When I was 8, my family decided to adopt a dog. The local shelter was a filthy, noisy place in the worst part of San Diego, so we chose the first medium-sized puppy we saw, threw $20 at a volunteer and dashed back to the minivan. There were times when we wished we had been more discerning because Katie, as we called her, turned out not to be the most intelligent of creatures. Once, she ate an entire string of Christmas lights. She frequently tried to dry-hump the cat. But she served my family loyally for more than a decade, and when she died we mourned with more emotion than we expended on some of our relatives.
My husband and I decided we needed a Katie shortly after we purchased a home in the Bay Area. I picked up Aaron, '06, after work one day and we drove to an upscale neighborhood near a three-star hotel. We had no reason to visit the hotel, but I doubt its accommodations could have been better than those inside the shelter: spacious rooms with upholstered furniture, large play areas enclosed by glass walls. One could easily imagine housekeeping coming by to present a chew toy or trim a dewclaw. These dogs didn't look desperate; they seemed bored.
After a tour, a fresh-faced volunteer handed us a bundle of paperwork she called an application, as though instead of getting a pet we were requesting admission to college. (We were later asked to provide references and schedule a formal interview.) In a short essay section on why we were qualified to be pet owners, I described our new home on the coast and disavowed any career aspirations that might lead either my husband or me to leave home for any period of time. The one caveat, I wrote apologetically, was that we did not want a pit bull or Chihuahua. (I did not indicate on the application that my 6-foot-6 husband didn't envision himself with a small dog, lest he crush it in Of Mice and Men style.)
Perhaps pit bulls and Chihuahuas were the only dogs available. Perhaps the application committee felt that having breed preferences was grounds to reject us outright. In either case, we never got the call granting us permission to adopt one of the dogs. When the same thing happened at two other shelters, I began to get angry. Across the country, thousands of homeless animals were being euthanized and we couldn't adopt one of them? What was wrong with us?
We took a road trip that summer and realized our problem was one of geography: There weren't as many animals being abandoned in the well-heeled communities of the Bay Area compared to other parts of California. We gave up our search after a fourth organization, one that imported abandoned animals from the Central Valley, promised us an adorable white Lab only to tell us later that she had been given to another family. We had already named her Nutmeg.
Sometimes, when two people love each other very much and aren't allowed to adopt a puppy, they decide to have a baby instead. When the doctors handed me my son, whimpering and wet, I realized how unprepared we were to care for anything of any species. Sure, we had read guidebooks and could offer food and lodging, but that feeling of having something so small and helpless depend on you for everything? There are few things in life that can ready you for that—and a nice house and a good education are not among them.
I hope to share that feeling with my son in some small way in a few years. We'll drive to a bad part of town, jump out of the car, and ask to see the dog that seems most likely to eat a string of Christmas lights.
Marie C. (Cannizzaro) Baca, '06, MA '10, lives near Half Moon Bay, Calif.
