Say "Hello" to stupid...

Although we enjoyed fostering rescue dogs for several years, eventually there's no more room at the Inn. You get stuck with the ones that are just too flawed to get themselves adopted. So now we have four misfits. Blind & deaf, crippled, an incurable runaway, and stupid. Here's stupid. She and her brother, both expensive show dogs, were dropped off at the pound by a guy who was more interested in hurting his wife than in keeping the dogs. Immersed in a particularly acrimonious divorce, he knew how much she loved them and thought it was a good way for him to show just how big a jerk he could be. The two standard poodles were beautiful, but surprisingly...blank. They had been raised together and did everything in tandem, so that was fun to see. They slept together at the same time in the same position and when they ran on the beach it was like watching a skilled kite flier with two parallel kites in a celebratory, harmonic dance. But after a short spell of refusing food, the male started to drool a vile black liquid from his nose and mouth as he lay under a shade tree in our back yard. Checking on him several times an hour to see if his chest was still rising and falling, I saw bottle flies on his still open eyes the last time there was any need to check on him at all. The vet thought that it had been a breeding problem, he probably had very advanced cancer by the time anything was noticeable. We thought the female would be lost, dog devastated, But Ms Stupid was a blank, just like before. Now, three or four years later, she hasn't gotten any brighter. She sits up close and just looks at me like I'm some kind of a dog TV. I speak to her and ask her the things we all ask our dogs: “Want to go outside girl? What do you want, you want me to give you some dinner? Want a treat, to go for a ride in the car, want to chase the ball? Blank. Well, to her credit, she's got good manners anyway, she isn't any kind of a problem, and she has great lines. Some guys settle for little more than that in a girlfriend. Not me, I'm looking for some spark, a little out of the box laugh at life. But I never look to stupid for any of that. With her, I'm just happy for the two of us to sit quietly in the grass, my arm around her, as we watch the fish jump at Mayflies on the surface of the lake. I like to think she's happy with that too, but it's hard to be sure one way or the other.