Thursday, November 19, 2009
The companion piece to the story I told you on Tuesday is, of course, my story, and because I do possess opposable thumbs, along with a working knowledge of how they function against a keyboard, you shall witness text–lines and lines and lines of it–unfold before you on your digital device. It will be a technological curiosity, a dazzling display of Web wizardry circa late 90s, or whenever people still capitalized the word “Web,” crashing into your space-age doodad.
The original story was simple. In it, I would adopt a dog right around this time, thereby completing some kind of iconic Thanksgiving picture in my head, where family and canine alike are gathered around a roaring hearth on a chilly evening. We would go around the room, each giving reasons for how fortunate we are, and the pooch would partake as well, because she would know that this is the season for giving thanks. Also for tryptophan ingestion, but that’s tangential.
As is usually the case, though, simple quickly gives way to something far denser, and here we are. For starters, I’m pretty sure the dog doesn’t care what time of the year you adopt her, or whether it’s a national holiday, and the thought patterns probably go more like this: hungry, sleepy, hungry, thirsty, pee, sleepy, OH GOD WHERE IS THE DOG IN THE ADJACENT KENNEL GOING, hungry, time to poop. She doesn’t know this is when the Pilgrims first shook hands with the indigenous peoples, simultaneously thanking them for maize while transferring foreign pathogens. She doesn’t know about cornucopias filled with fruit. I mean, for fuck’s sake! I don’t even know what a cornucopia is exactly. Are there, like, cornucopia factories somewhere and, if so, what do they weave during the other 11 months of the year?
The real plan, then. I’m going to commit before New Year’s Day. You may wonder why, after all this talk about holidays, and it’s because surrenders typically increase after this time of year, or so I’ve heard. People may receive pets for Christmas, then realize they can’t handle them. Perhaps the festivities hit the budget particularly hard, and it’s time to pull back and roll out a clean slate, starting with a deposit at the local shelter. With this flood of new arrivals comes the need to make space, and you know what that means. I’m also going to find out which dogs are on the chopping block, if I may be blunt here. I imagine the ones that have been at the shelter the longest are on the short list, once the influx hits, and I’d prefer to look at this group first. Certainly I won’t adopt solely on this fact, since I’m going to have to live with this decision for a long time, but it’s a starting point.
You may accuse me of overthinking matters here, and you’d likely be right. The kennels will always be filled–slowly at times, quickly at others–and the churn will always be there, and the choice I make will be one grain against the gale. But this is a vote that truly matters to the party involved. It’s going to be a ballot done right.