The Dog with the Old Soul

TRUE STORIES OF THE LOVE, HOPE AND JOY THAT ANIMALS BRING TO OUR LIVES

Jennifer Basye Sander

The Dog with the Old Soul

Finley Taylor

Sometimes people—or in my case, a dog—come into your life at just the right time.

Even before we were married, my husband and I talked about the dogs we would get someday. I wanted a Scottish terrier; he wanted a basset hound. Both of us liked both dogs, and neither of us minded which one we got first. We eventually decided that since bassets were known for being calm, low maintenance and child friendly—and since we were planning on having children soon—we’d get a basset first. Only problem was, for the first year and a half of our marriage we lived in a tiny apartment in Midtown.

When we moved to a larger home in 2009, it was time to start thinking about getting a dog. Well, actually, it was time to start thinking about having those children. Getting a dog was something we might push off till after the first baby was born, we thought. But the months went by and the pregnancy tests kept turning up negative.

The thought of including a different type of being, one with four legs, as part of our family never was far from our thoughts. As much as we talked about baby names and family vacations and how we would not give our eight-year-old a cell phone, we also talked about hiking trips and strolls along the river and what we’d name our dog.

Three days after my twenty-seventh birthday, my husband sent me a seemingly innocuous photo from a local shelter’s website of a perky-looking tricolored basset hound with intelligent, old-soul eyes. Her name was Chloe.

I work from home, so the squeal I let out fell on an otherwise silent house—a silence that over the months had developed a pitch of frustration, sadness and worry that became more palpable with each Facebook pregnancy announcement I saw. I called my husband and asked if he was game to go look at the pup with the world-heavy expression.

That night we stood outside the kennel of a loudly barking Chloe, who seemed to be conveying her frustration at being cooped up for so long, and at life for being a little rough on her as of late.

I didn’t blame her. A kind but frazzled shelter employee told us this was the second time Chloe had been brought to the shelter.

Chloe let out a characteristic basset bark that rumbled deep in my bones, rattling loose feelings of compassion and a desire to care for another living being—feelings I’d lately been walling off in an act of self-preservation. My husband and I looked at each other. “Let’s go home and sleep on it,” I said.

When we told the front-desk clerk that we needed a night to ponder adopting Chloe, she said, “You know, a family adopted her and brought her back ten days later because she had a cut on her leg. A cut.” The disdain in her voice stung my ears. It appeared this pup would not be given away again without the blessing of some very strong gatekeepers.

The next night we were back at the shelter, ready to adopt Chloe. My jangled thoughts and emotions zipped about my brain as if I were a kid in a bounce house. Are we ready for this? Can we be good enough guardians for her? Our lives are about to change.

“She’s a very vocal dog,” said a frazzled employee, this one with a platinum blond ponytail, while opening the kennel.

Chloe aoooffed nonstop out of impatience.

A cage that had not been cleaned out recently and a pen in which a matted microfleece blanket lay on the cold concrete were evidence of what the staff had already told us: the new shelter was struggling to survive, even as it tried to house a growing number of animals.

We were allowed to let this feverish canine out and to walk her, and she immediately put her nose to the ground with the loving familiarity of a mother tracing a finger over her child’s face. Within minutes, our hearts were completely won over by a panting, slobbering, smelly tank of infectiously lovable dog.

“We’d like to adopt Chloe,” we announced at the front desk.

“Adoptions ended a half hour ago,” said the front desk person, who was a different woman than the night before. Her name tag read “Staci.”

Crushed, we went home, nonetheless determined to be there right when the shelter opened the next day.

We arrived ten minutes before the shelter opened, and a coldness that didn’t come from the damp December air enveloped me when I saw about a half dozen other people in front of us in line.

“Are they all here to adopt?” I whispered to my husband. “You don’t think someone here wants to adopt Chloe, do you?”

My husband gave me a look. “Well, we’d better hightail it to the front desk as soon as possible,” he said.

When the front doors opened, we were the first to the desk. Staci, the woman who had turned us down the night before, was working again today. She smiled, pushing a lock of cocoa-brown hair out of her face. “You’re here to adopt the basset hound.”

