My Blue Dog

I have a blue dog.

We call him that sometimes anyway.

See, I have a dog named Blue – and at a time, I once felt this idea of carefree-companionship.

I was finished with graduate school and looking for work.

Finding a job proved impossible for that season of my life, but one day this stray dog showed up.

It took a week before he was part of the family – and almost a year before he weaseled his way into becoming an inside dog.

Most days we ran together for 2 miles.

I wanted to exercise, and Blue just wanted to be where I was.

Years later I went to grad school – again – and then had a family.

My parents fell in love with him – so I left him with them and moved away.

But for short periods between the stresses of a job search: I had a dog – and not a care in the world.

“I remember running through a field with Dad’s collie, Dannie, a beautiful, bedraggled creature so gentle that he once caught a baby rabbit and carried it in his mouth, unharmed, to a human for inspection. I have no idea why I was running, but we both collapsed from exhaustion and lay in the grass, Dannie’s head on my chest and my eyes staring at the blue sky. I don’t know that I had ever felt so content, so completely unworried about life and its stresses.”

Here he is playing with Huck, that we got a few years later: