Anyone who knows me just a tiny bit
knows that I have a weakness for her...
What can I say?
She makes me tick
(literally and metaphorically)
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an ode
(it's actually just a brief essay but I like to embellish it calling it an ode)
about her and our moment of serendipity eight years ago.
Ode? Essay?
Let's just called it a small token of appreciation
for having her in my life
and a tribute to the passing of time in the City of the Skyscrapers.
Eat, sleep, walk, play,
lick. Eat, sleep, walk, play, lick. Eat, sleep, walk, play, lick. Now, take
that, add to it 365 and multiple by 8. The
result: the life of my dog, Pia. Yeap, that's her name and that’s been her life
since we met a little less than 8 years ago when I went to pick her up at JFK.
I had just moved from sunny
LA, where I was living by the beach and she was arriving from sunny Puerto Rico,
where she was living on the streets. During
my sleepless nights planning my move to the Big Apple, I had read about the bad
treatment of stray-dogs ("satos" is how they call them) in the island,
so when a friend told me about “a dog” she had found, I decided to bring “this
dog” to mainland and make him/her part of my new adventure. That day in January when I opened the cage
and she and I met at JFK, marked the beginning and the end of two different lives that
by chance had become interconnected. Neither
her nor I knew what was ahead of us.
She arrived late at night,
alone and as cargo. I had arrived a few
days before in a red-eye flight, accompanied and in the cabin, although to be
fair, flying economy nowadays is pretty much like flying cargo. She was arriving to the unknown from a place
of despair. I was arriving to the unknown
from a place of boredom.
A bright and ample apartment
in Harlem became our home. Her adjustment
period to the new life was approximately 24hrs, mine…well, is still going. “Eat, sleep, walk, play, lick” became very quickly her mantra and except for a couple of times that she’s been sick, that’s
all she’s done since she arrived to the City that Never Sleeps. My mantra? "Suck it up and keep going."
Since Harlem, we’ve called
home to other 6 apartments (not all as bright and certainly as ample as the
first one) in pretty much all over Manhattan and we have encountered and
experienced “everything” that a single woman in her 30s and her
unconditional dog can experience living alone in NYC. Her mantra hasn’t changed throughout the way
and probably much of it at my expense but, how many true love stories do you encounter in your life time? That's right, not many (for not saying barely any), so I just suck it up and keep going.
8 years later, we still wonder what's ahead of us - who knows? But one thing we do know: wherever life takes us, it will be Sil and Pia till the end.
Love,
US
