When we agreed to foster Sammy, we were making a Faustian bargain with our own inclination toward loving dogs. We knew deep inside, though the unspoken pact required that the agreement never be mentioned in conversation, that we could never ‘give him back’. It was a clandestine adoption, an under-the-table bargain by which Sammy would instantly become a member of the family while we politely lied to ourselves that any such thing was happening. It was a rescue disguised as a holding pattern. He would be ours, but under the fiction that he was not. From time to time, the language of ‘returning him’ surfaced in a hypothetical way, though we both knew that there was not a them out there to whose company Sammy could be restored if things didn’t work out.
It was a most amenable fiction. It was the whitest of lies. (more…)
Canter Bridge 