My wife, the dognapper

I love my wife.

(Your honor, the defense would like to submit this blog entry. The defendant was obviously a devoted husband. How can anyone think he committed such a horrible act against the woman who was the focus of his life?)

Claudia and I have a series of running jokes between us. She says that I enjoy scaring small children, and I say that she has a tattoo that only small animals can see, announcing to all of them that she's an easy mark. There's ample evidence for both claims.

So when I got a call at work, while it may have been unusual for my wife to tell me we had a new dog, it was believable. It seems she saw this cute Pomeranian limping on the side of the road when she was coming home, and when she stopped the car, got out and made goo goo noises at it, it sensed a soft heart and hopped right in. Anyone else, that dog would have barked and probably whipped out a can of mace. My wife? Nope.

So she takes it to the vet, where the dog is pronounced to be in good health but does not have one of those handy microchips. She calls a couple of friends who will act as foster caregivers of animals, but it will be a few days before any of them have space and or time to take it. So she gives me the call.

This is not the first call like this I've received. Last year it was a chihuahua, one who was so people-friendly he would stand up on his hind legs and dance with you, and would hop in my lap whenever I sat down with him in the room. To avoid getting too attached to him, Claudia didn't want to give him a name. When I saw him for the first time, I joked that he was small enough to sleep in a soup bowl, so I just called him Soup. Eventually he was taken in by a family with kids.

Of course, while he was here, he earned himself the second name of 'Sir Pees a Lot.' Seems he was never fixed (or broken, as Claudia calls it), and felt the need to clear up any misconceptions about who owned the chairs, the toolbox, and the floor. He was also so hyper that he was never still. Ever. Imagine life with a large, affectionate rat who uses speed. That was Soup, and that was the reason I was a bit cautious about celebrating having another critter in the household.

The vet finishes the Pomeranian’s examination, (the damn thing was so furry, she had to hold it up by its hind legs to get a idea of whether it was male or not. It was) it gets loaded into the car for the next chapter in its life, and Claudia heads for home.

Now that soft heart does have some advantages. She's got a sense of connection that most people don’t have that lets her get closer, faster, to other people who have it. So when she's almost home and sees a man wandering around, she recognizes the look on his face. The look tells her right away what's going on.

“Are you looking for a dog?”

Where did the man live? Two streets over from our house. Where was my wife when she saw the poor lost dog? Two streets over. The man had held a door open for just one second too long, and Fluffy (yes, that is his real name) went for an unauthorized stroll. Who could have foreseen that he would get kidnapped?

So Fluffy is home, his owner has promised to get him chipped, and I get to ask my wife if the animal police have a warrant out for her arrest. Fluffy's owner is a handyman, so we now have someone to call if something needs to fixed. That's how real life works sometimes.

That's what makes writing about it such fun.