Pocketful of Puppy

Mending a Cracked Heart

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in

- Leonard Cohen

We were not going to get another dog, not never, just not anytime soon. We lost our sweet Cato before Christmas, and we wanted to give our cracked hearts more time to mend. We wanted to rest, to renew our spirits and build up the tenacity it would take for another transition.

We were going to wait for the right time.

But something slipped into our cracked hearts… a thought, a wonder, a possibility, a desire, something which surpassed risk, caution and common sense. What if we didn’t wait to love someone who was wanting to be loved?

And once the idea slipped in, it attached itself like a barnacle, chiseling away at our hearts creating just enough space… to inquire, to wonder, to consider… if one of the puppies, rescued locally, still needed a home. And once that question was answered with a resounding yes, the idea hammered away a little more until there was space to postulate, to dream, to ask if that home might be our home.

We shared the thought with our kids. One of them said, “Can we get him right now?” The other said nothing. The cracks in our hearts don’t heal in the same way at the same time.

I showed pictures of the pups, one black lab cuter than the next, to a friend before yoga. “Am I crazy?” I asked, “to even consider this?”

“Get two,” she said. “They can play together.”

We scheduled a visit. I couldn’t wait, but I also worried. Were we pushing a dog on a kid that wasn’t ready yet? “I think it will be good for her,” I said to my parents on the phone. I wanted to believe this was true.

I waited for my dad’s response, trusting his practicality. My parents were never ones to make things more difficult than they needed to be. “It will be good for her,” my dad said. “Plus,” he added, “this dog needs a home.” My parents wanted their daughter to be happy too.

The pup Dan and I very much wanted was named Cameron, and on our way to meet him, Dan informed me that the adoption was a process.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means we don’t just go home with a dog. First, we go to their house, then he comes to our house,” Dan said.

“That’s a process?” I laughed. “Two visits?”

“It’s more than we had with Mateo,” Dan said. Mateo was our foster son who lived with us for almost two years, and Dan was correct. We only had one visit with him before he came to live with us permanently.

We pulled into the alley behind Cameron’s foster home. “There he is,” Dan said, pointing to the pup who was in his foster mom’s arms. We walked up to their fenced backyard and nervously said hello.

“Come on in.” Cameron’s foster mom, Molly, said. She encouraged the pooch in her arms to say hello, but he was timid and turned his head the other way. I remember how scared Cato was when we met her at the shelter for the first time, how she positioned herself as far away from us as possible, how her tail hung limp behind her, how she clung to the shelter attendant’s side.

Molly gave us treats hoping it would encourage Cameron to feel at ease around to us. Two other dogs, one clearly Cameron’s brother, and another large friendly white dog with brown patches, were running around the yard. They came right up to us, hoping we would share the treats, but Cameron kept his distance. Molly’s wife Sara came out of the house, and Molly asked her to put Chase, the larger dog, back inside.

When Sara returned, they pulled yard chairs over saying that if we sat down Cameron might feel more relaxed. They placed Cameron in Anna’s lap and commented on how he seemed at home there. Then, they shared Cameron’s story with us, how he was one in a litter of ten found in an abandoned run-down shack, no mom in sight. “They were living on top of each other,” Molly said. “His sister, liked to push these two around,” Molly laughed gently, pointing to Cameron and his brother.

“Did you guys name him?” I asked.

Molly and Sara nodded. “He’s named after Cameron Dicker, who we absolutely adore,” Molly said as if Cameron Dicker were common knowledge. I later learned from Dan that Cameron’s namesake is a football kicker. “Cole, we thought was a good name for a black dog, but we’re spelling it C-o-l-e. Cole is a foster fail,” Molly confessed. “He was supposed to go to a friend of ours, but it didn’t work out. She,” Molly said, pointing at her wife “wants to keep him.”

Sara laughed, and said, “He gets along so well with our other dogs.”

I wondered how many dogs they had, if perhaps their house was full of dogs, but it turned out they only had two dogs before Cole. They periodically rescued foster dogs. This was their first time rescuing puppies.

Cam’s foster mamas told us that Cam was a super smart, sweet dog, which was apparent. They also said he was pretty much potty trained. He could even ring a bell on the door when he wanted to go out, and he knew how to sit and stand, etc. If you took him outside in the yard off leash, he would stay close to you. All of those things might be true, but none of those things was true the first day we took Cam home to our house.

Desperate to get him to relieve himself after many failed attempts, I let him off leash in our yard, which is only partially fenced in. I kept him in my line of sight, but the sun had gone down, and this was getting harder to do. The darkness also seemed to scare him, and when I called his name, instead of coming to me, he ran in the opposite direction. We played a game of chase like this back and forth until I finally yelled for reinforcement. It took three of the four members of our family and a bag of treats to convince him to come out from under the trampoline. The ground was covered in slush, and when we finally returned to our house, we were all wet and cold.

After the tramp incident, Cam seemed scared of us again. My family blamed me for letting him off leash. Their judgement hurt my feelings. Like them, I was just trying to figure out how best to take care of him. I felt better, though, when I remembered that it wasn’t about me. They were sad because a dog they were desperate to love was not letting them love him. It is easy in those moments, when we so badly want something, and it’s not going quite how we thought, to think it will be like this forever, but the truth is that transitions are hard, and trust takes time.

I took lots of pictures of Cam on his first day with us. He is adorable, but in those photos his eyes are brimming with fear. The world smelled and sounded different than what he was used to, and while he was curious about his new surroundings and his new people, he didn’t trust us yet.

The next morning, I took more pictures of Cam, and I could see that so much of that fear had dissipated. He knew that when he needed us in the night we were there, that when he made a mess on the carpet, we cleaned it up and still told him that he was a good boy. He started to play with us, fetch and tug of war. He gradually got a little closer and closer, and when he tired out, he rested his tiny head and his large paws on our legs. He found a good spot in Dan’s lap and settled in.

The day after our overnight visit, when Cam returned to his foster home, the kid who was resistant to the idea of another dog said, “You know who I really wish was here right now?”

I knew.

Even though Cam was named after a kicker I never heard of who plays a sport I don’t care about, we are keeping his name. We like it, and it was given to him by two women whose hearts were big enough to love him completely and then to share him with us. As a foster mama myself, I know how hard this is.

The four of us, though, are making our own claims on Cam. One kid has decided Cam will be Kam, with a k, and the other kid has decided that his formal name will not be Cameron, but Camera Obscura, after her favorite band. I’m fond of this choice, more so when I discovered that camera obscura means dark room. A camera obscura only works because there is a small crack in that dark room, a space for the light to filter through. That sliver in the dark, fills with light, creating a reflection and becoming a thing of beauty.

We are settling in at home learning to love all the versions of Kam and feeling lucky at the idea of him loving us too. To ease the transition, I bought bells. I attached them to our doors, and sure enough Kam ran to ring them. The first time he did this, we took him out immediately, and he did his business. We thought he was a genius. When we went back inside, he rang the bells again within seconds and then he rang them again and again and again. Every time we sit down, the bells start ringing.

He might not be a genius. (I am covering his ears.) And he might not be fully potty trained, but this little Camera Obscura is filling our lives with so much light.