The Dogs Who Found Me by Ken Foster

Author:Ken Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493027613
Publisher: Lyons Press

valentino

_______

A YEAR AFTER BILOXI, ON VALENTINE’S DAY, I WAS HEADED west on I-10, to New Orleans again, and feeling a little guilty, since it was Zephyr’s one-year anniversary. People say that dogs have no sense of time, that they never know whether you’ve been gone for a few minutes or hours or days. I disagree with this idea completely—at least with my dogs, the level of enthusiasm on my return rises in proportion to the length of time I’ve been gone. Even with other folks’ dogs, like Java in New York, there is a degree to which while they may not know how long it has been, they do know that it has been too long. Despite this, I am certain dogs do not understand the concept of anniversaries. I kept reminding myself of this as I passed the outlet where, a little less than a year before, I had found Biloxi. I had passed it many times in the year since I had found him, but I made a point not to ever stop there again.

I was meeting friends from New York in New Orleans, Ben and Sharyn, and for a while Sharyn and I had been estranged, so it was worth putting dog anniversaries on hold to meet up with them again. In a way, it had been Amanda’s memorial that had made us friends again. Although we had never talked about it, or the reason for our not speaking for so long, it suddenly seemed clear, that night, that few things in life are as important as friendship. Except, maybe, dogs.

I pulled into a truck stop just past Gulfport, because I didn’t want to be stuck with an empty tank as soon as I got to town. On the way back from paying, I spotted a beautiful fawn-colored eighty-five-pound pit bull sitting patiently outside the station, and I watched as he scampered after a customer. The dog walked alongside the man, sat patiently as the car door was opened, then watched as the car pulled away from him. The dog returned to sit outside the station door and followed another customer to his car. Each time I thought, This must be the owner. Yet, as each of them drove away, I began to suspect that the dog didn’t have an owner at all. On the other hand, he was too well behaved to have been abandoned—not that people who abandon dogs need a good reason.

I continued to watch him as he followed customers back and forth from the pumps to the register. I saw him walk one man out to his truck and then accompany him as he maintained each part of the truck. “Is that your dog?” I asked. The man shook his head no. The dog went over to the weighing station and seemed to be craning his head to look into the cab of the truck there, but that driver returned and left without him, too. I headed back into the station and asked,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.