We got a dog yesterday. I drew a picture of it.
Dear Dad,
I hope you’re gone. And I hope you come back. And I hope you’re still there. And I hope I never hear from you again. And I hope I hear from you again every day.
I hope you get this letter and I hope you never get this letter.
If you get it, you’ll know that we got a dog yesterday. I drew a picture of it.
Mom picked me up after basketball practice and had Rhonda in the car with her. We went straight to the animal shelter. The shelter is split up into two sections—cats and dogs. We were let in by a woman named Cassandra—she had like three piercings in her lip, but still talked mostly normal. She took us behind a counter and then opened a big metal door. As soon as the door opened, the room behind her exploded in barking. The room was long and narrow, lined in three levels of wire cages on both sides. Cassandra told us to take our time, look around, and ask questions.
Rhonda had her book of dog breeds with her. She would walk up to a cage, look at the dog inside, then flip through the book as if she were some kind of botanist or something. No, wait. A botanist is a plant scientist. What do you call a dog scientist? A doganist?
I’m pretty sure there weren’t any purebred dogs in there. They all looked like different kinds of mutts to me. Some were little and hairy. Some were big and hairy. They were all loud, as if each one thought, “If I’m the loudest one, maybe they’ll pick me.”
One thing that’s weird about mutts is that they all have tails that curl upwards. There must be some kind of dog breed with upward-curling tails that gets around a lot, if you know what I mean.
We looked around for about half an hour and finally got the choice narrowed down to two—one was a black dog with pointy ears that was kind of medium-sized. The other was a little, dirty white dog with hairy legs. Mom didn’t like that one, because he had one goopy eye. Cassandra kept saying, “Don’t worry about his eye. That’s just a temporary condition.” Mom would nod and smile, and then whisper under her breath, “How does she know it will go away?”
So we picked the black dog. The lady referred to her—it’s a girl dog—as a shepherd-lab. A schlep, for short. That’s what I call it. I wanted to name it, “Schlep.” Rhonda said we should name it Cassandra, because I’m pretty sure Rhonda thinks of herself as someone who will get piercings when she gets old enough. We argued about names the whole way home. The dog sat in the back seat, between Rhonda and me. First time I can remember that we didn’t fight over who got shotgun.
I’ll write more tomorrow. Right now, I want to go play with Schlep or Cassandra or Dog X or whatever its name is.
Your son,
Trevor