Read Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul Online
Authors: Jack Canfield
Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul (20 page)
The rain started falling softly as I hoisted myself into my Jeep and began driving back roads, stopping to call Buckshot with a disturbing touch of frenzy in my voice. In my mind’s eye, I saw Chris out in the rain wearing a slicker that was way too big, searching with falling hopes.
Miles later, with a throat scraped raw from screaming, I still hadn’t reduced the family pet to possession. Back at the cabin, I parked the Jeep and took off on foot, avoiding Chris’s eyes, not wanting to admit that maybe a city-bred dog could get irretrievably lost in all that wilderness.
I struck out for the depths of a quaint little piece of real estate the locals refer to as Deadman’s Swamp, muttering under my breath about dogs and their hold on small boys. If you’ve ever wandered around alone way back in the woods as nightfall is setting in, then you know what kinds of tricks your mind can play on you. I felt my vision fog up. The old pain was resurfacing.
After five miles of walking, screaming, running and sweating, I sat down on a slab of rock near an open meadow and tried to sort out how I was going to tell the little man that lived at my house that I couldn’t find his dog.
Suddenly I heard a rustle from behind me. Whipping around, I saw old Buck bounding up to me with that where-the-heck-have-you-been attitude that runaway dogs muster up when they’re finally found. We rolled on the ground together, my frustration dissolving in the wet ferns. After a bit, I put the dog at heel and we half stumbled and half ran back to the cabin.
When we came out of the woods, my son with the long face, my own father and the vagabond pooch grabbed and hugged one another. That was when it hit me.
I felt as if I had been transported back in time to witness a homecoming I’d hoped for but never experienced. My dad was there, looking thirty again. The little boy hugging the spotted hound was me—a quarter century ago. And old Buck? He was another much-loved mutt who’d finally found his way back.
Socks had come home.
Steve Smith
Jenny Holmes struggled with her weight every day of her young life. When she was twelve, she wasn’t heavy, but she thought she was because she wanted to be thin like a model. An aspiring gymnast, Jenny also wanted to be lithe and wiry, like the Olympic athlete, Nadia Comaneci. She didn’t lose weight until she was sixteen. Then she lost twenty pounds in the aftermath of a breakup with her first love, a sort of vengeance upon him. Her long battle with food and weight began. This occurred over the course of twelve years, during which time she tried again and again to lose weight, only to gain it back each time.
Little did Jenny know during those years that the change in her self-image would have nothing to do with low-fat shakes, counting calories or even giving up ice cream and chocolate. It would be a gift from a dog.
Brucie appeared in Jen’s life on her twenty-ninth birthday, a gift from her husband, John. Jenny was the happily married mother of two by then. She owned a successful small business selling custom-printed T-shirts. Trying to keep a sense of humor about her efforts to lose weight, she designed one for herself that read, “Those who indulge, bulge.” No one else ever called her “fat.” At five feet, four inches and 150 pounds, her legs were muscular and her hips thick, but her torso was slim. She had become a woman with a woman’s shape, but she still hated her backside. Jenny continued to long for the straight, thin, boyish look of a model.
Brucie, a yellow Labrador pup, came complete with big kisses and a bouncy personality. He was never intended to be a diet aid; he was meant to be a running partner. John loved Jenny just as she was, but he knew that Jenny always seemed more at peace with herself and her body when she ran. He couldn’t work out with her himself because he had a bad back. So that job was left to Brucie.
In the beginning Brucie and Jenny ran only fifty paces at a time, each set mixed with increments of one hundred paces walking.
I don’t look foolish starting this way,
thought Jen,
because Brucie’s bones are too young to make him run much
harder.
She was right, and Brucie’s early limitations gave her time to start slowly without feeling awkward.
After ten months, though, Brucie was old enough to run several miles a day and Jenny was fit enough to keep up! They logged the miles together every day.
