Starlings,

You may have noticed your valet sitting cross-legged atop the picnic table during our morning dog park excursions.

Please know: It’s not that I’m a helicopter dad, though I certainly am that. Here’s the deal: I dig your dog park. It is an amazing place for meditation.

Not for the quiet. Not for the peace. Certainly not for the janitorial duties.

I love your park because, everyday, I see a display of life lived right.

You both have made the off-leash Victory Dog Park your second home and, thus, mine. You whimper when we near in the car, strain collars when we approach on foot, and burst forth when we finally! unfasten.

So I take a hoisted seat, and marvel at the Great Canine Stage, where you and your wolf cousins seem so joyous, so unbridled and becoming. As best I can tell:

• You hold the right amount of consciousness. I can spot no ego, vanity, posturing or scheming. If you’re worried about how you look or what others think, it doesn’t show. If mortality frets you, your poker face would school Gaga.

• You hold anger for the right amount of time. Seven seconds, I count. Enough to feel it, express it, and move on.

• You hold memory for the right amount of time. A half day, tops. Enough to greet yesterday’s friends like today’s kin. Enough to forget parental failures — or at least to forgive so deeply it feels like forgetting.

A confession: I also like the park because I suck at meditating. I’m too much an emotional hoarder to clear my mind.

So I wolf a version of meditation, based on what you do. I take a corner of the table, hopefully dappled in sun, and cross legs. Elbows on knees. In through the nose, out the mouth. Deep both ways. Slow. Down. Time.

And I will watch you all and think: More than the joy, more than the forgiveness, more than the love amnesia, teach me how you are never anywhere but in the now.

I’m pretty sure that’s where meditation is supposed to take you. I’m positive it’s supposed to take you to a place place that embraces life, which you do without conscience. How did we help form something so present-minded yet forget ourselves?

It’s not just at the park. I think I have photographic proof of you both lazing in the sun on your backs, gazing at the sky, perhaps pondering what a nimbus smells like.

At least it looks that way from a tabletop.

So ignore the chauffeur in the corner of your eye, practicing his breathing and trying to take mental note of your dance moves. 

Dad’s just trying to dog.

My dear Charlie,

I’ve had rescues before.

There was Sal, a Shepherd mix that looked so much like a fox I’m pretty sure one got into more than the henhouse.

There was Esme, the Original OG, a Pitbull mix as gentle as she was fearsome-looking. I’m pretty sure she spared me a mugging once.

But you feel different, just as your sister felt different from the bred pups I’ve known over a half-century. In less than a month, you have dashed off a half-dozen reasons and reminders why rescues rock:

• Rescues are easier to teach.

When you’re raising a puppy, you’re not only introducing it to YOUR world; you’re introducing it to THE world. Rescues are well aware of the real world, perhaps more so than us.

• Rescues relive the puppy experience.

In navigating that new world, a rescue will make the same mistakes as a puppy. But so, too, will they achieve the same triumphs of learning your home, your path. The parental pride is easily as fierce, I find.

• Rescues are easier to discipline.

Every once in a while, we must attempt SOME sense of authority with our canine overlords. And when we do, pups make utterly public their disappointment in us, usually in the form of crate whines. Rescued or Raised, they moan just the same.

But with a rescue, you know: That crate, safe within a home that cares, is like offering a drifter a lifetime, complimentary stay at the Hilton. With poop-bagging.

• Rescues are more grateful.

Your ancestors, Teddy and Esme, left an embarrassment of riches to their heirs. And like all pups, Jadie chewed through and grew bored with her inheritance, seemingly within days.

You still carry half-eaten rawhides and slobber-encrusted toys like Indy at the Shroud of Turin.

• Rescues have backstories as imaginative as you.

Part of your appeal is the mystery of your muttness. How old are you, really? Where were you born, really? Who are your mom and dad? Where’d you get that limp?

My narrative for you is that you were the runt (sorry, but shorties rule) of a litter born to a Pitbull that had HER way with a Beagle that had HIS way with a more-wiener dog. Born behind a dumpster that would serve as an iron embryo, you survived on the scraps of excess. One day, on a search-and-subsist mission, you were run over, leaving you with a badass right-front limp when you walk slowly, like a Western gunslinger who’s seen his share of shootouts.

Or something completely different.

This is not to rob Peter and pay Paul. Purebreds are purehearts, and there is a visceral joy to witnessing life still in the glow of being new, unbridled and becoming.

I think you recognize that bond with Jadie. When I give her a good ear rub, you will lick her other ear. Love in stereo.

Which brings us to the core truth about you — and all refugees on the fang and claw:

• Rescues know.

They know they are rescues. They know of discarded love and recovered love. They know the utter value of a bed, of a roof, of an embrace. They know the unfairness of life doesn’t hold a candle to the beauty of it.

Rescues know.

And aren’t we all?