April 2024. I’m picking up my son from track practice when we spot a small white ball of fur on the sidewalk. It’s a dog. A small thing, not big like Lacy. The kind of dog you could carry in your arms, almost in a purse.
I pull over and we coax the dog to us. It comes, reluctantly. It’s got a collar with a shock box on it, but no identifying tags. We knock on a nearby door. “Do you know this dog?” they do not.
We try an apartment complex across the way. A woman gives us a wide berth. We ask around, but no one knows the dog. We give up for now, taking the dog with us. Maybe he’s got a chip. I name him Scruffles.
We call the 24-hour vet. They scan him. No chip. He’s clearly someone’s dog. Playful, friendly. He’s starting to learn his name. My wife puts out updates in local lost pet groups. We take him home.
The Scruffles saga begins.
I knew this dog for 3 days but it felt like three months. At night, he would DIG DIG DIG at the floor, or whine and want to run laps.
During the day, he’d try to mount Lacy, or challenge her to tug and chase. Lacy, 12, had very little time for these shenanigans.
The first thing I noticed about Scruffles was the teeth.
He was a chewer. He chewed through everything. Now Lacy was a big, slow dog. You turn your back on her, you can trust that next time you look she’ll be about where you left her. Not Scruffles. Little guy could teleport. You look away for half a second and he’s already across the room. And did I mention the teeth?
I turn my back, he chewed through my hoodie string. My bad. I lift everything off the grou– THOSE ARE MY SHOELACES! Okay, nothing more he can chew on, I can get some work done– Scruffles, if you eat the Ethernet cord, the internet will go out, and I need that, please get out from under there.
Scruffles, no! You’re lucky that charging cable wasn’t in use! That was my favorite charger, Scruffles. Okay. We’re just going to sit and hold eye contact with each other. You right there, no more cables around. And I’m going to get on a call here. Oh that’s weird, my audio dropped. Everything dropped. SCRUFFLES, THE ETHERNET CABLE!
And on and on.
We found his owner the next day. He wouldn’t get off work for another 4 hours, so I kept Scruffles locked in the room with me, not daring to exit except as biology dictated. I took him on walks and kept him off Lacy.
We learned his name was Simba (a cat’s name, surely), and he responded to that about as well as he responded to Scruffles (a brief acknowledgement, nothing more).
When I took him home, I learned a few more things. Scruffles lived across the street from the first house we had tried. Perhaps if we’d tried one more we could have avoided the saga altogether?
Scruffles DID have a collar, with his name and owner’s phone numbers. He, of course, chewed it off.