Prior to Brucie’s appearance in her life, one of Jen’s problems with exercising had always been staying motivated. Everything she read advised pairing up with a running partner. Human exercise companions, however, always let her down. One moved away. Another collected running injuries the way some people collect stamps. A third simply quit. She knew that her last exercise companion was cutting out when he made excuses like, “It’s my turn to do the dishes”—at six o’clock in the morning! She hated to admit it, but she had let others down in similar ways. Jenny expected the same from Brucie. She knew that he would run with her, but she didn’t count on the pup for help with motivation.
Wrong! The first morning that Jen wanted to stay in bed, Brucie licked her face. When she buried her head under her pillow, he dug her toes out from beneath the blanket. Jenny tucked in her toes more tightly, but Brucie jumped onto the bed. After she pushed sixty pounds of Labrador off her, he whined and thumped his tail against the wooden floor like a drummer. He quieted down when she hushed him, only to return to licking her face! That morning and every one thereafter, Jen and Brucie ran.
Jenny didn’t think that she had the courage to face the winter running, but Brucie was undaunted. Shaking his head with disbelief while the dog pranced in the snow and barked outside of Jen’s window to awaken her, John decided to give his wife a warm, lightweight set of winter running clothes. Spring brought mud and rain, but Brucie still wanted to run, and what could Jenny do? They had endured freezing temperatures and snowdrifts together. Surely they could manage a bit of slush and sogginess. Besides, she had become Brucie’s running companion, too. She could no longer even try to say no to the wide brown eyes that gazed at her every morning when Brucie came to her with his leash in his mouth. Sometimes he even delivered her running shoes to her.
They ran together for ten years. When arthritis and age kept him on the step waiting for Jenny to return from a workout with a new puppy, Brucie didn’t seem to mind. He would lie with his face between his paws until he saw them loping into sight, then his tail would thump excitedly against the porch. When they got to the driveway he eagerly walked to see them, his whole body quivering with delight as it had when he was a puppy.
Brucie died last year. Jen, John and their kids scattered his ashes along a wooded path where they had frequently run together. Today Jen continues to run with her new dog as well as her growing children. Just like Brucie, they don’t let her sleep in on rainy Saturday mornings.
Jenny still makes T-shirts for people, but no more “Battle of the Bulge” shirts for her. She’s working on a shirt to wear in the Boston Marathon next spring. The front shows a hand-painted Labrador retriever. On the back Jenny stenciled, “Brucie, this one is for you.”
Cerie L. Couture, D.V.M.
W
hen you rise in the morning, form a resolution
to make the day a happy one for a fellow
creature.
Sydney Smith
On Monday afternoons at two o’clock, Beau and I would arrive at the Silver Spring Convalescent Center on Milwaukee’s northeast side of town for an hour of pet therapy with the seniors who lived there. We’d walk the hallways greeting everyone on our way to the hospitality room, where residents would come to pet Beau and bask in the adoration of this beautiful, happy, ten-year-old, ninety-nine-pound Doberman pinscher. You’d never know this was the same dog that arrived at my doorstep eight years earlier so beaten, scarred and scared that as soon as he made eye contact with you, he’d lie down on his back with his feet up in the air and pee until you petted and soothed him into feeling safe.
On our first visit, as we walked through the canary-yellow Hallway One, I heard an elderly man’s excited voice, thick with a German accent, streaming out of room 112. “Ma, Ma, the German dog is here! The German dog is here!”
No sooner did I hear the voice than a wrinkle-faced, six-foot-tall, white-haired pogo stick of a man was greeting us at the door, swooping his big, open hand and strong arm across the doorway, inviting us in. “I’m Charlie. This is my wife, Emma. Come in, come in.”
When Beau heard Charlie’s friendly, enthusiastic voice, his entire body went into his customary wagging frenzy and lean-against-your-thigh position, waiting for a petting, which was immediately forthcoming from Charlie. As we walked into the room, a frail but lively eightyish, violet-haired Emma sat in bed, smiling, patting her hand on the bed. All she had to do was pat once, and Beau, leashed and always obedient, was up on the bed lying down beside her, licking her face. Her eyes teared up as Charlie told us that he and Emma had immigrated to the United States from Germany during World War II and had to leave their beloved Doberman, Max, behind. Max, according to Charlie, was the spitting image of Beau.
