And sometimes we take them home.

My little Munchie, a delicate flower, firmly believes that the best defense is a good offense. It does seem to work for him, although he is learning that he doesn’t need to stand down every dog or person who approaches him. When I first saw him, he was an inert grey wrinkled tiny thin lump lying in an isolation kennel. He was bald. He looked and smelled awful. All I could guess is that the first year of his short life had been pretty miserable. Why I gravitated to him after all the dogs I have seen in the shelter whom I have wanted to take home with me over the years, I just don’t know. What I do know is that a year and a half later after I took him home is that when I see him skipping and leaping through the park, with a full coat of hair, as fast and as graceful as anyone I’ve ever seen, it makes me happy. He was a tap dancer in a former life. His gentle eye kisses feel like rain falling on parched soil, and life would not be as rich as it is without him.

My little Mutley came along about 6 months later. Unhappily ensconced in the back of the shelter, he had come from an abusive home. He would have bit me as hard as he could have the first time I took him out to the shelter park if he had not had a cone on his neck due to an infected eye. He tried like mad, a whirling dervish of wavy black hair, teeth, and flailing legs, but after that one incident, he decided to trust me and just squirmed his way into my heart. And now we wake up together, the three of us, Munchie and I slowly, Mutley ready to capture the best of the day as soon as his eye opens. He has one beautiful expressive brown eye.

Two different dogs, both small, both very loving, both needy, both fun. They make me laugh a lot. I’d pictured my next dog as a female pit bull, around 3 years old, but somehow these little foster dogs found my home first. I’d never planned on having small dogs, nor more than one, nor any more males, but fortunately for the three of us, plans have a way of going south, and I’ve found that as is usual for companion animals, the longer that we live together, the better it gets. Happiness resides in loving and in being loved. It’s all about the love, baby.

Published in Tails of the City, quarterly magazine of San Francisco Animal Care and Control and in Dogtime.com, an online magazine.