Six years ago, I bought a dog. Well, I didn’t buy her exactly, the boy I was dating at the time bought her for me. I did one of those things where you drop heavy hints to someone who you know is going to buy you exactly what you say you want. I wanted a dog. I even went so far as to drag this boyfriend to the pound to “hypothetically” pick one out. A few weeks later, I had my birthday gift—Loki.
When she was at the pound, the staff called her Piper—as in “Hyper Piper.” I renamed her Loki after the Nordic god of mischief. Yes, she’s a wild one, weighing around twenty-five pounds and looking, almost exactly, like a black dingo. Loki was six months old when I got her, and by the time she turned a year, I was dating someone new, an Australian (who confirmed that she did indeed resemble a dingo) with whom Loki quickly became friends. My ex and Loki’s liberator tried to keep in touch, but it didn’t last long. We’d moved on. After the Australian came a string of other boyfriends and even a short-term fiancé. Loki, as my friends liked to say, had many daddies.
But she took it with grace, never moping over their departures and offering enough saliva kisses to make each one feel special. In fact, she has always been more graceful about most things than I am. She certainly looks prettier when she runs, and she has a way of endearing herself to strangers that I, situationally shy, can never muster.
She’s also been with me through two moves, three states, four dye jobs, and I don’t know how many crises. Loki’s kept her poise through them all. She is, as the best dogs are, perfectly faithful to me. Her affections may spread themselves to many a man, (and they do—she even has a tendency to pee when she sees a man whom she especially likes) but she has only ever had one mommy.
Which is why I felt more than a little guilty the other day when I went to my vet to drop Loki off at the kennel for the weekend. I always felt badly leaving her alone, but it wasn’t the abandonment that bothered me most that day. It was the piece of paper the vet made me sign saying how much money I was willing to spend on Loki if something should go horribly wrong and they couldn’t get in touch with me.
This was a tough question, which basically translated to, “How much did I think Loki was worth?” I had, according to the sheet, four options from which I could choose. They read something like this:
1) I am a complete miser who is more concerned about spending my money at whatever vacation I’m on than my dog. Kill her.
2) I sort of love my dog but not enough to give up a trip to Disney World. Give her a $100 bucks worth of treatment and then let her die.
3) Spend up to $500 dollars to make the pooch better. That’s pretty good, right?
4) I am a saint or else loaded. Spend as much money as you need on my angel.
I marked the $500 option. I was not a saint, and I was not loaded. I wanted to be a saint, but I just didn’t see how you could do that without the money. I could take out loans, I supposed, but would it really make sense for me to put myself even more deeply in debt just to give Loki the chance at an extra year or two? She was already seven. But maybe that was the sort of logic that only occurred to people who were too selfish to think of the well-being of anyone besides themselves.
