That Was Then

49-Then

The summer between seventh and eighth grade, while amazing, went entirely too fast. As the first day of school approached, my anxiety grew to be nearly unmanageable. Since our experience with counseling didn't go over very well my parents decided on a different approach. I didn't realize what they were doing at the time but in retrospect getting me a dog was not the whim my parents claimed it was.

"Where are we going?" Mama and I had just finished lunch at her favorite Mediterranean restaurant. When we didn't take the road that led home I got a bit apprehensive. I was desperately hoping they were not taking me back to the shiny therapist. 

"We're meeting Dad at the animal shelter," she told me. We hadn't had a pet since Handsome died a couple years back. Mama had quite the attachment to that hideous, annoying dog and when he passed she said she would never own another dog.

"For what?"

"I thought it was time we get a new dog," she smiled over at me. I was definitely not going to argue with that, I'd been asking for a new dog since even before Handsome died.

Dad met us in the parking lot and when we entered the shelter we were greeted by a chorus of barks and the smell of wet dog and urine. All of the dogs jumped excitedly at their kennel gates as we passed and I wanted to adopt them all. Toward the end one puppy caught my attention. There was a pretty white cat perched on the dog bed of a fluffy three legged dog. I stopped in front of the kennel and then Dad urged me on, "lets look at them all before you decide." I looked up to make sure I had heard him correctly. I got to choose! After looking in each kennel I found myself drawn back to the three legged dog.

"Would you like to visit with him?" A worker asked as I reached in to pet him. We took him into the room and the three of us fell for him. It wasn't very creative, but the name the kennel had given him was Tripod.

"We'll definitely have to change that!" Mama whispered to me.

"What's the deal with the cat in his kennel?" Dad asked the worker.

"He had a lot of anxiety when he first came here, the cat was an escape artist and we kept finding them together in the mornings so we finally just let them stay together," she told us. She also told us that the puppy was a great Pyrenees/lab mix, not quite a year old and had been born missing one leg but didn't seem to notice he was any different.

"I don't know Blake, great Pyrenees get pretty big," Mama said, the puppy was already pretty big with gigantic paws. I barely started to pout when she gave in, "fine, but you're cleaning up his poop." It was a lot harder to convince them not to separate my new puppy from his beloved cat. "We are not cat people." Mama said at least fifteen times. We left the shelter an hour later with the three legged dog and his cat.