The Dog Days

The Spring is such a wonderful time of year. It brings the people-folk out of their houses. The runners start training in mass for races, bikers create that cloud-like blob along early-morning road sides, and dogs with their owners begin making longer journeys around the neighborhood.

I was on a run yesterday when I passed a number of people walking their beloved furry animals. I couldn’t help but remember just over a year ago when the wifey and I made the collective decision to bring a dog into the family.

And….scene:

It was late fall, the family had just moved from Virginia to Chicago to be with me after waiting months to sell the house. We had already bought a cat and everyone was settling into a good mid-western big city routine.

I’d just finished reading the amazing book The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (yeah it’s an Oprah Book Club book but I didn’t read it because of that…you wanna fight about it?!!!). I suddenly got a hankering to bring a dog into the family thinking in my head, the kids would love growing up with a furry bastard around the house.

It was like being a teenager all over again…I wanted something that I knew was no good. I wanted to bring a dog into a three bedroom, one bathroom house, already equipped with one brand new cat, a backyard no larger than a postage stamp, long winters hovering around 0 degrees, and a wife I knew damn good and well would not walk this beast.

We went to the SPCA as a family. We met dogs. We walked dogs. We played with them on shit-covered sheets of ice. We finally found the “perfect” one! Five minutes later the SPCA worker was quickly removing him from us after he tried to eat my daughter’s face off.

Two days later we brought home a large doggie. We loved that bastard. But holy shit no one in his short life had even begun to train him. And when he stood up on his hind legs, he was the same height as my beloved wife at 5’1”.

This is the same wife who for the first time since she was 14 years old, wasn’t working a job. She was staying home with our children, in a new city, hundreds of miles from any family and friends while her husband was gone from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. during the work-week.

We named him “Odie.” Most of his short life in our home he spent chasing the cat, leaping on counters, tackling our children, trying to eat my wife, and sparking calls from the wife to me at work that sounded a lot like “I can’t handle the two kids, this winter, and this damn dog!!!”

I took him on walks. I read up on training and implemented the tips as best I could. I set up an appointment with a trainer but had to wait a month for a new class to start. But every day I came home it was the same. House trashed, the dog crated, wife frazzled and crying, and kids swinging from the ceiling.

A few days later I came home to the wife in tears again and mumbling, “I just can’t handle it!”

I asked her to put the kids to bed, I grabbed the dog, put him in the car and headed back to the SPCA. It was the worst feeling I’d had in years. I knew I was taking him back to prison after experiencing our wonderful family. A lot of other people would have made a different decision, but I knew we were not the ideal family for this dog that had lived in our house for four days.

Later we explained to the kids that I took Odie to a farm to be with tons of other dogs where they could run around and have so much fun.

We kept track of Odie on the SPCA website and a week later he was adopted and never returned. Looking back at those pictures the wife and I miss him. We wished he had found him at a better time in our lives.

But…we’re confident he’s enjoying his life on that farm with all those dogs…