Every Dog Has His Day

In the course of conversation the other day a friend declared, “Every dog has his day!”

Truthfully, I’ve never given much thought to the deeper meaning of this colloquialism, and neither have I stopped to consider how very strange it must sound to someone listening in. All I know is that, though I don’t like them very much, we happen to own a dog, and if “having his day” means an experience of reckoning, I suppose that’s exactly what happened at our house this week.

Our dog is what we like to affectionately call, “intellectually challenged”.

I guess we should have suspected something was up when we threw him a tennis ball in the courtyard of the pound and he toddled over to look at it with vague interest then turned away. Let’s just say he hasn’t been exactly what we’d envisioned when we had the grand idea of adding a canine member to our family (smart, loyal, fun, etc.).

This week Champ disappeared.

We’d been gone on vacation, and though we’re not sure we think he might have been smart enough to notice someone else was taking care of him. We saw him long enough to pet him when we got back but then he disappeared.

This has happened before, as our yard is connected to several neighbors’ yards to allow the kids easy access to and from neighbors’ houses. We’re not sure but we think someone left a gate open by mistake and Champ wandered out.

He’s really not smart enough to trot around the block . . . and come back home. Why, I do not know, but such is the case.

Champ was missing for several days before we found out a neighbor had called the Montgomery County Animal Shelter, where Champ “had his day”—a four-day vacation at the pound, to be exact, complete with mandatory computer chip identification implantation. Don’t know how his ID tag came off, why he didn’t come back or why we weren’t called through our Vet’s ID on his collar, but we were getting rather worried after a few days of missing Champ and several teary “I miss Champ!” conversations at bedtime.

(The kids were fine; it was Mark I was concerned about.)

Last Saturday we finally found Champ and Mark and the kids went to pick him up. As they did they ran into a family looking at Champ and telling each other what a nice dog he seemed to be. Looks like we got there just in time to get him back.

Was this experience “his day”? Did Champ learn his lesson? We’ll see . . . .