2000-08-08 - 00:15:28

Today at work I was riding around with this guy and his dog. And since i was talking about dogs yesterday, why not explore the subject further?

One year when I was a kid my mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said a dog. I didn't have many friends, so a dog would have been nice. But my mother's allergic to dogs, so she couldn't get me one.

When I was in kindergarten, my brother Kevin and I sometimes walked to school together, and we passed through this short stretch of trail with a stream in it. It was a neat trail because it had these roots that stuck out of the ground that helped you keep your balance when it sloped. We called the trail the short cut because it cut off some time from our walk.

Once when we were taking the short cut to school, we found a dog just hanging out on the trail. At least that's how I remember it. Kevin made the effort to say hello to it, and it followed us the rest of the way to school. We decided it would be our dog.

In kindergarten, we were doing our usual thing that day when some of the kids saw the dog out the window. They all gathered around the window for a moment and said how cool it was. It made me feel like I was in one of those stories where Curious George or some other crazy animal comes to the school and wreaks havoc on the classroom. Only the dog didn't get inside. He just wandered around the school grounds, I guess.

Well, somehow, we caught up with the dog after school and he followed us home. I was in kindergarten, so I don't remember it too well. But he came home with us and we showed it to Mom and Dad. They must have distracted us and done something with it, because I don't remember playing with it much. But I do remember that my younger brother Mark, who had just barely learned how to speak, decided we should call it "Hoggy." So that was its name.

We weren't allowed to keep it, though, since Mom was allergic. She gave it to some distant relative of ours, or at least that's what she told us.

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A few years ago, when I was out getting my frst real newspaper experience at a paper in western Pennsylvania, I went on a walk with one of the paper's editors, Joe. While we walked through some woods, Joe told me about the dog he had when he was a kid.

Apparently, Joe liked his dog a lot, but he took it for granted. He would play with it a lot when he first got it, but as time went on, he played with it less and less. It wasn't that he didn't like the dog, but he just didn't have that much time to dedicate to it.

Sometimes the dog would be off doing his own thing, then he would come back and see what Joe was doing. After a while, the dog began to come back less and less, though Joe didn't worry too much. Then he stopped coming back and Joe wondered where he was.

Joe saw him one day in a neighbor's yard and went over to get him. The neighbor told him that the dog had just shown up, and he liked having him around to keep him company. Joe took him home that day, but the dog just kept on going back over to the neighbor's house.

I guess they treated him better over there. And Joe had to face the fact that his dog didn't want him any more. It was one of the saddest things in his life, he said.

Anyway, I wonder if Hoggy was out there just like Joe's dog, looking for someone to pay attention to him. Too bad it couldn't be me.

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