We nodded like fools.

“I’ll go get her.” She rose to leave the desk, then turned to face us. “You know, she’s very vocal.”

We made assuring noises and stepped back when she sent a volunteer to get Chloe. A mother and two teenage girls came up to the desk. The mother said to an employee behind the desk—the one with the platinum blond ponytail who had allowed us to open Chloe’s pen the night before—“We’re here to adopt Chloe, the basset hound.”

Our eyes went wide. Wait, not our basset.

“We were here last night,” the mother explained, “and started to fill out paperwork, but they said we couldn’t adopt her, because it was too late.”

The blond employee, who had not heard our conversation a moment ago with Staci at the front desk, said, “Okay, I’ll go get her.”

My husband went up to Staci, who had just sent the volunteer to retrieve Chloe. “I don’t want to cause a scene, but we just heard someone say they wanted to adopt the basset that you’re getting for us.”

Staci looked at us. “Oh.” She got the attention of the blond employee, who came back to the desk and listened as Staci told our story.

“Yeah, I remember you,” said the blond woman. “But this family did start the paperwork.” They looked at each other, and then the blond woman hurried to the back, where the volunteer was supposedly getting “our” dog.

How could this happen?

We had tried twice to take Chloe home, we knew we were ready for her, and now our little addition might be ripped away from us before we even had a chance to have her. We looked at the other family discreetly. They looked nice enough, with their perfect white smiles and their matching sweatshirts with their private high school’s name emblazoned on them. But she was supposed to be our dog.

Finally, the blond woman came back, holding the leash to Chloe, who was elated to be outside her kennel. We and the other family stood there awkwardly. The blond woman walked up to me and held out the leash. “Here you go,” she said.

I looked at the leash in my hand. And smiled at it.

Twenty minutes later, after filling out enough paperwork to apply for a home loan, we walked out of the shelter the proud new guardians of a vocal, four-year-old basset hound, our hearts still stinging a bit at the image in our minds of the disappointed teenagers as they dejectedly walked past us to go home empty-handed. We never found out why the shelter chose us over the other family.

On the way to the car, we called our newest family member by the name we had chosen the night before, Bridgette—a name we felt encapsulated her unique, sweet yet spunky nature. We later found out that the name means “the exalted one” and “one who is strong and protective.”

“Do you think she’s happy to be out of there?” my husband asked, trying to get a look at her through the rearview window as he drove. I looked at the backseat, where Bridgette, with her long, thick body, flung herself onto her side like a breaching whale and breathed a contented sigh.

Four months later I was diagnosed with infertility, and we discovered that the only way we could have a biological family of our own was by in vitro fertilization. As I underwent testing and surgery, Bridgette was steadfast. And as I await a risky and uncertain treatment, she remains at my feet, showing a constancy that throws into sharp relief the actions of those in her previous life, those who had been entrusted with her care—a constancy that challenges me to return what she has given me. I stand at a threshold, facing an uncertain future of my own, and her old-soul eyes serve as a daily reminder of grace as I am brought through the doors of a temporary holding place that I hope will eventually lead me home.

Simon Says

Katherine Traci

November. Dark. Cold. I was driving home from a late-night writing workshop, a brutal night of fellow writers casually critiquing what was my own heart typed out neatly on the page. The exact same heart that had been trampled on by a liar three weeks prior. We’d gone to Venice to fall more deeply in love, cement it all in ancient stone. But no. Instead the medieval city was the scene of a modern breakup.

“Good plan, Kate,” I scoffed to myself in my car, gripping the wheel and picturing what I should have done instead—pushed him into the dirty Grand Canal. I hadn’t pushed him in. I’d gotten on the plane home like a good girl and flown back to an empty house, an empty heart. Tonight I’d hoped that writing it down and sharing it, letting others know how I felt, would help me heal. And maybe it would in the long run; but right then, alone, surrounded by strangers, empty and at a loss, I sat waiting to turn left onto the dark on-ramp, headed home. My head turned to follow a tiny cat that streaked across the road as it crossed my line of vision.

