“They are a gateway drug,” a friend once told me with a euphoric smile. She was carrying an Amazon box full of rescue kittens into the “cat house” of a large California city shelter where I volunteered as a dog walker a few years ago.
I knew what she meant. I am in my seventh decade now, but I still remember the joy that rose in me when my first pet, a black kitten with white paws, arrived at my fifth birthday party in a similar cardboard box. Who can ever forget the rush of endorphins, oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin when a kitten nuzzles against your chest? Instantly, I was over the moon for this kitten that my mother had rescued from a friend’s barn. Of course, I called her Mittens because of those white paws.
She taught me about life the night I watched her birth her first litter…and death when her runt failed to thrive even though I fed it warm milk from an eyedropper. And she taught me about unconditional love, sleeping in my bed for years.
In those days we lived in suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but my mother had grown up on a farm and she wanted to surround herself and me, her only child, with animals. So…the question was naturally what other pets could we add to our family. To me a dog seemed the natural next step from Mittens and her kittens, but my father said no way. No dogs. It wasn’t that he was being mean. He said that owning a dog as a boy had “broken my heart.”
When my father was a boy, he was infatuated with movies about a WWI rescue German Shepherd named Rin Tin Tin. Eventually, my dad convinced his family to rescue a GSD puppy, which he named Lindy, after his hero, the aviation pioneer Charles “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh (My father became a U.S. Navy pilot during WWII and flew for the Navy for 28 years).
As it happened, Lindy, a long-haired shepherd puppy, grew into an adolescent dog, weighing about a hundred pounds. He was goofy, affectionate, full of pep, and noisy in that whiny, barky way some dogs can be when they wish they could talk like humans. Eventually, Lindy proved too much for the neighbors to tolerate in their neighborhood of tightly packed homes. The police told my father he had to either rehome Lindy or they would confiscate and euthanize him.
Now, here comes the heartbreaking part. After my dad’s family rehomed Lindy with an adopter 20 miles away, Lindy escaped, found his way home, and showed up on my dad’s front porch one night. He woke up the neighbors with his plaintive barking, and they called the police. Thus, ended Lindy. My father never really recovered from the trauma. He said it was as bad as the war that he had fought, flying against the Japanese in the South Pacific. So ended my boyhood chances for owning a dog. But…I always hoped.
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