The Dog with the Old Soul. Jennifer Sander Basye

didn’t hesitate. All kittens were welcome, but Nishan was her favorite. She never grew beyond the size of an eight-week-old kitten. Rosa continued to nurse Nishan for almost two years. Wherever Rosa went, Nishan followed.

      They are together now, watching the crew ready the kitchen for filming. The actors arrive. Rosa runs to the door to greet them and lead them into the kitchen.

      Everything is ready for the first take. Spaghetti pot boiling on the stove, lettuce washed and dried by hand, husband and wife intimately touching shoulders as they laugh and make dinner together.

      “Cut! Where did that damn cat come from?”

      There is Rosa, perched majestically on the lower deck of the butcher block, taking a keen interest in the proceedings. I pick her up and put her on the back porch.

      The director sets up the shot again. “Camera’s rolling,” he says.

      The salad is being tossed; noodles are placed in boiling water. I see Nishan, who had remained hidden, peer out from behind a butcher-block leg. Within minutes Rosa is back in place, following every move of the camera. The director doesn’t seem to notice at first. When he does, he silently picks her up by the scruff of her neck and tosses her out.

      Minutes later she is back, arching her back against the director’s legs, as if trying to seduce him. Again, he picks her up and tosses her out the French doors.

      Before you know it, she’s back again, under the stairs. Neither the director nor the crew has noticed there is a cat door. As I wonder if I should block it so Rosa can’t get back in, she suddenly leaps from the floor to the kitchen table and then takes another flight to the butcher block.

      “There are too many cats in the kitchen!” the director barks and stomps out of the room.

      Angela follows him. I hear muffled voices, his strident and nasty, Angela’s soft and lilting as she tries to calm him. One actor has picked Rosa up and is tickling her under her chin. She responds with a rumbling purr and a gracious movement of her head.

      The director comes back, temper under control, but barely. Angela follows, a catlike smile on her face. “A few more takes and we’re done,” he says. “I give up.”

      Rosa remained in place for the rest of the morning, looking like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard demanding her close-up.

      “That’s a wrap,” the director called.

      He never broke a smile or thanked us for giving up our house and our time. He just watched silently as the rest of the crew packed up the camera gear, the lights, the food, petted Rosa one more time and left.

      A week or so later Angela called to say that the commercial was going to air at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday and would be rebroadcast for a month or two.

      We set up the television recorder, gathered all the cats on the bed and waited to see Rosa’s debut. The commercial ended. The editor had left all Rosa’s scenes on the cutting room floor! The ad was okay but we thought it lacked the emotional punch Rosa might have given it.

      Rosa, in one of her rare acts of petulance, jumped off the bed. In solidarity the other cats followed her. Only Nishan remained to ease our disappointment. A strong union household, we boycotted Safeway for a while but realized it wasn’t their call; it was the call of a director who didn’t realize that the biggest joy of all is too many cats in the kitchen.

      Transforming U

      Suzanne Tomlinson

      As a longtime journalist, I never imagined a writing assignment from a popular horse magazine would lead me to personal transformation. But that was exactly what happened when I met a horse with a giant letter U branded on his well-muscled neck.

      I’d been asked to write a piece about how to have a successful match when adopting a horse from a rescue center. A lifelong horse-crazy gal with horses of my own, I was excited about the assignment.

      I interviewed the Grace Foundation director, Beth DeCaprio. She provided some solid information and great tips on how to find a perfect equine partner at a rescue organization. Then she told me about an upcoming project—the HELP Rescue Me Trainers’ Showcase. It had grown out of a crisis involving wild horses.

      In the Midwest about two hundred of the Bureau of Land Management’s mustangs had gone through three auctions with no bidders. When that happens, the BLM brands the horses nobody wants with a big letter U to identify them as unwanted. They are no longer the responsibility of the BLM. Most of the horses with this sad scarlet letter go to slaughter operators. These particular two hundred U horses were sent to a ranch in Nebraska, where a rancher placed them on his property and then left them to fend for themselves.

      The Humane Society of the United States rushed in to help but not before many of these horses died from starvation. Horse rescue groups, including the Grace Foundation, traveled to a rehab center where the surviving mustangs were being held in the hopes that they could be helped. Beth and her volunteers agreed to take thirty-one of the U horses back to her center in California, near Sacramento. Other rescue organizations took on the remaining unwanted horses.

      Beth came home with the daunting task of finding these horses forever homes. Suddenly an inspiration hit her. Why not pair professional trainers with each of her thirty-one mustangs to give these wild horses seventy days of training and make them more adoptable?

      Local trainers took to the idea. They came to the Grace Foundation and each picked out a mustang. At the end of the training period Beth brought the whole gang—mustangs and their trainers—to the big annual horse expo in Sacramento to show off. She called it the Trainers’ Showcase. Each trainer demonstrated to the crowd what had been accomplished in those seventy days of training. I watched in the audience as thirty-one horses and thirty-one trainers entered the arena to show what an untrained wild horse could learn in a very short time. The crowd in the stands was moved to standing ovations again and again. Many of the horses were under saddle and seemed at ease with the chaos of the arena, the lights and the noisy crowd. Some of the U-branded horses had learned impressive dressage movements; others jumped obstacles with confidence; all had the beginnings of trust with humans, despite the fact that all the humans they’d met in the past had brought them nothing but hardship and pain. At the end of the event the mustangs were offered for adoption. Would they still be unwanted?

      I wrote my story about adopting a horse from a rescue organization, plus a sidebar about the unwanted horses at the horse expo. Editors at the magazine suggested I check on the U-branded horses in a few months and find out what had happened to them.

      In the meantime my life suddenly, unexpectedly, turned upside down. My seemingly solid twenty-four-year marriage crumbled, damaged beyond repair. For a time I thought the shock and the pain would kill me. I fled to the guesthouse on our property to be alone. In those first few days of facing the ugly truth about a marriage I had thought was based on faithfulness, I asked God for help. I remember praying, Dear God, if what I feel now is going to kill me, please take me now. But if I am supposed to survive it, please let me rest and feel your peace. Show me your light and I will know I can get through this.

      For the first time in several days I slept for many hours. What awakened me was not the jolting remembrance of the nightmare I was living. It was the brightest light of morning I had ever seen, streaming through window blinds that were closed…the light so bright, so lovingly piercing, it woke me up. Something had shifted in that dark night of the soul. In the recesses of my mind there was a knowing—I am deeply loved by God and the divine that dwells within me. The pain, the anger, the unbearable grief just dissolved away. God’s peace was all around me and in me. Thank you, God, I said to myself. I have my answer. I can go on.

      In the days that followed I began to count my blessings. Our children were grown and on their own. I had financial resources. And I had strength beyond anything I could have imagined. Upon filing for divorce, I moved out. I found a nice house