Canter Bridge

Today was a great day at work. The team is energized, the projects are queued up, the camaraderie is palpable. Even the soup and salad at the Olive Garden seemed peculiarly flavorful to my colleague Rick and me on this late summer day in Indianapolis, where the air feels uncommonly autumnal.

Quitting time came early. I could have stayed longer.

‘Cept for Sammy, whom I could hardly wait to see. He welcomed me home with a slightly more erect posture than the slumping, fearful gait with which he began his life under our roof. My wife was on the phone with the rescue volunteer, reporting in on his progress, gleaning some new facts. Continue Reading »

The tectonic plates of the soul launched one giant sigh of relief when Sammy walked outside and peed for the first time. When he nailed his first dumper in the grass by the bird feeder, the rejoicing could be heard clear across town.

The unthinkable ‘what if …?’ still haunts my more brooding moments. Continue Reading »

Despite the best efforts our über-athletic Rhodesian Ridgeback Rosie and her erstwhile companion Dear Departed Tucker, the fact remains: our yard is full of squirrels. The day-to-day canine v. rodent skirmish over those green square yards ends with an unchanging outcome whose monotony seems somehow not to dampen the participants’ enthusiasm: squirrel safe again!

Enter Sammy, our newly adopted blind Rhodesian Ridgeback. The threat level, squirrels everywhere might reasonably have concluded, has decreased with the arrival of this helpless, unseeing, gentle dog. Continue Reading »

Sammy, whose weekend name change from clichéd ‘Simba’ to the humbler diminutive of ‘Sam’ more accurately reflects Midwestern modesty, is a high-stepper. When you’re blind, I suppose, you take whatever measures are necessary. When on unfamiliar turf—which appears to have been Sammy’s lot from birth—and you can’t see it in front of you, you step high as though marching in the hope that your feet will find the terrain’s irregularity before your nose bumps into it.

This, at least, is one of Sammy’s ways of negotiating his fate. Continue Reading »

This is Day Two in the story of a rescued Rhodesian Ridgeback who came to us Saturday afternoon under the name ‘Simba’. Day One was too busy for words.

Nobody knows if Simba is truly the name of this emaciated, scared dog brought to us in response to several phone calls by a caring rescuer volunteer.

In fact, nobody knows anything about Simba except this one thing. Simba is blind. Continue Reading »