The Dog With the Old Soul by Jennifer Basye Sander

than the divorce would if she also had to surrender our dog to me. So when she asked if she could keep Portia, I said, “Of course.” Part of me wanted to push for visitation, but I realized that as much as I would miss my dog, in the long term she’d be far better off with my ex-wife.
    My second dog was a rescue dog, too, from the SPCA. I was married to Jane, my second wife, whom I would live with for twenty-nine years, until her death. We got the dog when our daughter, Jessica, was three and a half years old. Jane had always been afraid to have a dog because she suffered from allergies that could easily escalate into asthma. But since our daughter loved animals so much and clearly had a gift for communicating with them—she surreptitiously petted the kangaroos at the San Francisco Zoo, which was strictly verboten —Jane asked her allergist what sort of dog she could have that would cause her the least discomfort. “Get whatever you like and we’ll adjust your shots,” he said.
    This came as a shock to her. All her life she’d been told—by uninformed family doctors and a mother who would say, “Who needs the trouble?”—that a dog, any dog, unless it was completely shaved and drenched in aloe, would cause her grief. “I’d have had dogs all my life,” she said.
    Camellia, a German shepherd–Queensland herder admixture, was just eight weeks old when we adopted her. She and our daughter quickly became quibbling siblings, to the extentthat when we were enrolling Jessica in a private school and she was asked if she had sisters or brothers, she responded, “I have one sister an’ she’s a doggy.”
    Camellia lived with us until she was fourteen (and my daughter was seventeen) and contracted cancer. By this time, my wife was also five years into her nine-year battle with breast cancer. Camellia’s losing battle became far too emblematic of the direction our lives would take in the next couple of years: my wife’s condition would turn terminal, our daughter would leave home for college, and I would have to learn, or to pretend, that everything in life had a purpose.
     
    I could never stand cats. Part of my animus derived from the fact that I’d always been allergic to them. Another part sprang from the fact that cats just didn’t seem needy, dependent, grateful and sloppy enough to make them loving pets. Cats just never seem to need anyone’s help. Fact is, I like to be depended on, I like to protect and I like to help. I have the same problem with children once they’re old enough to ask you to leave their rooms.
    And while I lived with Sabrina and tolerated her, I never really saw myself as a cat owner—not in the way I’d been a dog owner to Portia and Camellia. Until one day, not long ago, a feral neighborhood cat strolled into our backyard and began to hassle Sabrina. She quickly burst into an aria that had me running downstairs from my office into the backyard and removing the intruder, which I threw for a thirty-yard incomplete pass (unless you consider a camellia bush a receiver).
    Wow. Where did that come from? I wondered, standing on the grass, waiting for my heartbeat to calm down. My rage and violent reaction surprised me. Since when was I patrolling the garden to protect a cat? I knew enough about cats by then not to await a thank-you note from Sabrina or even a casual brush against my leg as she stalked stiffly back into the house. Weird, I thought, shaking my head and brushing the stray cat hairs off my hands. Just weird.
    A few nights later Jessica came to dinner and asked for my help with a project with a looming due date. The request was barely out of her mouth before I nodded in agreement. “Sure, of course. Let’s get started. I’m ready right now.”
    And that was when I realized why I’d come to Sabrina’s rescue. One of my kids had been in trouble. I’d done what any loving father—or cat owner—would do.

Kissing the Whale
    Pam Giarrizzo
    Laguna San Ignacio is not a