Birthday Dog

Patch turned five last week. Five years. Gone by like *snap that. I got this little boy when he was a six-week old furball the size of a chipotle burrito. Most of his birthdays have been the same, more or less, but this one hit me differently. Something about five being half of ten, and something about the typical life expectancy of dogs. . . and. . . and . . .

My mind went to some places that I didn’t want it to. The scary thing is how unbelievably fast the last five years have gone by, how vividly I still remember everything that happened those early weeks and months, the needle-like teeth, the weird puppy breath, the crate training, the carrying him up and down the apartment stairs to go potty, the crying all night.

I don’t want to think about life without Patch, I want to enjoy every wacky moment of it as is. I read somewhere that the average cost of a dog over the course of its life is around 6k. HA! In civil war dollars? This dog has cost me so much money and yet, as all dog owners understand, the value that he’s brought to my life is something money can never come close to purchasing. He gives me something to be responsible for, something to take care of, someone who’s there when I walk through the door every night. I live alone right now. But I never feel like I do - once, for about six months in college, I lived in an apartment by myself. But at that time, there was no dog. And every single night when I walked through the door, I had this absolute crushing certainty that no matter what, on the other side of that door was darkness and stillness and nothing else. Never anything else. Well I still technically live alone but I haven’t felt that way in a long time. About five years.