Writing about how much I love my dog is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I guess it’s because anybody can tell you about how great their dog is, truly believing their dog is the most special of all the dogs. But, my dog IS the most special. Just look at him.
I’ve grown up with dogs my entire life. I even paid for one with my own money as a kid, but of course all of my dogs ended up being my parent’s dogs—you know how that goes. When I left for college, I left the dog at my parents’, and for my first two years away from home, I wasn’t as happy as I was when I had a dog to cuddle up to after a bad day—because in college, every day is a bad day. So I started following way too many dog pages on Facebook. Shelters, BuzzFeed Animals, BarkPost, The DoDo, you name it! And boy was that an awful idea. All of the posts left me crying all. the. time. because of how badly I wanted to save all the mistreated, abandoned dogs. Of course, I’m currently a broke college student living off of my oh-so-gracious parent’s money, so if I wanted a dog, I had to go through them first.
I would tag my mom in every single shelter dog’s photo that caught my eye. That was a lot of posts that my mom ignored, but I persevered, and one day I tagged her in this dog’s post:
And this one:
But that day, he got adopted. Of course, I was sad that it wasn’t me but I was happy he found a home. I moved on and forgot about it for a whole three days until my mom sent me a post she found saying he was returned, placing him directly on the euthanasia list.
Now, I had my mom on my side. She now wanted to save this dog too, but she also knew there was absolutely no way my dad would go for it. It was Mother’s Day weekend and they were going on a trip, so she told me to come home anyways. She instructed me to go to the shelter and get that dog as soon as they left. So I came home, I wined-and-dined my dad—that’s $50 I’ll never get back—and at the conclusion of our dinner, he told me that “if I had just come home thinking I was going to get that dog I can turn my a** around and go back home.” So I begged and begged and begged some more for him to just come to the shelter with me to look at this dog. Even though I was going to go get it anyways, I would feel better if I had his approval.
He agreed that on Friday, before they left town, he would meet me at the shelter on his way home from work. Friday came around and I waited all day for a call instructing me to go to the shelter, but instead, I got a picture of the dog. I called (obviously freaking out) and he told me that when he got home we would talk about it. Well, that never happened because he brought him home himself, one year ago today, May 6, 2016.
I can’t lie to you, it took months of hard work for this dog to trust me. He ate like he’d been starved his whole life, like he had to fight for the food. He trembled at any touch, he still does if he doesn’t see it coming. He hates baseball bats and water (I can only imagine why), but it is also the most rewarding thing I’ve done in my entire life: to have enough patience to be able to watch him change. Blue really is the perfect dog for me, and he has given me a purpose other than to be a dumb college kid that drinks all the time and sleeps until noon. I can’t even begin to explain the effect he has had on my mental well-being (omg, I’m tearing up WTF).
I don’t think I could make it through college without this dog, and the Lord only knows where he would be without me. I’m so grateful I am the one who took him away from whatever he suffered through in the past. I’m the one who gets to work with him everyday to show him how nice humans and other dogs CAN be, something he clearly never knew before. That’s the thing about dogs, they’re the most forgiving creatures on this earth, and I don’t know what we did to deserve them but I do know they make life a whole lot easier.