How Bourbon Brought Me Happiness

Four years ago on this day a dog was born. Not just any dog, but Bourbon Ochoa Gallegos Jacobs Adams.

Before I got this dog I really didn’t understand why people were obsessed with their pets. We already had one dog at the time named Whiskey. She was my oldest son’s dog and they had a great relationship. I loved her, but she wasn’t my dog and I certainly didn’t let her sleep with me or anything. She was a dog, the end.

I started having terrible nightmares that would leave me so tired because I couldn’t sleep for weeks at a time. I was scared of dark, which is something that I have dealt with since I was a teenager, but it was getting worse since the older I get the more I have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I would see shadows and after my conversion I had serious spiritual warfare that got a bit crazy. We had the house blessed, consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and when we moved to a new house, I thought it would be better, but it wasn’t. I won’t go into details, but trust me, I was not sleeping well at all.

One day I was scrolling on Facebook and came across this pit bull rescue’s page where I saw that picture of the cutest puppy in the whole world. I knew that I wanted him and asked my husband if we could adopt him. I was sure that he was already adopted because look at that face! My husband said that I could call and see about him so I did. I talked to Heather, who is the director of the rescue and she said he was still available. The adoption fee was $125 to make sure that he went to a good home and to cover the cost of his shots and microchip. Then she would have to do a homecheck and make sure that Whiskey would be ok with him. We set it up and I waited. Everything went great during the homecheck, Whiskey loved the puppy and my husband wrote a check for his adoption fee. Nobody had ever bought me a dog before but he knew how much I wanted this puppy.

Bourbon has been a great blessing to me. He has also chewed up a lot of shoes, bitten someone (which was totally my fault for not handling him properly), has had accidents that sent him to the vet (luckily it was before Warren died and the crazy set in) and has eaten a futon. But the good outweighs the bad. He is a smart dog, is loyal to me and listens to me when I am sad, mad or grumpy. Mostly, he naps.

I don’t have nightmares anymore and I’m not scared of the dark anymore because he guards me when I get up. It just so happens that my parish is named after St. William who had a dog (well a wolf) as a companion too, which is a crazy coincidence.

Nobody will ever be able to convince me that Bourbon isn’t a gift from God. Moonshine, on the other hand, is a whole other story, but Bourbon? He’s the greatest.