Member-only story
THE NARRATIVE ARC LOVE STORY!
When I Fell in Love with a Dog
Love is love
When I first saw her, she was standing at the very back of a kennel at my local animal shelter. Looking at her from the walkway between kennels, I could see she was a beautiful animal despite being considerably too thin, an American Staffordshire Terrier, a brindle. I had a brindle pit many years before and am partial to them. So I went to the shelter office and tried to sign her out for a walk.
“Nope,” said Barbara, the shelter administrator. “That dog is dangerous.”
Barbara told me the dog had been brought into the shelter using a ketch-all-pole, one of those things with a loop at the end and a stick to move the animal around without letting it get near enough to hurt you. Even so, it’s hard to manhandle a 65-pound animal into a kennel, and Barbara said the dog had bitten one of the men twice.
I went back to the kennel and looked through the grille. The dog averted her gaze, a submissive gesture, and growled softly, usually an aggressive gesture but sometimes just a statement of distrust and distress. I said something soft and easy, maybe “Hey there, sweetie pie. How you doin’?” Hearing me, she crouched down and pressed herself hard into the wet, cold corner of her kennel as far away from me as possible.
