Dog Conversation

I met an elderly woman along a river trail on a fine sunny morning. She was catapulting a Chuck-It with her feisty black dog. A fighter jet zoomed overhead. I heard birds everywhere. The river ran green. White seed heads of black cottonwoods floated by like clouds. I asked the woman about her dog as I ask everyone about their dogs. I enjoy hearing dog ownership origin stories because they tend to reveal essentials of a person—good and bad.

The woman told me she’d recently adopted the two-year old dog from a local animal rescue organization, which entailed driving to a kill shelter in California and bringing the dog back to Oregon. The dog was highly protective of its owner and she told me not to try and pet it, although I dearly wanted to.

We talked for ten minutes or so about the joy of adopting shelter dogs and what it’s like to lose old dogs. I told her I was dogless at the moment, but sharing my time with senior dogs and friends’ dogs. I wasn’t sure if I would have a dog of my own in the near future because the future is so uncertain for me. But dogs have a way of finding a person exactly when that person needs to find a dog. That has happened to me multiple times in my 21 years on the Oregon Coast.

After we parted, I heard her talking to the dog and not about matters related to Chuck-It. I remember doing that as well. It occurred to me that one of the reasons I like having dogs is how encounters with other dog owners in the remotest of places, at the oddest of times, is such a wonderful thing. The talk often begins about dogs, but then, for me at least, it always transcends into something else, something about the world we live in or the one we are experiencing outdoors at this precise moment when the rest of the world is at work, usually inside.

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