Ron Collins
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

This is Abby. She found me in a blizzard on Christmas Day 2003, a lost puppy looking for her mom, probably, and got me instead. I’m not her mom. She was never my pet. There has never been a fence made that would confine her, as she doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of a fence as anything but an obstacle, and an easy one.

I don’t know that she loves me. I think I’ve become a habit. She has always been more or less loyal in terms of being at the house when I get home all her life (except around the 4th of July, when I might not see her for days, until she comes back without a mark on her as if nothing has happened.) But I don’t think she really needs my love or approval. I think she thinks I need hers, so she sort of goes through the motions of being “my” dog because I think she feels sorry for me for only having two legs or something.

Abby really only seems to love one kind of people, which is small children. All her life she just has become a whole other being when little ones are around, and has always been absolutely safe and trustworthy for them to play with her. Otherwise she doesn’t have much use for playing at all. I tried to teach her to rough-house like a puppy when she was one, and she didn’t get the point. So I taught her to shake and sit up for a treat, which I think she thinks is stupid but she humors me anyway.

What Abby has shown me, has little to do with what people thinks dogs give us. Her love is not unconditional, because she always had her fears from whatever it was she was running from when she found me, and if something I do scares her, no, she doesn’t love me then. Her companionship is not constant. She does what she wants and lives a whole other dog’s life I know nothing about, and certainly doesn’t just live for me to come home and pat her on the head. Her loyalty is sort of habit as much as anything meaningful to her. I’m just her human and that more or less works for her. I think she thinks I’m a little ridiculous for the way I’m so fond of her, which she mostly acts like she could take or leave.

What Abby has shown me, is how to take a friend and their friendship as it comes, and not try and mold it into something it is not. I don’t know what exactly she ever wanted from me (other than calories) but she sticks around to get it, and never has had to. She could have left me and gone back to the feral life she was bred out of in the hills of northern New Mexico, any time she chose. She chooses every day instead, to stay with me.

I don’t need to know why. And she isn’t saying. She was never “my” dog, really. But she has been my friend now for a long, long time.

Ron Collins

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