Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [63]
And these are only the very small number of people whom I have come to know within my own community. They speak for a collective experience of vast proportions. At the same time, I have come to understand that what Oogy went through — the unspeakable torture he was subjected to as part of some barbaric cultural exercise — and the odds that he had to overcome to have survived at all make his story, and therefore our experience, somewhat unique. He is not the product of accidental injury, but a living symbol of an epidemic that kills thousands of dogs each year. And if there is a reason this story has a happy ending, a large part of that is because every day I think about how it began.
I also think that because they are adopted, the boys relate to Oogy on another level as well. On their eighteenth birthday, I asked Noah and Dan several more of those questions I had no way of knowing the answer to. I wondered if the fact that they are adopted had influenced their lives, and if so, how. Did they feel rescued or saved in the manner in which Oogy had been rescued? Did they think that the fact they were adopted had influenced the way they related to Oogy?
I told them I was not expecting immediate answers, to take as much time as they needed, and that whatever they wanted to say would be fine. I was not looking for anything in particular. I just wanted to know. I actually wasn’t sure they would be able to answer the questions — I know I couldn’t have done it when I was their age.
But they could.
Dan said that he does not sit around and think about the fact that he is adopted. “I’m aware of it, of course, but I don’t dwell on it,” he said. He considers it to be a component of his identity, “the same as the fact that I’m a Caucasian male. I don’t sit around and think about how my life would be different if I weren’t a Caucasian male. I don’t think about what effect it’s had on my life, either. It’s who I am.” He told me that he never thinks in terms of Jennifer and me not being his parents. “I mean, for the last eighteen years, except for three days, which I have no memory of, you’ve been my mom and dad.”
Dan understands that the fact that his birth parents placed him for adoption does not mean they rejected him. He appreciates that it represents an incomparable sacrifice, an act of love not only for his benefit, but also for the benefit of total strangers. At the same time, Dan does feel that he was “in a way” saved. Not in the sense that he was in any kind of danger, the way Oogy had been, but because he has never wanted for anything and has been provided with a loving, supportive home environment and significant developmental advantages, both intellectually and athletically, that he feels certain would otherwise have been unavailable to him. Dan also thinks that this sense of feeling lucky and advantaged is related to why he is so crazed about saving animals. “I can’t know how I’d have related to Oogy were I not adopted,” Dan explains. “But I have to think it has affected how I feel about him. We share the same experience. We both have better lives for it. I want to help him and love him the way I have been loved and guided.”
In the end, it is not the fact that he is adopted that has affected Noah, it is the act of adoption itself. “I mean,” he said, “for all the things that had to have happened to get me here, to have in fact happened, I find that pretty amazing.”
Just like Dan, Noah has a sincere sense of appreciation for the quality of life he has enjoyed. The friendships he has been able to develop, the academic opportunities he has been offered, the fact that we were always able to somehow pay for lacrosse camps and basketball camps and overnight camps and lacrosse clubs and individual coaching, the occasional vacations, even a trip to Paris we took when they turned thirteen — all represent advantages and experiences