Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself: A Man and His Dog's Struggle to Find Salvation by Anderegg Zachary

Author:Anderegg, Zachary [Anderegg, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626361706
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

I lay on an air mattress in the back of my truck, looking up at the night sky.

Most people think the brightest star in the sky is Polaris, or the North Star. It’s not. It’s Sirius, or the Dog Star, for its place in the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog. It’s the brightest because it’s also (after the sun) the closest, and getting closer. To my mind, it’s a stretch of the imagination to see a dog in Canis Major, which is basically a Y with a leg at one of the ends of the Y and another leg at the solo end. Both legs are about the same length and pointing in the same direction, but it could be any animal with four legs and a long neck. People see what they want to see.

That night, waiting to find out if the dog was going to make it, I was finally able to see the four-legged animal in the constellation. I thought of all the other ways the word “dog” was used in the English language, and it struck me that most of them applied to or resonated with me. “Die like a dog,” as in what I wanted the kids who tormented me to do. “Sick as a dog,” as in how I felt so many times as a kid when I was afraid to go to school. “Dog eat dog,” as in how the world seemed to me, and I was definitely the underdog in that regard. “Every dog has its day,” as in what I was still waiting for. “Dog tired,” as in what I felt physically. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” as in what some people thought I should do. If that phrase meant letting go of the things that hurt me, I couldn’t live up to it, because I wasn’t holding onto them; they were holding on to me. One last one: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight—it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” an adage I’d learned to apply, and adopt, almost as a slogan, but at great cost.

My favorite word, though, was “dogged,” meaning tenacious, stalwart, and untiring. I’d read about researchers who put heart monitors on sled dogs to see what sort of heart rates they were able to sustain over long distances. The researchers were shocked to learn dogs could sustain heart rates of three hundred beats per minute for hours, which was astonishing because scientists had previously thought the only mammals capable of sustaining three hundred beats per minute were tiny ones like mice or shrews. It explains how a pack of wolves can run down an elk, even though elk are faster than wolves. Wolves can outlast anything. I told myself the dog in the hospital had heart, in both senses of the word. I hoped it was enough.

Then I told myself I did, too. Surviving my childhood wouldn’t have been possible without it.

I grew up in Cudahy, Wisconsin, which is on the western shore of Lake Michigan, on Milwaukee’s “sout’ side.

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