“Open the door of my heart. Quick!”

“Open the door of my heart. Quick!”

Nudging my husband’s side in panic, I said, “Honey! Somebody’s at the door!”

To many of you, hearing a knock at 9:35 at night probably wouldn’t incite such a breathless response. But my husband and I live in an apartment adjacent to our grocery store, and although it is a common enough occurrence to have UPS trucks delivering packages at all hours in the daytime, we do not usually have people knocking on our door at night unless we are expecting them.

To put it another way, because our apartment is adjacent to our store, I always worry that eventually we’ll get broken into.

So I sent my big burly man out to answer the door. He opened it, sucked in a breath through his teeth because of the knifing wind and rain, looked around and said, “Oh, it’s just another dumb dog.”

This is another thing you must understand: I love animals; I truly, truly do. If I hadn’t married a man who grew up on a farm and has farm-like tendencies, I would probably have our apartment chockfull of all kinds of creepy-crawly critters by now, but then . . . we live in an apartment adjacent to our grocery store, and those two things do not coincide.

Therefore, in response to my husband saying, “Oh, it’s just another dumb dog,” I groaned, leaned back against the couch, and said, “Close the door. Quick.”

I did what I have started doing with people: I closed down my heart, my mind, I told my husband to, “Close the door. Quick,” before I could poke my head outside and see a little trembling creature in need who would roll its sad brown eyes up at me and steal away my heart along with all rational thinking.

Instead of this, my night was spent watching the rest of the movie with my dad and husband, a candle lit on the coffee table, our bellies full of apple crisp, not even knowing that right outside our door an emaciated animal was spending his night fighting for life.

The next morning, I paused in my writing and went into the kitchen for a banana. In the middle of breaking the peel, I reached over and pulled the string to the blinds. The dog was still out there standing on our sidewalk. Even from a few feet and a glass pane away, I could see the protruding ridges of his spine, the sunken wings of his hips, the way his dark eyes stared into the sun like a refugee. It was terrible. I threw my banana into the trash (great to do when you see something starving) and immediately called my husband.

I told him about the dog’s refugee-staring-into-the-sun part, the sunken-wings-of-his-hips part. I explained that this animal was going to die on our doorstep if we didn’t feed it, and the blood would be on our hands, ect., ect.

In reply, Randy calmly explained about the kittens he had tried feeding. All four of them. All killed. Hit on the road within a month.

We both couldn’t go through something like that again, so I said, “I’ll just feed it today. To-day. Tomorrow, I’ll find it a home.”

On this, we agreed. I hung up and went outside. The dog was still standing there; its long stilt-like legs barely able to support its teetering frame. I went back into our apartment, down through our office, into the store, opened a bag of dog food and brought a cup of it back up. The dog wolfed it. He didn’t even stop to chew, but he didn’t growl whenever I approached him, either. I ran my hand over his arched spine, his splayed legs. He was nothing but bones held together by a sack of skin. It was heart-wrenching.

I brought more dog food back up and discarded the bowl I had put it into because the dog was in such a hurry to eat, the bowl was just getting in the way. I poured him some water; he lapped it up and looked up at me, his tail wagging. I swear I almost saw him smile.

That night, I made a bed for Sammy (yes, I named him) from a banana box and an old blanket. I put it behind our store and threw some dog food into the box to get him to climb inside it. He wouldn’t. I picked him up to place him inside the box and was amazed at how light he was. In my arms, he collapsed on himself like an accordion, his long legs folding in ways I didn’t know was possible. I probably could’ve tied him into a knot, and he wouldn’t have made a lick or bite of protest. This broke my heart more than anything: that this little creature would so unquestionably accept whatever hand (or punch or kick) he was dealt.

I spent a majority of the next morning on the phone. I called every animal shelter within the county but received no response. I even tried calling shelters outside of our county, but they were not interested in saving something beyond their perimeter. I considered taking Sammy into this county anyway and giving them the address of our new house, but I didn’t want this little animal to end up at a place where he was just another number waiting to become zero.

During lunchtime in our apartment, my sister-in-law said there was a Native American woman who was interested in the dog. I got her description and went down into the store. I saw her gray army jacket and spiky silver hair and knew she was the one. I waited for her to finish speaking with another woman and asked, “You’re interested in the dog?”

“What dog?” she asked.

“This one here,” I replied, taking out my camera and scrolling through pictures of Sammy.

We discussed the situation further, and the woman explained that she was a former animal shelter volunteer who fostered pets. Although she’d known nothing about the dog until I just mentioned it, she said she would come up and look at Sammy after she was finished shopping.