Feral, I thought as it headed toward the freeway. Odd behavior for any smart feral that lived in the area. I watched as what I now saw was a kitten run up the embankment toward a busy freeway overpass. It was almost 10:00 p.m. and the street was empty. I was tired… I was hungry… I was sad… I wanted to be home. The light changed. I stayed where I was.

Hmm, well timed on behalf of the cat, I thought. I had left class at the right second, had driven the right speed, had paused just long enough to turn at the exact moment that the little cat decided to sprint across six full lanes of the street in front of my truck.

Sighing, I felt the full weight of my own empty life hit me. If I couldn’t push a man in a canal, at least I could rescue a kitty on the side of the road. I pulled over as far as possible onto the left shoulder and hit my hazards. There he was, hunkered down in the greenery far above me. I rolled down my window. I watched the kitten. The kitten watched me. I got out of the car.

I looked up the steep embankment at him. Ice plant. Damn. It was cold. I am a 911 dispatch operator. For me, hazards lurk everywhere, even in the safest of homes. A slippery shower, a frayed electrical cord. So many of the calls we take are the result of foolhardy behavior. This would fall easily into that category.

I have nothing to put a cat in. I don’t even have a blanket. I have no idea what I am doing, I thought as I looked around. And I’m mostly a dog girl. I’ll go out of my way to rescue dogs. But a cat? I shivered and tried to focus on a workable plan.

I decided to try and approach him. If he ran up toward the top of the embankment, I’d have to back off. I didn’t want to be responsible for a cat on a busy freeway. I started up the steep embankment and the kitten didn’t move. He blinked at me. He sat in the ice plant near the freeway on-ramp and slowly blinked his big teary eyes, open, shut, open. The light shone down from the streetlamp and his eyes glowed. Open. Shut.

I clutched at the fence along the embankment with one hand and made my way up the slippery ice plant. It was a good slope. My clumsiness well known, I tried to keep out of my head the images of me tumbling back down to the asphalt below.

I could hear the morning news in my head: “An unidentified woman tried to climb ice plant in an attempt to access the freeway for unknown reasons. She was unkempt and messy, and all evidence suggests she suffers from broken heart syndrome. The authorities have hesitated to confirm or deny this, and it is unknown at this time if this syndrome is related to last night’s incident. She is in critical but stable condition today at the medical center, after falling twenty feet. Doctors say she fell sometime late last night and was not discovered until morning.”

I was one foot away. I could touch him if I reached out. Should I take off my hoodie to grab him and wrap him up?

Nooo, I thought as I zipped the hoodie up further. It’s too cold.

I pulled the hoodie’s wrist cuffs down over my hands, minimal protection against claws at best, and stretched out toward him. I aimed for the back of his neck.

Cat scratch fever, cat scratch fever…cat scratch fever! My dad’s voice reverberated in my head. Whether it was a warning or the lyrics to a song, I couldn’t quite remember.

I reached out once…twice…three times. Each time the kitty turned his head around to look at my hand but didn’t move.

Oh. I’m going to pick him up and he will be a bloody mess, badly injured, I thought, feeling sick to my stomach in addition to feeling cold. I could see only his tiny head. And those big blinking eyes.

Really, this was too absurd. Remember, I see potential danger everywhere. Yet there I was on a dark, cold night, perched on a slope of ice plant near a freeway overpass in the middle of a part of town you really shouldn’t slow down in, let alone pull over and stop in. I was alone, trying to rescue a damn kitten.

I needed to get this over with. “Now or never. Just do it, Kate!” And with that rallying cry I grabbed him and pulled him to my chest. His claws held on to me and I felt his body vibrate with his purrs. I looked down the embankment. Now I had to make my way back down. This time with no hands to hold on to the fence, as both were clasping this mess of a cat. Tense, I carefully picked my way with each step down the slippery ice plant on the steep embankment, arriving at the bottom without incident.

In what felt like a one-take action sequence, I threw the car door open, tossed the kitten in, grabbed my keys, started the car, rolled up the window—before the rescued cat escaped! I turned to look at him. He was perched expectantly on my center console, waiting and watching my hurried antics. He was bones. Skin and bones…and purrs.