The next door, room 114, was home to Katherine, a woman in her seventies who had stopped talking a few months earlier and had been living in a catatonic state in her wheelchair for the past month. No amount of love, hugs, talking or sitting had been able to stir her. I was told her family had stopped calling or visiting, and she had no friends. When Beau and I walked into her room, a small light was on next to her bed and the shades were pulled. She was sitting in her wheelchair, her back toward us, slouched over, facing the viewless window.
Beau was pulling ahead of me with his leash. Before I could get around to kneel down in front of her, he was at her left side, with his head in her lap. I pulled a chair up in front of her and sat down, saying hello. No response. In the fifteen minutes that Beau and I sat with Katherine, she never said a word and never moved. Surprising as that may be, more surprising was that Beau never moved either. He stood the entire fifteen minutes, his long chin resting on her lap.
If you knew Beau, you’d know that even ten seconds was an eternity to wait for a petting. As long as I’d known him, he would nuzzle whatever person was closest to his nose, whine, soft-growl and wiggle his body against them until they were forced to pet him, or he’d lose interest and find someone else. Not here. He was as frozen as Katherine, head glued to her lap. I became so uncomfortable with the lack of life in this woman that, much as I wished I felt differently, when the clock chimed 2:30 P.M., I rushed to say good-bye, stood up and pulled the reluctant Beau out.
I asked one of the nurses why Katherine was catatonic. “We don’t know why. Sometimes it just happens when elderly people have family who show no interest in them. We just try to make her as comfortable as possible.”
All the wonderful people and animals who blessed my life flashed in front of my eyes, and then they were gone. I felt what I imagined Katherine must be feeling: lonely, lost and forgotten. I was determined to find a way through to her.
Every Monday thereafter, Beau and I made our rounds to the hospitality room, stopping to make special visits in room 112 to visit Charlie and Emma, and in room 114 to sit with Katherine. Always the same response—Charlie waving us in and Emma patting the bed, waiting for Beau’s licks, both so alive. And then on to Katherine, sitting desolately, no sign of life except for her shallow breathing.
Each visit I attempted to engage Katherine in conversation, asking her questions about her life and telling her about mine and Beau’s. No response. I grew more and more frustrated with Katherine, not content with just “being” with her. Yet here was Beau, meditative dog-monk, teaching me how to “be” and love quietly, assuming “the position” for the fifteen minutes we sat at each visit.
On our fourth visit, I was ready to bypass Katherine’s room, figuring we didn’t really make a difference, so why bother, but Beau had other plans. He pulled me into Katherine’s room and took his familiar pose on her left side, head on lap. I acquiesced, but since I had a business meeting later in the afternoon with which I was preoccupied, I decided to cut short our usual fifteen minutes with Katherine to five. Instead of talking, I remained quiet, focusing inwardly on my upcoming meeting. Surely she’d never notice or care. As I stood up to walk out and began to pull Beau away, he wouldn’t budge.
And then the most miraculous thing happened. Katherine’s hand went up to the top of Beau’s head and rested there. No other movement, just her hand. Instead of Beau’s customary response of nose nuzzling and increased body wagging, he continued to stand like a statue, never moving from his spot.
I sat back down in silent shock, and for the next ten precious minutes, reveled in the stream of life flowing between Katherine’s hand and Beau’s head. As the clock chimed half-past two, marking the end of our fifteen minutes, Katherine’s hand gently slid back into her lap, and Beau turned to walk out the door.
It’s been ten years since that visit and eight years since Beau died in my arms from a stroke. Love has many ways of showing its face. Each time I am ready to walk away from a person on whom I’ve given up, I am reminded of the power of Beau’s loving persistence with Katherine and with me. If Beau can give an extra ten minutes, surely I can too.
Mary Marcdante
