A new begining with a new life.

At the turn of the year I lived a simple life with neither children nor pets. At work and with friends who had either, all they seemed to discuss was one amusing anecdote after another involving those extensions of their family. Could I possibly be less interested in your dog having an accident on the carpet or perhaps your child getting their first tooth? A funny thing happened on Valentine’s day of this year, my life was enriched by a puppy. Maybe enriched is too limiting of a term, how about driven crazy while sick with worry yet wholeheartedly emotionally connected. This blog which used to be interesting anecdotes of my travels around the world encompassing almost 600,000 miles has shrunk to a dramatically smaller circle of only a few dozen miles. While there is no lack of blogs out there that tell stories of pets and children somehow people seem interested in my stories so perhaps I can regale you with one or two (or vastly more knowing my verbose nature).

So rather than starting at the very beginning (far too normal for the likes of me), perhaps the more recent and we can recount over chai tea early beginnings at a later time. However an introduction is of course in order. I would like to introduce you to Dodger, not as in the Brooklyn and now LA Dodgers but rather the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. What better name for a rescue dog than one of the most famous aid-de-camp of orphans the industrious and yet amusing Dodger?

On Tuesday morning Dodger woke up as usual at the wonderfully late 5am hour happy to be a puppy and thinking simply of food and maybe a bathroom break. Sadly today was not to be like every other day in the past 4 and half months of his life, today he had to go to the vet for a ‘routine’ surgery. Thus, no food in the morning (something that did not go over well with the lord of the manner) and an early start out of the house en-route to the vet. Upon arriving, instead of the usual turning over of the pup to the surgical tech, they actually had me walk him all the way to the back and put him in the cage personally. Great so the last image my dog is going to have of me is to put him in a cage in a back room smelling of sour stale air, with tufts of fur in every corner occasionally wafting through the air, forever lit with impersonal florescent bulbs and well used and chewed metal mesh cages. Dodger cheerfully goes into the cage knowing that I would never put him anywhere he would not like for why would I ever do that to him, but when the door closed with me on the other side his face turned from confusion to fear in a blink of an eye. That was the image burned into my mind as I walked out.

Any of you who have ever had a dog, or frankly any dog that needed to be ‘fixed’ will know this is a minor procedure and I am making far too much of this experience but it was to be the first time leaving my boy to go fully-under and operated on. By the way, why do we insist on using the term ‘fix’, as if something was wrong with him to begin with. Memories of Orson Wells’ 1984 novel speaking of people having to get permission to procreate and the implications of such come to mind as if that was the natural order of things. But I digress.

10 hours, 600 minutes, 3,600 seconds before I could pick him up. The orderly brings him out and while his tail wags ever so slightly you can see he is still dazed (and maybe a bit hurt by the betrayal?). He gingerly walks to the car where he occasionally whimpers evoking sympathy and concern at every turn. I am not supposed to feed him for a while to ensure he does not throw it right back in my face and yet he has not eaten for 24 hours. I struggle with that once a year and I don’t even go in for surgery. So I cave and start to give him treats, and then a half meal and then the remainder of the meal. A common theme to be seen is the firm belief that my dog is smarter than I. He can observe and read signals that I do not even know I am sending and use them against me. In this case, he knows I will cave every time he whimpers, so he uses it to his full advantage. He got all the TLC he could stand, not mention toys, treats, being carried up and down stairs; everything short of a spa day.

Next time he has to go in for surgery I think I need to prepare myself more than I need to prepare him.