True Stories of Love, Shared by Viewers

When our boys, Cheko and Pato, were eight and ten, they began asking for a dog. Then they began begging. Neither my husband nor I had grown up with one, so the request puzzled us, and for a while we did what puzzled parents do. We let the days pass.

One Saturday morning the four of us went to the mall to buy new football shoes. Across the hall from the shoe shop was a pet store, and we went to it the way iron goes to a magnet. Nobody suggested it. We were simply there, all four of us, noses almost touching the glass.

Behind the window a litter of golden puppies tumbled over each other like fuzzy teddy bears. One chased a tennis ball that skittered from corner to corner. Two wrestled, rolled apart and wrestled again, while a third ran circles round them, trying to join in. A brown one lay on his back, scratching himself happily against the plastic grass. I laughed with the boys, and underneath the laughing I felt a small ache that these babies were here, in a shop, and not with their mothers.

Then, without quite deciding to, I turned my head, and one of them was looking straight at me.

He was a yellow Labrador, the most beautiful I had ever seen, and he was the only one not playing. He lay quietly to one side, chewing the lace of a baby’s shoe that someone had put in with them as a toy. His deep brown eyes were fixed on the window, on the four of us. I felt something I can only call recognition. The boys felt it too, because at almost the same moment all of us said it.

“The one with the shoe!”

We signed the papers that afternoon. We drove home with a new collar and leash, a bed, two bowls, a bag of food, a page of instructions and the vet’s number. And the shoe, of course. Everyone wanted him on their lap. He was four months old and could not keep still, so the job fell to me. I held him while he scrambled and sniffed and tried to make sense of this moving room he was in, and somewhere on that road, without thinking about it at all, I became his mother and his guardian. I am a spiritual person, and I will say it plainly: it felt as though our souls already knew each other, from some other time.

The boys named him Golder.

He settled into our family as if he had always been part of it. He had a way about him that drew people in. Three times a day I walked him, and three times a day someone stopped us to stroke him and ask his name. Neighbours I had lived beside for years without really seeing came over to say hello. Through Golder, I finally met them.

At home he would suddenly take off at full speed, racing circles round the coffee table without ever knocking into a thing. I used to think he was clearing the air in the house, sweeping it through with joy. We hugged him and kissed him, and he stood in the middle of all of us, simply shining.

At weekends we went out to the country, and that was where he was happiest. When we took our bikes up into the hills, he ran beside us with nothing holding him back, breathing the clean pine air. At the lake he was the best swimmer of us all, bringing the same stick back for hours as if every throw were the first. Afterwards he slept in the sun with a contentment the rest of us could only envy.

He had a full life, and he was loved every day of it.

It is only now, looking back, that I understand what he was. I am not, by nature, someone who reaches out. Meeting new people still costs me something. But Golder went out every day to meet the world with his whole heart, and because I was holding the other end of the leash, I went too. He was a teacher, a quiet master, sent to show me how to open the door, step outside, and love the people I find there.

I still have a few photographs of him. They have faded a little with the years. He has not.