4.17.2010

Cherie

Me and my wife decided to get a dog. Till the time she came to bangalore, she always had a dog in her home. So I could not fail to notice the excitment in her face when I agreed to get a dog to our house.

Almost everyone in their childhood dream of having a pet. Let it be Dog or a cat, children somehow manage to find a non-human buddy for themselves. I remember that I had got two little
puppies from the street and started to take care of them in my grandma's house. All the kids in my colony treated as their own pets and we used to love the time spent with them.


Kids always see the emotional part of things and adults sometimes see the logical part of things. The same happened with me and I could not hold on to a dog for a long time. So the childhood dream of having a dog was buried like the bone dog burries in ground.


Then I grew up and with age you start to think logically. All the thougths of, if I own a pet, i will have to feed it, bath it, clean the mess it creates. Above all, i would lose my freedom and have to dedicate my time to it. Such thoughts chain you up, narrowing your sight towards negetivity.


The bone remained burried until my wife started off one day after we moved in to our new house that we should get a dog. I was not willing to pay for a dog and told her the same. Later she found a organization called CUPA. It is a NGO in favour of animals and they had put up a camp on Gandhi Jayathi in which we could go and adopt a pet staying at their shelter.


That was the day when we got Cherie. She is unusual. She looks like a pom but has the color of a german shepard. For the day we brought her she was quiet and we thought she does not know how to bark. But as the days passed by we realized that she is one notorious dogie, who always likes to be pampered. She goes to the extent of taking our hands, putting it on herself asking us to pamper her.


Lot of things changed after she has come home. Me or my wife has to return from work before 6pm just because we need to take her out for a walk and give her dinner. Our expenditures have increased. Our outings have become less. We take leave from work when she is sick. When we go out, we do not enjoy until we come to know she is doing well back home. My wife cries when she gets hurt.


These are some of the difficulties which we face. But on the other side, we are more happy when we are at home with her. Her every action makes us laugh. After a day of work, your stress goes off the instant when u see she is all over you right after you have opened the house door. No welcome comes close to the welcome u get from her. And the best thing is, We become kids when she is with us. The best part of our life, childhood, comes back alive.


Weighing the pros and cons of owning a dog would be useless. You give them a home. They give you everything. My freind one's said. "My dad did not cry when my grandma died, but he cried when his dog died". This just shows the space that a dog can create in your heart. Cherie has created that space in our hearts.
We will always be thankful to God to give us the sense to have dog and hope God gives the same sense to everyone else.