This is where my story begins. The trouble comes later. My yellow lab of 15 ½ years died so I took the hole in my heart to a volunteer training class at the local animal shelter where I could do some good for the less fortunate in Kaya’s name. For the past five years, I’ve been a volunteer dog walker, showing up several times a week to walk the temporarily incarcerated on the wooded, 11-acre trail on Back Creek.
There were 14 of us in my class, including a retired CPA, a mother and her teenage son. A kind of sketchy guy in dark glasses who turned out to be fine. From our facilitator we learned how to recognize aggressive behavior. We learned to stay 50 yards away from each other walking our unpredictable charges. We learned that if your dog bolts off the wooden pedestrian bridge over the stream, you’re going in after it.
We got t-shirts.
Since this is a no-kill shelter, they take returns and there were one or two frequent fliers— like Chase, who got adopted (yay!) and then reappeared a few weeks later. (Ruh-roh.)
Like Jet.
As you make your way down the cement run past the kennel cages to retrieve the dog you intend to walk, the other dogs compete for your attention of course, yelping, somersaulting, leaping like toddlers in need of a bathroom break. Except Jet, who sat with patient dignity amidst the rabble rousers, posed at a slight angle to the cage door, the way high school photographers made you cant a shoulder and tilt your head in an impossibly awkward position no human boy or girl ever assumed for your yearbook portrait. Only on Jet, the pose was remarkably debonair. A handsome hound, his white chest and black martingale collar could have been a tuxedo. A calculating flirt, you could almost see him raise both a martini and a suggestive brow as you walked by.
I loved Jet so I was particularly sad when he was adopted and returned. Evidently, he was hiding anxiety issues. Aren’t we all?
So, it took me five years of walking dogs who rescued me from lonely days at the computer with no human contact, to finally bring one home. This is where the trouble begins.
She was an underweight terrier mix surrendered with external and internal parasites. A year old, her facial hair had grown so long she couldn’t see, but it was thin, so she wore a ratty pink sweater. She’d just been spayed, so she had a giant cone on her little head. I couldn’t actually see much of her except two shiny bright eyes. How could an animal so sick and neglected radiate only goodwill? An old soul in a puppy’s body. Love with her high beams on.
I was so moved by her need I didn’t research her breed. Heads up. Big mistake. She barks incessantly at the television and has this weird preternatural ability to know when you’re changing channels, even on mute! Even with her eyes closed! Even sound asleep!
She chases squirrels from inside the house! She can climb trees when incentivized. She can fly. There is a five-foot-tall brick wall enclosing the back garden and I’m sure the neighbors, enjoying a glass of prosecco on the other side, have been startled to see her head sail by in pursuit of her quarry.
In the car on the way home from the shelter the little dog was aquiver, trembling, a coiled spring spotting squirrels from the car window and maniacally digging the glass to get at them. I felt more ambivalence than love for her at that moment. I hadn’t thought this through! I’d never owned a high-intensity dog before. I suddenly felt more anxiety about the commitment than devotion to the cause.
And this is how my story ends.
I have this theory that you grow to love what you serve. That nurturing promotes bonding. That love follows action because love is not a feeling, until, well, it is.
“I could never work at a shelter,” friends proclaim. “I’d take all of them home!”
No, you wouldn’t. There’s chemistry. There’s personality. And we can’t swap out loss quite so efficiently. It takes time. It takes love in low doses to reseal that container so it can hold risk again. Because when you love a pet, you are going to have 15 years of good days for which you will eventually pay with the worst day of your life.
It’s the paradox we were born for. “Come!” is a command. “Stay” is a request. Grace holds the tension between them. You know going in, you will have to let go, yet as much as we are wired to avoid pain at all costs, we eventually choose to love, again and again. We fall hard. We are undone by our children. We bring the neglected home.
Somewhere in love’s evolutionary past, fear became a recessive gene and hope prevailed.
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