Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [64]
Noah agrees with Dan that he has never felt that he was rescued or saved. “I think things would have turned out a lot differently, but, really, how can I speculate about how things would have turned out? I’m very happy with what happened to my life. That’s all that matters. And I definitely think the fact that Danny and I are adopted has affected my relationship with Oogy. We all arrived here through circumstance. Maybe it’s fate. Danny and I weren’t born here. You didn’t even know we existed till Golden Cradle called you. Well, that’s what happened with Oogy. We didn’t know he existed, but he was alive before he ever became part of our family. What would have happened to us if you had not adopted us? I mean, me and Danny and Oogy. We all come from some place else and now we’re here and who knows how that happened?” Noah grinned. “Oogy’s my brother,” he said.
When he told me this, Noah knew nothing of my belief in the role fate had played in bringing Oogy to us. This is but one of the common elements that tie the boys and Oogy together. There are remarkable similarities in their stories. Perhaps this is why Oogy’s integration into our lives has been seamless and complete.
The magnificent and wholly unanticipated rewards that have come our way from Oogy make it difficult for me to believe that anyone could have made a different decision than we did. On many occasions, I have somewhat glibly told people that I did not rescue Oogy, the police did. I simply brought him home. The truth is, I tell them, that Oogy rescued me.
Finally, I started to think about the implications of that statement.
Even though I was not conscious of it — and in fact, mirroring what my parents had taught me, pushed it down to the bottom of my being so that it seemed as if it had never happened — my sister’s death and my parents’ reaction to it understandably, inevitably, and irrevocably reverberated down the passage of the rest of my life.
Perhaps as a child, unable to understand the dynamics involved, I wished I had died instead of my sister so as to spare my parents their grief. I know that until I became a father and saw the value of life, I used to think that the moments in which I could feel most alive and could most appreciate the experience of being alive were in the proximity of danger and death. No doubt as a result, I spent several years with the U.S.D.A. Forest Service on an interregional Hotshot crew fighting forest fires. Hotshot crews perform the initial attack on large fires, flying and busing from one to another for weeks at a time. My friends on the crew and I treated it as a unique experience, full of laughs, but really we were willfully ignorant of the dangers we encountered on a regular basis. That did not mean, of course, that they were not there. We simply disregarded them: falling timber, crashing limbs, hurtling boulders, poisonous snakes, tons of slurry dropped from planes that could crush you and explode the fire around you, helicopters that could fall from the sky at any moment, fire waiting just on the other side of everything we did.
But I think that all of this may also explain my immediate attraction to Oogy. I saw myself in him. I saw the burning of the metaphoric fire that almost consumed him resonate in the way that fire had made me feel alive. I saw how death had had its way with both of us. Proximity to death had shaped us. For me, raising the boys had carried an element of self-doubt, which is why I have always told people that I think the boys turned out as well as they did despite me, not because of me. But with Oogy, with this dog, there was never a moment’s doubt that all the returns would be positive. And I raised him as I tried to raise the boys, as I wish I had been raised: a full-contact relationship free of ambiguity as to their central place of importance to the