A Broken Heart Isn't Always a Tragedy

I grew up loving "Peanuts." I just really enjoyed the characters. I sort of related to Charlie Brown's toiling fruitlessly on the baseball diamond, I liked how Linus would wax philosophical between sucking his thumb, it cracked me up how Marcie called Peppermint Patty "sir," and I admired Schroder's Beethoven-wannabe piano chops.

More than anything else, I loved Snoopy. I thought he was the coolest dog ever. He hunted the Red Baron on his Sopwith Camel, he stalked the desert as a vulture, paraded around as a penguin, and excelled at baseball. Even with his amazing talents, he was still very much a dog: He was Charlie's loyal friend¹, he loved to get the blanket, and he would sometimes curl up with Charlie at night when he went to bed. For all of his losing characteristic, I still thought Charlie Brown had the best life of them all because he still had Snoopy.

As I've written before, I love dogs. I think they're the perfect non-human companion. You know movies like "My Dog Skip"? I never really dug them, but I envied the relationship between the boy and the dog, his closest friend. What else could a boy really want? I was jealous of the people that had that.

Our family had a dog, and I loved her very much. However, she wasn't "my" dog. I always felt that distinction. I always wanted my dog, one that came to me first and considered me his true friend. Because I enjoyed "Peanuts" so, I wanted to get a male beagle and name him Snoopy.

I tend to fight loneliness in my little corner of Athens², and I have more than once wanted to have a canine friend to live with me. What really held me back was money; I didn't feel that I had enough of it to properly support a furry pal. I certainly had the desire and willingness.

My hand was somewhat forced when a coworker said she found a dog chained to her front porch one day. It was a beagle, and she was trying to find a home for it. It essentially came down to me or taking the dog to the pound³. I figured I might as well give it a try. The dog- a girl, as it turned out- was either a stray or abandoned. We figured she was a couple years old and had been taken care of for at least some period of time⁴.

So I picked her up and brought her back to my place. She didn't have any tags or any sign of ownership save for a collar on her neck. There was no way to tell if she had been fixed or had her shots. We didn't know her name, and she was going to be mine, so I named her Lucy⁵.

And she was an absolute sweetheart. She loved to give face kisses and hop in my lap and just chill. She's also an absolute fireball: It was nearly impossible to get her to calm down and relax. I know young dogs have a lot of energy, but she did not take well to being inside. And being inside alone? She couldn't handle it. She would start freaking out within five seconds. And no matter how little time I spent outside without her, as soon as she came back in, she would leap on me and look at me with a "I didn't think you'd come back!" mood in her eyes⁶.

When I was getting ready for bed, though, she sensed it and would wait for me on my bed. This was, in every sense of the word, a dream come true for me. I have very little experience sleeping with another person in bed with me⁷, so to have a dog curled up beside me was very special. I always wanted to have a dog that wanted to sleep on the bed with me. I just thought it would be the coolest thing ever, and it pretty much was.

The main problem was when Steve and I left for work for the day. She absolutely tore the apartment apart. My DVD remote, various boxes, some of my bedding... it was all destroyed. She somehow managed to open up my book bag and shred some of the contents inside. I had a couple razors in there, so that was a scary moment.

She lives to be outside. I don't think she ever willingly went back in; we always had to guide her through the door. She was an outside dog for sure.

And it was that, really, that was the tipping point. I really liked Lucy, but she was just too much. Because she was older, she was harder to try to train, and I didn't think she would ever be an indoor dog. We weren't going to be around during the day enough to let her outside so that she would not turn the apartment into a fallout zone.

It really broke my heart. Lucy, as I said, is an absolute sweetheart, which made it that much harder to let go, but I had to. It was ultimately the best thing for both of us. Thankfully, a rescue organization was able to find a home for her. I've been told she's in Canada(!) now, which is really the perfect place for her. I miss her, but I know she's happy.

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1 Even while tormenting him the way only a dog can.

2 Especially lately, when it seems like none of my friends are single.

3 Taking a dog to the pound in Athens is tantamount to a death sentence.

4 One sign: Her nails were trimmed.

5 Yes, Lucy Van Pelt.

6 It led me to believe that she was abandoned. She never seemed to figure out that, yes, I was going to come back.

7 No, I'm not counting the times I shared a bed with my sister when we stayed in hotels.