So there we were, Jen, Aug, Willow, myself, all stuffed from a big brunch at Diner. Walking around sort of aimless. Eventually the plan was to go to Jen’s and drink beer and do some arts and crafting. Jen pops in to her laundromat and asks if they stole some of her clothes. Meanwhile this dog follows her in. Let me describe this dog — cute. Piercing icy blue eyes, white fur, pink nose. It’s an Australian Shepard we later learned. This dog is coming up to everyone. Nuzzling, laying on it’s back for belly rubs, not barking. This local lady is going on and on about the dog, how it just walked up and was running loose and how she’s taken in two cats and how her husband didn’t want the cats at first but now he’s really into them. So we hear her out, and finally tell her we’d take care of it, and she blesses us and finally leaves us alone. Someone calls the vet number on the tag. They’re located in Texas and not open. We call local dog places and no one has called them looking for her. We take her to a vet to see if she has the micro chip buried in her. She doesn’t. We make hand-drawn posters of her and put the phone number on there. We can’t believe no one is running around frantically looking for this amazing dog. We’re walking her all over the place. People keep stopping us. “Can I take picture of your dog?” Then we tell them how she’s lost and they hadn’t seen her before, but will gladly take her if no one claims her and they chime in with their various advices and dognapping horror tales.

We walk and walk and walk. We see all kinds of people we know, people from our pasts, friends of friends, etc. From like 2pm til about 8pm. The only person to contact us was a text message from someone who loved one of the signs and had fallen in love with whomever made it, and they hoped we were a cute single boy. We get the dog back to Jen’s and feed her and the dog is still totally stoked and having a great time. At this point we’re all day-dreaming about how we’re going to change our lives for this dog. Who’s gonna try and keep her. Or if we can’t keep her — what qualities we seek in future owner. We don’t want the day to end, so we go to the movie rental shop and pick out an animal documentary and I wanted some pizza, so we went a little bit out of our way for that. I’m inside getting the pizza. I come out of the pizza store. I see Jen talking to another dog owner. Then I see two gals coming up out the subway. Their faces light up. I think “oh brother, another person who thinks we got a cute dog.” One says something to the other, “oh that looks like my dog. Wait, that’s is my dog! That’s my sweetie!” Apparently her roommate is stupid or something and must have left the door open as the dog was supposed to be in the back yard. She’d been gone all day and had no idea her dog was loose. She didn’t even know she was supposed to be fretting and worried sick. And … get this — the dog is deaf. We’d thought it was just real cool and didn’t care what we had to say, but it couldn’t even hear us. Anyhow, the dog was turned over. The dog owner lives across from Jen, so hopefully we’ll see Data (the dog’s name) again.

Yesterday I told this story many times.