Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [14]
“He was just another white pit bull as far as I was concerned,” Dr. Bianco later told me. “But he had a charming personality. You have to understand that we get pit bulls in here on a somewhat regular basis. We repair them when we can and try to adopt them out. There’s dogfighting going on in this area. One time a kid brought in a pit bull he said had been attacked. He was crying, and he said he could not afford the surgery. One of my clients, who was in the waiting room when the kid came in, volunteered to pay for it. The surgery cost her eight hundred dollars. Several months later, the kid came back with the dog torn up again. He was clearly fighting the dog. I confronted him. I said to him, ‘You’re fighting this dog.’ He denied it, of course. I told him, ‘Listen, I know you are. I’ll fix him up this time, but don’t bring him back here again.’”
The Pennsylvania SPCA, which is located in Philadelphia, receives anywhere from fifty to seventy-five reports of dogfighting a month. Through the years, I have met fighting dogs that have survived and other rescued dogs that have been abused and mistreated in horrific fashion. But for obvious reasons, survival is exceedingly rare in a dog who has been used as bait and mutilated to the extent that Oogy had been. And it’s even rarer that, after the unspeakable depravity and abuse that had been inflicted upon him, the dog maintained a trusting, loving spirit.
I am routinely overwhelmed by the circumstances that brought Oogy to us. There are so many “ifs” involved: if the fighting dog had killed Oogy as he was supposed to do; if Oogy had not somehow survived his torment; if the police had not raided the facility at the moment they did; if the raid had not been local, so that the police would not have had access to ER services; if Diane and Dr. Bianco and the staff had not been so determined to save Oogy…
Long after Oogy had come to live with us, when I had pieced together as best I could how events had unfolded, I related the story to Noah and Dan, told them how Diane had refused to allow Oogy to be sent to the SPCA, insisted that Dr. Bianco save him, and had essentially dedicated herself to not letting him die.
Noah blurted out, amazed, “Really? That really happened? Diane really did that?” He broke into a wide grin. “Jeez,” he said. “Diane’s a freakin’ saint!”
“Saint Diane!” Dan exclaimed. “I like that.” He rolled it around in his thoughts for a few seconds. “Saint Diane,” he said. He, too, had a broad smile on his face. “The patron saint of hopeless causes.”
CHAPTER 3
The Stork
the boys have always known they were adopted. They were three days old when they came into our lives, and we told them the very first day how ecstatic we were with the way events had played out. Even before they could acknowledge it, they were told how they came to be in our house and made it incandescent. It is nothing we ever hid from them. It is part of who they are.
Perhaps this explains why, when the boys were very young, one of their favorite stories was how the pets they shared the house with then, a rescued dog and two rescued cats, came to be in our family. I think that knowing how beloved these animals were, being able to love them on their own, and the story of how all of this came to be reassured them that kindness and caring are neither limited nor determined by the traditional biological parent-child relationship. What matters are the opportunities that are created and the extent to which the offered potential is fulfilled — the chance and ability to give love and support when they are most needed.
I would be flattering myself if I said that I’d been ambivalent about becoming a father. Nothing about parenting had generated any eagerness in me, no doubt as a result of the attenuated relationship I had had with my own parents and the experiences of my own childhood. However, because Jennifer badly wanted to be a mother, I agreed to pursue the choice. We endured