Oh! Dog

While driving down my house on a surprisingly cool March morning, a street dog looking for comfort under the first rays of the morning sun set me on a hot chase of this question: Why do we value things in life?
I was forced to take my mind of the road and journey into my own enlightenment when the dog, thankfully unaware of my predicament (and its own), made me think of my daughter and then forced me to steal a smile at the recollection.
Now it happens that my daughter shares this naïve fascination of spotting things - living and inanimate - and learning to identify them every time her eyes, new to the world, behold a visual treat.
Dog is a vital part of her nascent vocabulary, which she flaunts to perfection in front of others with an infectious delight. Since we do not own one - my otherwise stoical wife's symptoms of morbid fear and loathing for the canines has prevented us from indulging in the pleasure - street dogs, benevolently left to gay abandon by our municipal corporation, happen to be the building blocks of my 2-yr-old daughter's vocabulary. Well she is actually less than two. (Now why did I say that?)
That dog on the roadside pulled off the incredible! It found a place in my heart and, if I might add, gave me some comfort by stirring up my daughter's memory. The best part about the entire rendezvous was that it happened in the most commonplace of all circumstances, while I was driving down to my house by the same road I take every day, around the same time and in the same car that has two years' of feisty run under its hood.
My daughter's association with the dog had redefined the moment for me. And, so it was in some way, remotely valuable for me, just as a tattered kite dangling off its broken spine from a Neem tree holds meaning for me, because like the dog, it speaks to me of my daughter.
My tryst with the dog has made my life simpler. For when I value something I know it is not the subject (or the object) that holds meaning, but the moment spent, the time lapsed and the memories shared with it that makes me yearn for it.
It made me realise events that are absurdly meaningless and terribly insignificant import a promise when a shared past happens to peer through the trivial that our eyes picked off the routine landscape.
It is the same feeling that radiates from the songs we remember from our childhood and carry with us to afterlife. Because they touch a beautiful raw chord somewhere, some place, in past, which now lies buried in the worthless mundane of our busy lives.