Patterson's boss, Mac Siu, said he has tried for years to find a backup but has yet to find anybody with Patterson's charisma, grandfather-like gentleness and Santa features.
But dog-breeding is an imprecise science, especially when characteristics like gentleness and patience are so subjective.
All twinkling eyes and gentleness, Bruna is rather like the kindly old puppet-maker Gepetto in Pinocchio; to him, Miffy has become like a little granddaughter.
He promptly composed "Vale from Carthage," which began, " 'And what if one of us' / I asked last May, in fun, in gentleness, / 'Wears doom, like dungarees, and doesn't know?' " He included the poem in his first collection, "Terror and Decorum," for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1949.
It's an aspiration as much as an affirmation, a sense that Christianity still gives us a good orientation in how we should live, and that values like love, gentleness, thinking of others before self, and doing as one would be done by" still matter most.
Within days of her arrival, I began walking through my house with a gentleness and slowness almost like kinhin (walking meditation).
I like to say that one of my favorite quotes is from Saint Francis de Sales: "Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength".
There's a gentleness about that that I like.
The astonishing thing about Katniss -- and her kick-ass blonde film peer, Tris Prior of the equally box-office smashing Divergent series -- is how both players boldly display long socially undervalued feminine characteristics like compassion, empathy, gentleness, availability, vulnerability and forgiveness.
Like the throttle, gentleness is key.
