Here are some excerpts from A Dog Named Boo, How one Dog and One Woman Rescued Each Other and the lives they Transformed Along the Way.
“I, ah . . . the sign says you have puppies?” I ventured.
“Poor babies,” she said, leading me to the center of the store, where a makeshift cardboard pen that held a litter of puppies who couldn’t have been more than five ore six weeks old. “They were on the doorstep this morning with a note saying they’d just started eating food. I guess somebody figured we’d find them good homes.”
There were five of them, three black and two yellow…. Four of them were bouncing all over and chasing one another around the makeshift corral with typical puppy enthusiasm.
But it was the fifth, the smallest, who drew me in imme- diately. A smaller baby boy with a black velvet coat and bewildered brown eyes… He wandered through his siblings’ roughhousing, a toddler in a roller derby… When he did manage to get out of their way, he drifted aimlessly around the pen. Like the eight ball in a game of puppy pool set into motion by an invisible cue ball…
He was in my hand before I knew I had reached out to pick him up.
I’m not one of those people who idealize dogs… but I am gratefully aware of the symbiotic relationship between dogs and humans. For tens of thousands of years, these two species have managed to maintain a reciprocal bond of fondness. …
An ancient Native American Anasazi dog myth suggests a link as old as time:
The earth trembled and a great rift appeared, separating the first man and woman from the rest of the animal kingdom. As the chasm grew deeper and wider, all other creatures, afraid for their lives, returned to the forest—except for the dog, who, after much consideration, leapt the perilous rift to stay with the humans on the other side. His love for humanity was greater than his bond with other creatures, he explained, and he willingly forfeited his place in paradise to prove it.
Anasazi –
Boo’s love, like the dog’s from the Anasazi legend, taught us that we are all more than our limitations. He worked through his limitations to being joy and healing to the hundreds of kids and seniors he visited. He taught my husband and me how to work through our limitations which brought us to our son.
And as Boo helped the kids in his Stepping Stones classroom, he helped me to be prepared to advocate for my son’s needs and guide him through his own limitations.
