Operation Doggy

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.