Monday, December 14th, 2009 |
by Parlour Fam
I’ve always wanted a dog. Even in my younger days when I lived at home and my little sister begged my mother for a pet and we received a cat, I wanted a dog. Maybe it was the notion of a canine being “man’s best friend.” Maybe it’s because I really, really liked White Fang when I was a kid. Or maybe, it’s because for all intensive purposes, it’s because I thought having a dog would simply be awesome. This past September, I turned wishful thinking into reality when Rumble, my Alaskan Klee Kai came into my life. But Rumble’s arrival was more than of just me checking off an item from my bucket list. No, he was the culmination of several events.
.
Some of those events stemmed from boyhood wishful thinking, while others (and perhaps the most compelling) come from the realities of being a man in his late 20s, living in the post-Obama era and staring down the impending barrel of a pre-mid life crisis where career and my relationship with my (then) girlfriend were what I based happiness upon. In case you can’t read between the lines, Rumble was my way of coping with a break up from someone, who I had been with for many years. After all, the best way to mend a broken heart isn’t in the arms of another woman – it’s on a long walk to the dog park.
Rewind back to May when the notion of having a dog was as viable as a lucrative career in the print medium. I was at a rooftop BBQ and in between conversation hopping, spotted a dog who, because of her medium size and defined, intelligent-looking features, caught my attention. “I should get a dog,” I quipped to myself. Sufficed to say, it was one of those moments that were partly fueled by cold beer and the warm sun, and so naturally, it sounded brilliant. I asked the owner about the dog and the breed and all he could tell me is that it was a rescue from Puerto Rico and he’d had her for only a short while. I mused to my friend Va$htie that I wish there were huskies (the closest thing to a legal White Fang I could fathom) that were small enough to comfortably enjoy the confines of apartment living. To which she replied, there were, and said dogs were amazing, as she’d seen one. She gave me the name of the breed, I Googled it and was amazed, but chalked it up to wishful thinking and drifted back into my previous conversations. (more…)