys while giving bars quality educational assets that can hopefully help attorneys and the bar. We are also very open to working with the bars in exploring new ideas and are generally very flexible – we want to work with you to figure out what will work best for your bar and your members.
Why do you think bars should partner with Fastcase in particular?
JP: There are many reasons bar associations across the country trust Fastcase with their members. One of the most crucial reasons we have the most experienced and stable leadership in legal publishing. Our president and CEO, Phil Rosenthal and Ed Walters, respectively, founded the company in 1999 and continue to lead Fastcase today, nearly 20 years later. They also are leaders in technology. For example, Ed is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown and Cornell Law Schools, teaching the Law of Robots. Phil has a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech for his work in string theory. Our COO, Steve Errick, is the former head of product and M&A for Lexis. He was the driving force behind Lexis’ acquisitions of Lex Machina, Law 360, Intelligize, and Ravel.
How long have you been a member of NABE Comm: Just over 2 years
When you were a kid, did you dream of being a Bar Association Executive? Of course! Doesn’t everyone?! I actually wanted to ride dolphins at Sea World 😉
If not, describe how you got to where you are today: I was a double major in History & Government at Wofford College then received my MPA from University of Georgia. I helped open our local children’s museum working in Development, Volunteer Management & Events for eight years and had decided to stay home with our children. When the former RCBA ED was retiring, a friend and Past President suggested I apply for the job…it worked out!
What is the most rewarding part of your job: Working with the many outstanding attorneys in our community. Making the RCBA to be the most valuable and relevant legal resource in our area, as well as being their number one choice for membership in a legal association.
What is the most challenging part of your job: Managing successfully the different roles & responsibilities needed for a one-woman run association!
If you weren’t a bar executive, what would you want to be?: Event Planning or something in state government
What is your greatest accomplishment: My wonderful family and serving as 2017-18 President of the Junior League of Columbia. I’m also very proud of our Bar’s past and continuing to build and strengthen our good work.
What is the best piece of advice that you ever received through NABE?: Take advantage of the terrific knowledge and expertise available through the conferences and listservs. There’s a lot of smart folks that have experienced a similar situation and can be a critical help when the need arises.
What would you tell someone new to the crazy world of Bar-Executive-dom?: At least in my experience, it can mean every day is different – get ready for managing the member database, organizing Memorial Service speakers, planning for an Ethics CLE, budgeting for another event, and writing an article for the newsletter-all on the same day!
What makes you successful in your position? Committed to excellence and making a difference. Giving 100% as much as I can. I’m working diligently for our leadership, as well as our attendance at events to be reflective of the overall diversity of our membership.
What does your bar do better than most? Where do you shine? Great events that are consistently being refreshed & digging deep to listen and determine what our members find most valuable and beneficial about their memberships.
What’s your favorite website or app?:
For work: Twitter, NABE + other Bar Associations for ideas
Personally: Goodreads, Nike Run Club and Yahoo Weather
Do you have a motto?: You are your best thing.
Favorite quote: The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
Favorite sports team: University of North Carolina Tarheels
Any interesting celebrity sightings or run ins: The drummer for Hootie & the Blowfish attends our church’s contemporary worship service.
Favorite band/album/concert of all time: Indigo Girls, Bruce Springsteen, most country music
Favorite Book: any and all by Lee Child or Nelson DeMille
Favorite movie: Ocean’s Eleven
Person you would most like to have dinner with (alive or dead): Michelle Obama
Hidden talent: Still looking for it!
What do you do for fun? Reading, traveling, running and spending time with family & friends
Brownie has taught me so much about life, love and friendship, not the least of which is the fact that he never gave up.
He lived hard and free the first five years of his life, roaming the hills of Alleghany County, North Carolina, in search of his next meal and his forever home. The details are sketchy and forever shall remain, but we knew early on that he liked us and looked forward to the weeks and weekends when we visited our mountain cabin.
“Don’t feed him,” I said to my wife, to no avail. We already had a dog, Shadow, who was much older than Brownie, and I just couldn’t wrap my head around adopting another one at that time.
But it broke my heart every time he chased us down the road on Sunday afternoon, running for all he was worth in hopes that we would open the backdoor and let him into our lives on a permanent basis.
Then one fateful day the decision made itself. His Achilles heel – running after cars and trucks – nearly did him in as he successfully chased down a pickup. The veterinarian said it was a clean break, but that someone would have to claim him and agree to pay for the surgery before they would operate.
The X-ray also revealed buckshot in his right hindleg, further testimony to his grit and determination.
That is when he became our dog.
We bonded over the next 10 weeks, during which time Brownie had to remain caged in order for the leg to fully heel. Throughout the fall of that year, I spent several hours a night in the garage keeping him company, reading a book or listening to a ballgame on the radio.
Once the pin was removed and he was cleared for activity, Brownie continued to favor the broken leg. Even when he let his paw touch the ground, he wasn’t putting any weight on it.
Then, one miraculous day, he realized that his leg was OK. He began putting more and more weight on it, and within a week it was all I could do to contain him with a leash, even two.
From that moment on, he became my walking partner. Even before Shadow died the following winter, her walks had become slower and shorter. But Brownie, oh my, he is ready to go every morning at 5 a.m.
I can buy him off with a treat long enough to drink a cup of coffee, but that’s it.
He doesn’t understand the concept of weekend, holiday or daylight savings time. Rain, sleet, snow or shine, we go. Whatever indecision I ever encountered when it comes to walking in the morning is a distant memory.
From a dietary standpoint, the rest of my day may well be a train wreck, and often is. But not that first hour. We get it right in the morning – every morning.
Walking is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Brownie’s contributions to my overall health and wellness. He touches my heart in places no other creature can reach, and teaches me life lessons on a daily basis.
He appreciates the best that life has to offer, never sweating the details, and keeps everything in proper perspective. He’s a great listener, tolerates my singing, and appreciates every gesture of kindness and love that my wife and I have to offer.
It is tough leaving Brownie in the morning, even though I know he is safe and secure in our home, but it’s all worth it when his face is the first thing I encounter when I unlock the front door at the end of the day.
Whatever baggage I may have accumulated throughout the day melts away, perhaps not entirely, but enough so that I am reminded once again how precious this life is and how fortunate and blessed I am.
I am also reminded of my constant prayer, in which I ask God to help me worry about things that matter.
Brownie has taught me these and so many other important lessons, the greatest of which is the fact that he never gave up.
NABE Communicators Talk 