Sammy Part 1: The beginning of the beginning

January 2010

I pull my car into my usual spot, the one closest to the library in the lot behind our house. The cold January night air bites at my legs through the thin fabric of my Church Street Market pants, but my thick brown leather jacket and obnoxiously long curly brown hair keep the rest of me warm as I walk the few feet to our door.

Jacket off and work shirt unbuttoned, I walk into the living room surprised to see that both my mom and brother are sitting on the couch, but more surprised to see what is sleeping on my mother’s chest.

“Mom?” I ask, my eyes focusing in on the tiny sleeping puppy, “Who’s puppy is that?”

“She’s ours,” Tom says gleefully.

“We went to get her earlier today,” Mom supplies as I stand there in speechless disbelief. She hadn’t said anything about getting a dog. No one had. How could we get a dog? In our tiny place in the middle of winter. We hadn’t even talked about getting a dog sine Zazzy; I wasn’t even sure I wanted a dog.

“Do you want to hold her?” Mom asks.

“Yeah,” I say, not sure of how I should feel as I sit down beside her on the couch. I hold my hands out, and Mom puts a now yawning puppy in my palms. She is so little that she fits perfectly in my cupped hands. Yeah, I want a dog. Who was I kidding?

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I don’t really remember how we decided on the name Sammy, but I think it was my mother’s idea after she had shot down a few more eccentric name choices. It never really occurred to me that we had gotten Sam to help Tom cope with his new disease. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t involved at all in the decision to get a Dog. Being the self-involved high school student that I surely was, I never took the time to consider why Mom might have decided to get a dog now.

However, what I soon found out is that we all needed her. It had been hard since Dad left, but more than that, sometimes life is just hard. The three of us were all hurting, and Sammy was the medicine we didn’t know we needed. It’s not really an effect that can be measured with small words or a number. All I know is that after Sam came into our lives, we were all noticeably happier, so much so that I can recall all of us mentioning it on more than one occasion.