Saving Bear

Due to DH's exhaustion from playing golf all day Saturday in Wichita, we decided to play hooky from church yesterday. We don't do this very often since he is the choir director and it seems one of us is always participating in the service somehow as Cantor, reader, acolyte, Jr. Usher, and so on. But on this particular Sunday we wanted to take it easy and finally make it out to a garden center for some annuals. We have two annual beds in the garden to provide instant and season long color. We changed the types of flowers every year also for variety. Any how, as we were looking around, I heard a car honk it's horn. As I looked over, two lanes of traffic on a pretty busy street were stopped for a dog to cross. As he got across, I called him over. He looked to be about a 3 or 4 month old doberman puppy. He had a nice collar and tags. Unfortunately he just had a city license tag and a rabies tag, but not an ID tag. Being resourceful, I situated the puppy in the van with the kids, (they of course begging to keep him) and went to find a phone book. I called the police dept. hoping they had a database with the license information. "We just changed computer systems and that hasn't been updated" the dispatcher told me. Of course, why would this be easy, I thought. "I can call the animal shelter officer on call and have her call you back" he then said. "Fine", I replied thinking this could take all day. About 2 minutes later the cell phone rings. "His name is Bear, and here is his owners name, address, and phone number." she told me. "Awesome!" We called, and the relief on the woman's voice was undeniable. She started to cry right there on the phone. "I'll be right over!" It turns out her son was still out looking for Bear, but she had given up and gone home. She had just gotten home when we called. She and Bear were so happy to be reunited. "Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!" she said over and over. "My son let him out early this morning and didn't get the gate latched. " She gathered Bear up, put him in the car and drove away. She now had to find her son, who was still out looking.

The kids were happy, but sad. They would have liked to keep him, but they realized how they would feel if we ever lost Kida. Our daughter asked if we could skip church regularly and hunt for stray dogs to save. I told her that it doesn't always work out this way. Many dogs don't have any kind of identification, and I have let many a stray dog stray for this reason, and that is really hard. That is why we have like 3 types of ID on our Kida. We could tell Bear was a good dog and well loved, we hope he grows up happy and healthy and brings lot of happiness to his family