Hope
I’ve written a lot about the Trump/Biden race in the past few weeks. In fact, it seems like I’ve mostly rotated between the political campaigns, COVID and shootings. And they all seem to get darker and darker. The campaign, as we all know, just keeps on getting ugly. No matter where you stand on policing: someone getting shot and paralyzed or killed, is just bad. COVID is like a thick fog hanging over all of us, all the time.
And here I am again, getting dark and sad.
So today I am going to write about hope. As dark as things seem at the moment, there is always light, because there is always hope. And that hope is based on people. Regardless of how folks feel about politics, or COVID, or what’s going on in the streets, there are still a lot of people of “good heart”.
Find A Dog
My wife Jennifer and I work with a group called Lost Pet Recovery. This group is a bunch of folks who gain expertise, then go out and find lost dogs to return them to their owners. While LPR takes donations, it’s actually all volunteer and the “recoveries” are at no fee. Jenn’s really involved (I just help out with paperwork occasionally), and has spent many nights sitting in the pickup truck, waiting for a lost dog to find its way into her trap.
It’s a high tech operation, with cameras, computer mapping and tracing: but in the end it’s about people who want to get dogs back to their homes. And it can be an emotional roller coaster. Yesterday in the wee-dark-hours of the morning one dog they’d spent weeks tracking finally was trapped and returned to its owner. But by mid-afternoon, another dog they tried to follow for two weeks was found twenty-five miles away from where he was lost, killed on the side of State Route 23.
The “good hearted” people of Lost Pet Recovery will mourn for one dog and owner, and rejoice for the other. And it doesn’t matter about politics or illness. COVID is just one more problem to work around, as they relentlessly look for the next dog.
Bosco
As I said, my involvement is much more casual than Jenn’s. I’ll drive, and haul traps around, but I don’t have the patience to sit all night waiting for a dog to appear out of the woods or bushes. But I did get involved in one case, closer to home. There was a major accident on Interstate 70 one Friday afternoon, just a few miles from our house. A big Yellow Lab bolted from one of the wrecked cars and managed to survive running across six lanes of rush hour traffic, vanishing into the woods alongside the highway.
The driver was beat up in the crash, but checked out OK and was sent home. But his dog, Bosco, was still in the woods, and Jenn took on the job for LPR. She tracked Bosco for two nights, while the owner commuted back and forth to his home in Dayton, trying to take care of all the problems caused by the wreck. On Saturday evening Jenn, the owner and some of his family were sitting in a Big Sandy Superstore parking lot near the woods where Bosco was hiding, waiting to see if he’d go in the trap.
I decided we all needed dinner, and showed up in my Jeep with pizza. As we were all eating from the back of the Jeep, the owner and family couldn’t help but notice the “Biden” sticker on the bumper.
Pizza not Politics
We really didn’t talk about politics as we munched Creno’s pepperoni pizza. But they seemed surprised by a Democrat, and the conversation flirted all around the edges. We all told our stories, about growing up, work and life. In the end Biden or Trump didn’t matter. We were all focused on a more important goal: Bosco. And we got help from all sorts of people who called in spotting’s of his location, and then stayed clear of the scene.
This story has a happy ending. The owner was able to coax Bosco out of the woods, and with some quiet conversation, the dog realized that it was his “Dad”. While the traps were there, they weren’t needed, and Bosco went home.
Good Hearts
Bosco didn’t care about the bumper sticker. Neither did his “Dad”. We weren’t Republicans or Democrats, we were folks on a common mission – reunite a family.
I have no idea about the politics of the rest of the LPR “volunteers”. I don’t care, I know they are dedicated to a good task, and have good hearts. In our partisan world, it’s important to recognize that we don’t always have to be defined by the bumper sticker, or hat, or yard sign. In the world of dog recovery, and a lot of the rest of day-to-day life, there are still folks with good hearts, regardless of their politics.
That’s something we all should remember in the sixty-two days until Election Day.
