dependents, part 2

Could you have resisted that face? I think not. But you wouldn't have had to; Jasper in May looked a little like a cross between a whippet and a slinky. He featured a lot of visible bones. He was a dull yellow color. He was starved for companionship, more interested in the people around him than in the food that we were trying to give him. I liked dogs, but I had no use for the impolite, unmanageable, unfriendly or obnoxious ones. I worried about getting a dog with an unstable temperment. As I'd watched the interaction, it had occurred to me that this puppy couldn't be unfriendly to save his life.

(In fact, that's true: he needed the sandwich. He was six months old and should have been close to his adult size, yet he doubled his weight between May and July. He was starving to death.)

My mother was appalled. This is quite understandable, as the car had never been driven, the dog had never been housebroken and probably featured parasites, I was living in my parents' home for two more weeks while the sellers moved out of my place, and my father is NOT a dog person. At all.

Still, Jasper was nervous but friendly the entire trip, and licked my mother's arms from the fingers to the elbow. (She'd cooked bacon that morning.) We took him to the shelter for the mandatory ten-day wait. He seemed too friendly not to have an owner, although he was too skinny to have been fed recently. I decided it was a good way to keep him safe until I had a place to bring him and to appease my conscience: I would hate to take anyone's lost pet.

Those who known me shouldn't doubt that it was two weeks of second-guessing. I visited the shelter a lot, trying to figure out whether Jasper was manageable, and whether he had any pit bull in him. Fortunately, my idea of pit bull was the Target doggie, and he was too big and had a completely different face shape. It wasn't until weeks later that I discovered that the odd egghead dogs are actually bull terriers, a show breed never used for fighting. Pit bulls are medium-sized, athletic dogs. They look a lot like Jasper, although the face and jaw are generally wider.

Oops.

But I took him home in blissful ignorance, two days before my move. Sadly, the shelter had run out of room and wanted me to remove him instantly. This caused a certain amount of stress for the parents, who have never had a dog in the house. I thought it would be fine, but then I'm an idiot. Moving already turns me into a gibbering stresscake, and having a new dog was much, much more difficult than I'd thought.

The housetraining was easy and the feeding was easy, but the separation anxiety was a whole different story. I had become the apple of Jasper's eye, and leaving him alone, even to sleep, was enough to cause the poor creature to cry. It's not a nice sound, dog crying. Being put in a room alone resulted in a frantic attempt to excape, as my doors still testify. He broke through baby gates and tried to chase Lucie. It was a miserable few weeks. I'm still not sure why I didn't return him to the pound, but I suspect it had something to do with being stubborn.

And then, one day, I looked at him in the car seat next to me and thought, "I love this puppy. How did that happen?"

Since that time, the frantic whining has stopped. The whole-body wiggle has taken over. Jasper treats Lucie with the respect and deference to which she's become accustomed. My house is usually safe from toothy depredations (although I have lost three garden hoses.) I have discovered the joy of the dog park, a local fenced area where Jasper has learned to apply the Golden Rule. He might have more success if he could only grasp the idea that most of the other dogs AREN'T as interested in WWE fighting moves as he is, but it's a start.

dependents

The story started, as so many stories do, with a telephone call. This one was from a car dealership, and said that my new ride had arrived. (For the uninformed, one of the great benefits of the PI gig with my large company is a company car with unlimited use privileges and replacement every year or two. Although after the Great Car Accident Fiasco of Winter '06, I was frankly surprised my boss was willing to trust me with a new car.) And so I convinced my mother, who was in the car with me when the call came, to accompany me to the dealership.

The car was lovely, and the transfer process ("Here are the keys!") was blessedly pain-free. Ten minutes later, I was ready to leave when I saw a little dog bouncing towards me. "Oh," I said, "how cute? Whose dog is he?" Fatal words. He was no-one's dog. He had been loitering for hours. He ate anything that was given him. A sandwich was produced for experimental purposes. But the little mutt, now in the middle of a circle of half-a-dozen, ignored the food and went bouncing around to each person.

Here I should mention that, although I never owned a dog, I was a voracious reader of Lad: A Dog, Lassie, and other classic sentimental children's books about man's best friend. I typed a very detailed Christmas list when I was ten, all about the Irish Setter I hoped Santa would give me. I'd considered getting a dog last year, when I moved into my apartment. (I'd decided on Lucie because it's more difficult to house a dog than a cat if you're a renter.) I had a sporadic addiction to the AKC web site, where I learned enough about various dog breeds to know that Italian Greyhounds hate winter, Pharoah dogs blush, and Rhodesian Ridgebacks don't smell. I read books by Jon Katz. I'd added a dog to my first novel, albeit as a surrogate murder victim.

Ten days earlier, I'd closed on my first house, which had a fenced yard.

In retrospect, I see that it would have happened soon. When the lady at the dealership said, "I don't suppose you want a dog?" I replied, "Sure. Let's put him in the car."