Puppy No More

As best we can reckon, based on the paucity of the anecdotal information and veterinary opinion we’ve gathered, my wife and I believe Jinx was six months old when he came to live with us back in March. That means that September marks the month of his birth. We’ve chosen the first day of the month in which the r’s return to be his birthday.

Jinx was not the dog we would have chosen. He was funny looking, ungainly, wild, roynish, runkledish, spastic, frenetic, a leaper, a roller, a destroyer of flower beds and digger of smooth lawns, a bringer of carcasses, a barker at phantoms, a serrated soul, a lolling-tongued terror, bristle-coated, flatulent, with too-small ears and too-large an appetite for chasing cows and trampling on our bare feet. We would not have chosen such a dog.

But he chose us. He might have found his way here the first time by simply roving, but the second time, on the black night he arrived almost a month after his dypsomaniacal owner took him away, he arrived bone-dry in the middle of a thunderstorm and barked to announce himself at our front door. He had been dumped off by a man who simply didn’t want him and who saw in me an easy mark. And when we went outside to greet him, his joy at seeing us again was almost pathetic, like food to a starving creature, warmth to a frozen thing, shelter to a squirming, shivering, homeless vagabond.

He has had a home since that night, and he now sleeps inside, watching over our home with his long-legged, short-eared tenacity. He is our dog, and he chose to become our dog.

I had a stern talk with Jinx last night. I reminded him that as of today, Tuesday, September 1st in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand Twenty, he is no longer a puppy. He is officially a Dog. And he expected to assume the mantle of maturity and duties pertaining to his new position, and to discharge them with the diligence and gravity accorded the office upon which he is entering.

He reached up and tugged on my beard with his teeth.

So Happy Birthday, Jinx. you rapscallion of a mixed-breed mystery mutt. You will never be a puppy again.

But you are my dog, and heaven help you now.

~ S. K. Orr