Man's Best Friend Devoted to the End
/The Boston Herald
The story made the 17-year-old choke on her Corn Flakes. 'This is gross. This is disgusting. Did you read this? It's horrible.'
Indeed it was. It was 'Pet Semetary' come to life, the true tale of a dog that died, was buried and rose from the dead. Except Brownie didn't really die. His owner ran over him and the dog looked dead, so she buried him in a field near her New Mexico home and then went about her business.
But 24 hours later Brownie was back, sprawled on the front porch, covered with dirt, missing one eye, his right shoulder broken, but very much alive.
All's well that ends well, I suppose. Brownie's on the mend and he even has a new name. The family now calls him Lazarus. What strikes me about this story isn't the miracle of the dog somehow digging itself out of his grave. This is remarkable, yes. But what's incredible, the real miracle, is that Brownie dug himself out then crawled back to the woman who ran him over and buried him alive.
Would a person do this? Never! A person would stumble and crawl all the way to a lawyer to file a lawsuit or to Coleman's to buy a gun. A person would go bonkers and be mouthing off on every talk show coast to coast. A person would never believe that the whole thing was an accident and be so loyal and forgiving.
Maybe loyal and forgiving translate to dumb, I don't know. But this capacity for devotion is one of the reasons I love dogs. I left mine out in the cold recently. I thought she was in the family room asleep on the couch. I was in my office, the computer humming, the space heater rattling, my mind somewhere else. I never heard Molly barking.
When I finally realized she was outside and let her in, she wagged her tail and moaned and jumped and was ecstatic to see me.
She didn't yell, 'What is wrong with you? I've been out there freezing my fanny off for hours and you didn't notice?' She didn't stomp away in a huff, retreat to her bedroom and not talk to me for days. She didn't call all her friends to tell them I was a horror. I had let her in. I had saved her from the cold. I was a hero.
It's so easy to be a hero to a dog. They're grateful for everything. I feed Molly the same dry food every day, and she's happy to get it. She doesn't say, 'What, this again? You can't come up with anything better?' She doesn't turn up her nose and sigh the way people and cats do. She devours the food. She's genuinely pleased.
She's also always glad to see me. Every morning, she moans and barks and runs around in circles and jumps and never says, 'Don't talk to me this morning. I haven't had my coffee yet.' She doesn't complain that she's had a bad night's sleep. She never groans about what she has to do that day. She is consistently joyful.
She swallowed a sock not too long ago and had surgery and when I visited her at the vet's she was tethered to an IV and still drowsy from the anesthesia. But her tail thumped like an out-of-breath runner anyway. No complaints, no recriminations. Just the same, happy, loving, devoted dog.
There was another story in the paper this week about a 7-year-old Doberman-husky named Gizmo. Gizmo wandered away from his East Weymouth home way back in December. He wound up in Hanover, on death row. A Norwell resident heard about his scheduled euthanasia and took the dog to her home but Gizmo kept running away and wound up back on death row. Another person took him in.
'I knew he was trying to get home and trying to get his bearings,' this woman said. 'He was always looking at the street. He was always looking at the sky and sniffing around.' She took an ad in the Patriot Ledger with a picture of the dog. Gizmo's owners, who had never stopped looking for him, finally found him. 'If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man,' Mark Twain said.
People think dogs are dumb. They're not. They're devoted and loyal and true.