Next morning at the vet’s office, they insisted on a name. I stood in front of the receptionist, shaking my head.

“I’m not going to name him. I don’t want to name him.”

The receptionist raised her eyebrows and cocked her head, her fingers hovering over the keys of her computer.

“Please don’t make me name him. I can’t keep him. I have a very small house.”

She waited. This same scene must have happened a lot here. I wondered if it always turned out the same way. “Okay, we’ll just type in k-i-t-t-y.”

“No, don’t write ‘Kitty’ on the chart. I don’t want to call him Kitty.” Something told me his name was Simon.

Simon spent the next two weeks sequestered in my bathroom, my only bathroom. I gingerly opened the door whenever I needed access, pushing my foot in ahead of me to keep Simon from rushing the door, nudging him out of the way if he made an attempt to escape. I needed to keep him away from my other pets, the vet said, until the lab results came in and they gave him a clean bill of health.

So until that approval came through, I had a four-pound, voraciously hungry, frustratingly messy roommate. A loud roommate who lived exclusively in my bathroom. His tortured cries reverberated off the tile when he heard me stir in any part of the house. In an effort to calm him, I’d visit for long periods of time, just sitting on the edge of the tub. Talking seemed to quiet him down, so I talked. The look in his eyes made me feel that he could answer back.

“My mom died, Simon,” I whispered.

“When?” he would purr, rubbing his cheek against mine.

“Two years ago, but it still hurts.”

“I know,” he would squeak, “but then somebody comes along and helps.” He reached out a paw to tap my nose.

Simon talks to everything and everyone. He has a sweet meep, high pitched and soft, when looking up at me; a brrrrr chirp when he asks my older, “can hardly be bothered” cat relentlessly for playtime; and he gives a merrwrrrow to the dog whenever their eyes lock. All very different sounds, very specific and very Simon.

Simon believes he has an imaginary friend. When he plays with crumpled-up paper, he growls and chirps and looks around and plays…with somebody. Not me. Not my other cat. Not my dog. He is alone. It is the craziest thing to watch. The tiny noises he makes scare the bejesus out of my big, scary dog.

Since I found him on the way home from a writing class, perhaps he is a writer, too. He has a special fondness for laptop keyboards. The first time it was the letter x. I found him batting something small and black—the key off the keyboard—around the floor, like a hockey player practicing with a puck. The next time it was the t. He leaps up and pounces on the unattended keyboard. No letter is safe as he picks whichever one he pleases to pry off and play with. The third time it was b and e, double the fun. They recognize me now at the computer repair shop.

The little ice-plant kitty was the most loving creature I had ever met. I thought I’d left my capacity for love squashed flat on the cobblestones in Italy, but Simon taught me my heart was still there, strong and healthy, after all.

Sometimes I look at Simon and think back to that night on the side of the freeway. I think I saved Simon, but maybe he saved me.

Where the Need Is Greatest

Tish Davidson

I have been a volunteer puppy raiser with Guide Dogs for the Blind for ten years. Donna Hahn has been raising guide dogs for at least twice that long. She has shared tips on socializing puppies, has helped me with difficult dogs and has encouraged me when my dogs failed to make the grade as guides. We have traded puppy-sitting chores and dog stories. Donna has loved every guide dog puppy she has ever raised. But one dog was special. This is Donna’s story.

Donna could hardly control her tears as she mounted the platform at the outdoor graduation ceremony. A light breeze ruffled the flag. The audience waited, polite and attentive. The graduates sat, alert and poised. The flag had been saluted; the speeches made; the staff and students congratulated. Now it was time to take the final step and send the graduates out into the world to fulfill their mission.

Donna stopped beside one of the graduates and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Raising a puppy is an act of love and faith,” she began. “When a puppy comes into your home, he comes into your heart. He is a part of your family. You give him all the time, care and love you can. Then, almost before you know it, that curious, wriggling, uncoordinated puppy has changed into an obedient, mature dog, ready to return to Guide Dogs for the Blind and take the next step in becoming a working guide.