A home for the abandoned

The owner of the dog I found finally contacted me a few nights ago. To make a long story short, she's out of state and will be so for the foreseeable future. She's had the dog in the care of her mother for the last number of months, but the mother has seemingly lost interest in caring for the dog any longer. Apparently, I'm not the first person to find this dog. He's run away three times this year already, and I'm guessing by the complete lack of communication from her that mom just wants to wipe her hands clean of the matter. She has some unspecified medical and/or mental health issues, so probably not the best person to care for a young dog in the first place.

To complicate the matter further, the owner can't take him in due to her current living situation, and hasn't been able or hasn't tried finding another home for him. Not sure that I want to give him back to her either. I looked her up online to see if she lived in the area, out of curiosity to find out how far this dog wandered before I found him. What I instead found was her social media profiles, and by all appearances this girl is a fcking trainwreck. A 24 year old party girl who only posts photos of her butt and skimpy nightclub outfits online. I only found one photo of her dog in all her profiles, and it was him as a puppy. Everything else is literally just photos of her body or her long-lost Kardashian face.

I truly don't understand how pet owners don't have photos of their pets, but at least it explains why I couldn't find any lost dog postings that matched his appearance. It also explains his heterochromia. I'm guessing the only reason she ever got this dog was because he has two different colored eyes and that makes him more instagrammable. The lack of responsibility apparently runs deep in this family. Based on the timeline her socials were able to provide, she literally only had the dog for a few months before leaving to go party in California. And in true material girl fashion, she named this dog Kash, most likely after the only things she values, money and believing that superficial alterations matter.

Granted, I know there's more to a story than what meets the eye, but the part of you familiar with abandonment and neglect can't help but become outraged whenever you're forced to confront it again.

It's a part of my life that can't be avoided. I think about my place in the world frequently as I've been making a conscious effort to escape from my escapes, and in trying to envision the path ahead of me, I nearly always unconsciously refer back to Boo Radley. Here's a character that was dealt an unfair hand at the start of his life, and because of that never had anywhere to belong. Everyone else had raced ahead of him socially while he could only stay behind and watch. His inability to fit in made people wary of him, and it was their own unwillingness to humanize him that led him to become the frequent target of gossip and speculation. It's almost remarkable that he could be such a central figure to a novel in which he only ever spoke one line.

"Will you take me home?"

Those five words have lived in my head for almost 2 decades at this point. I must have been about 14 when I first read To Kill A Mockingbird, and it was the first time - and one of the few times - in my life that I ever felt like I could relate to anybody. And when I peer into this dog's mismatched eyes, those same words come roaring back from the burial mound where I laid my hopes. "Will you take me home?"

Since he has nowhere to go but a shelter, I've decided to keep him. Oh, I'm never calling him that abomination of a name his "owner" decided befitted him. I've settled on calling him Fenris, a wolf destined to kill Odin during the events of Ragnarok. Not that he's vicious at all, he just looks that way. He's a total sweetheart, and I'm happy that he's fitting in quite nicely here. I was worried for a bit that he'd rough up or try to mount my dog, or bark up a storm while they competed for my affection, but he's settled down a fair degree and is much more well behaved since his first few days. I think he was just a little too excited from being in an unfamiliar environment. I won't have to worry about surrendering him after all.

Still, there's undoubtedly a theme emerging in my household now that he's joined the fold. I was abused by my parents and no longer have contact with them, my emotional support dog was sheltered twice before I came along to rescue her, and this new dog only came into my life after being disowned himself.

I used to think The Beatles were a bunch of pampered tools for singing that "all you need is love", but seeing the impact that a little TLC had on rejuvenating and reanimating my previously institutionalized dog, on providing comfort and support to an overstimulated puppy with signs of separation anxiety, and on giving purpose and meaning to a chronically depressed recluse that had only known hopelessness, my inner cynic has no choice but to acquiesce to the transformative power of love. I dismissed them only because I'd never known or felt it before, but it's a force I can no longer deny now that I've been witnessing it with my own eyes.

Welcome home, Fenris