"How long is he with us for?"

A formal introduction, of sorts

Today’s accompanying tune: “Wiser” by Old Man Canyon

I figured it was about time to introduce someone. Officially.

I’ve known Oliver for 10 years. A decade. The average age of a fifth grader. Enough time to cover three election cycles, seven original Taylor Swift albums, and four rerecorded Taylor Swift albums. For long-time Dispatch readers, he is a sentence or two each week, a quick distilled snapshot from the video of his life. He sleeps on the couch, in the sun, on several blankets. His spiteful antics summarized, his treats highlighted. But he’s been an especially good boy this last week, so I’m feeling especially generous. Because he is truly the best boy, the best dog in the universe. The other half of my soul I didn’t know was missing until I saw his pleading eyes behind a layer of plexiglass in the basement of a rundown shelter in Chicago. Until I sat on the floor of the food storage room of said shelter while he sniffed my cardigan and burrowed inside of the cheap fabric and also my heart.

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I clocked out from my shift at the fast casual restaurant in my college town — one of three jobs I was holding at the time — without much thought. I had only just gotten back into town from an internship in the Bay Area and had barely $100 in my bank account — now $136 from tips after my six-hour shift. The internship didn’t pay and rent in the Bay Area was rent in the Bay Area. I knew I would need to pull as many doubles as I could over the weeks before classes started if I wanted to afford rent, food, books. It was my last quarter of college, the coldest, darkest part of the year in Chicago. Generally, things were feeling a bit bleak, but no more than they had the last 21 years had been.

I had asked my roommate before she left for break whether she would be open to fostering dogs in our new apartment, which just happened to be dog friendly. I grew up with dogs and, in the thick of winter hibernation and impending graduation, felt like a little friend would be a the boost I needed to make it through. She, thankfully, agreed.

And so I left town and drove south into the city. The clouds were low, the city gray. I parked on the street, careful to avoid the slush puddles accumulating along the curb, and stepped inside. Oliver had only arrived a few hours before. If I had gone before my shift instead of after, things would be so very different for us both.

I had to carry him out of the shelter because he had never encountered stairs before, and the bright lights of the passing cars shining through the window sent him into a cowering frenzy. He sat patiently in the front seat the whole way back to my apartment, where I had little in the way of supplies or preparations. We cuddled up on the futon and I sent a picture to my roommate.

“So cute! How long is he with us for?” she texted.

“Um, forever, I think? I adopted him.”

He was only a year old, two at most, the shelter had said. They didn’t know much about him since he had come in only a few hours before, but they knew he had been a stray in a southern state where they had partnered with another rescue organization. He was skin and bones and still needed to be neutered. They didn’t know he had a massive worm infection, or a tendency to mark every inch of his territory. They didn’t know that he despised men and had a tendency to break out of any restraint he met. We learned it together, like we learned how to brave frigid Chicago winters and scary car rides and limited budgets. Like how we learned to trust each other, two kids terrified of what came next, even if we were doing it together.

All told, we’ve lived in four apartments and one house. We’ve lived in two states but traveled to eight. He was there for my 22nd birthday, my 30th. I was there for his third, his seventh, his tenth. He endured the results of post-work happy hours in my early 20s, while I endured his enduring tendency to make his displeasure known by peeing in the kitchen, all kitchens, every kitchen, all the time. He has never missed a meal, and, on one occasion, finished my dinner — a half of a deep dish pizza — in what is probably the best day of his life. He will do anything for a treat, and is frustratingly easy to train. When he doesn’t listen, it’s because he simply doesn’t want to. A little plausible deniability would be nice, on occasion, but I understand the compulsion to flout authority. We have that in common.

Winning Oliver over is easy, at first glance. A treat is enough to get him to pretend he likes you. And he is pretending. Because, in reality, he assumes all other people are here simply to do his bidding. A running joke in our little circle is that, in another life, Oliver was most certainly a cat or a king, with no other possibility. Truly, there is very little difference.

He has a few toys he prefers to rip to shreds, and will gnaw on a bone only if our other dog already has it. He stops as soon as he acquires too much drool — he is a very proper gentleman. He doesn’t suffer the indignities of chasing a ball but he will use all of his 30-pound self to play tug-of-war. His favorite pass time, though, is laying in the sun, rotating like a rotisserie chicken, on the hottest days of the year.

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A few years ago, my heart stopped when the vet said she heard something “unusual” with Oliver’s heart. It could be nothing, she said, but also it didn’t hurt to head to the cardiologist. A specialist, over an hour away, who was booked out for the next six months. For six months, I waited in agony, counting Oliver’s breaths, limiting his sunbathing, cutting our walks short. Everything we had, on the line.

Oliver’s first car ride was also his best. He is as anxious a passenger as I am a driver. No one wants to join us on our trips, and we’re both due for a nap upon our return. And so, together with our crippling anxieties, we wove through the Southern California highways towards either the best or worst day of our lives.

“You’re here for Oliver?” the vet asked as she walked out into the waiting room where we were sitting, each of us side by side on the hard wood benches. I could only nod, afraid to open my mouth and burst into tears in front of a stranger.

“He’s got a few issues with his heart valves, but for the most part we think he’s okay.” I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of her talk, which covered exactly what they had seen on his echocardiogram, what they were looking for, the lack of fluid anywhere there shouldn’t be fluid. We left without a prescription, but a directive to keep counting breaths and return for another scan in six months.

Nearly two years since, and I haven’t stopped counting his breaths, our breaths. The ones when he’s asleep curled against my back, under the covers. The ones as he watches me from another room, waiting for me to notice that it is nearly dinnertime. The shallow ones during fireworks, which are always too close and too loud. The ones as he schemes to get our other dog to give up her bone. The ones where he watches TV, same as he did our first night together. The ones where, the same as his first nights in our small apartment in Chicago, I placed my hand against his ribs and felt him inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, until I also fell asleep.

We’ve weathered blizzards and hurricanes, dust storms and lightning storms. There were several weeks during the initial stage of stay-at-home orders where he refused to sleep in my bedroom, so tired he was of having me around. Many foster dogs, one permanent addition he says he tolerates but ultimately adores. Each time, survived on a breath, and then another.

Each one, the best there has ever been. Each one, a reason for us both to give another day a chance, to let go of the worst of ourselves so we can show up for each other, be the one the other needs us to be. Each one, surely, giving way to another gray hair. Each one, a gift from one soul to another. The best there is.

Here’s to my soul dog, the best dog. All the best dogs there ever were.

- Megan