Liney-Poo

This Storytime Sunday is inspired by the fact that I'm currently pet-sitting Linus for my parents.  Isn't he the cutest little angelic dog?

In May 2013, I graduated from Agnes Scott and was preparing to move to Nashville for my first semester of grad school. The day before the big move, my mom rented a small yellow Penske truck and pulled it around back of the house. We loaded furniture, clothes, dishes, everything I'd need to live in Nashville for a year as a successful graduate student. This process of loading heavy furniture into a truck took a couple hours between the two of us.

When all was said and done, we closed the truck and decided to head in for dinner. But wait, it was 6:00, time to feed the dog. Linus is diabetic and has to eat measured portions of food at 6am and 6pm, along with an insulin shot. Where the heck was Linus? We realized we had left the gate open and he had wandered out while we were loading.

Things we know about our dog:

• He is nearly blind, and could easily have fallen into a ditch or creek. (There were plenty of them in our old neighborhood.)
• He is scared of everything, including the jingling of his own collar, so at the time we didn't keep tags on his collar for his own sake. 
• Linus is an extremely lazy dog. We knew he couldn't have gone far, and we knew he would never willingly walk uphill. 

So we split up- on foot and in a car, roaming the neighborhood yelling for Linus. Who were we kidding, he never comes when we call his name. So we tried again, roaming the neighborhood squeaking his favorite toy, a rubber chicken.

We couldn't find him. We gave up around 9pm when it got dark. I'm sure my parents didn't sleep well that night. Our diabetic, needy, scaredy dog was lost somewhere, alone and cold in the dark. Of course I was guilt-ridden, since it was my fault we left the gate open for hours. We woke up the next morning and called the lost pet network for our neighborhood, and the lady said, "Yeah! Somebody found a Westie last night. Here's her phone number and address."

The house was no more than 40 yards away from ours. They had found Linus around 5:30pm, brought him inside and decided they would try to find his owner the next morning. We were screaming across the neighborhood like idiots. I bet Linus could hear us calling from the street and was rolling around with laughter inside, "Hahaha they think they're going to feed me a measly half cup of kibble and give me a prickly shot again. Not this time, suckers!" He survived an evening without his shot, what a tough guy.