Thirty minutes later, we stood outside, hunkering against the cold, while the woman looked at Sammy. He growled at her.

“He smells my animals on me,” she explained.

Feeling threatened, Sammy came over to where I was sitting on the window ledge and nestled his head against my side, putting both of his paws on my thigh. His whole body trembled.

“You’re his sanctuary, you see,” the woman said, folding her arms and looking down at us. “He was loved at one time, but he’s not any more, and he doesn’t understand why they’ve abandoned him.” The woman sighed, scraped a weathered hand back through her hair. “We’re seeing this more and more with the economy and everything. I understand people need to feed their kids before they feed their pets, but . . .” She shrugged, slid her hands in her army jacket pockets. “Well, it just doesn’t make it any easier. Does it?”

I nodded, scratched Sammy behind his black and white ears.

“If you don’t get meat on his bones soon,” the woman warned, “he’s not going to make it in this kinda cold. Give him garlic and fish oil, in the morning and night. He’s probably full of worms. The fish oil will take care of that, and the garlic will strengthen his immune system.”

The woman stopped a moment, looked down at me. I was almost near tears, wondering how I was going to keep this animal from freezing to death outside of my own door.

“Jolina, you and Randy should be commended for what you’re doing here.”

I looked up, startled. I’d seen the woman a few times before, but I didn’t think she knew our names; I certainly didn’t know hers. I thought she wanted to commend us for what we were doing with the dog, but then she added, “I live on $200 a month. I eat one meal a day. Your store makes it easier for me to do that.” She cast her arm wide, as if to take in the parking lot and the people filing in and out of the store’s door. “For all of us to do that.”

I looked down in shame, scratched the dog again. It had been a long time since the store felt like anything other than a business: a place that was means to an end rather than means to a beginning.

The woman gave me numbers to contact and scrawled hers down on a piece of torn notebook paper. I gave her mine. Before she left, I took in her weathered brown skin, her spiky hair, men’s shirt and army jacket, straight leg jeans stuffed into dirty sneakers, and I saw a kindred spirit where before I had only seen a customer.

Two hours later, I drove Sammy up the switchbacks of the Cumberland Mountains. He clambered over the console and wedged himself between my legs and the steering wheel. I was scared with every turn that I was going to choke him, and if I lifted my hand that was stroking his fur to put it on the steering wheel along with my other, he began to panic. But he didn’t bark or whine at all, not even when my erratic driving and the snaking road made his emaciated back arch and that day’s stomach contents to come pouring from his mouth.

“We’re almost there, Sammy,” I crooned, trying to keep one hand on him and the other on the wheel. “You’re gonna be all right.”

He just looked over at me with mournful brown eyes, and I prayed I was telling the truth.

At exactly 28.5 miles, as MapQuest had predicted, I made a left hand turn and pulled into the animal clinic. When I parked my Jeep and went around to get Sammy, he folded in on himself and nestled against my neck. He remained in this position the whole 20 minutes we sat in the waiting room until they called us back. The elderly woman with the sweater vest and Doberman pinscher the size of Texas said, “You’ve got yourself a real quiet one there, don’t you?”

I nodded, but at her “You’ve got yourself” I couldn’t trust myself to speak, for by that point I so desperately wanted to keep him.

Thankfully, the veterinarian’s assistant came out and asked what I needed.

“Katie Crockett told me to come,” I said. “She told me she’d call in advance?”

The woman nodded and ushered me back. I placed Sammy on the examining table, and he stood there with his whole body quivering like he was hooked up to jumper cables. I put my hand on his head, rubbed behind his ears, and the quivering stopped. If I didn’t get out of there soon, I was going to lose it.

But I was still there — holding Sammy’s little black and white paw — when the veterinarian came in wearing a camo hat and jean jacket rather than white lab coat. His beer belly bulged against a UT shirt.

“Katie said you’d be dropping a stray dog off, and she’d pick him up tomorrow?”
The veterinarian paused, looked down at my hand holding the dog’s paw, then back up at me. “Miss, is that right?”

I shook my head Yes. Shook it again. “That–that’s right,” I said, keeping my teary eyes away from the vet’s.

“Of course–” he motioned to Sammy  “–unless you want to keep him . . .”

“I can’t,” I said, my voice breaking between the can and the t. Then I faced the wall and started bawling. Right then. Right in front of a vet who looked like he could wrangle a bull with his teeth.

Ripping off a paper towel from the dispenser, the veterinarian passed it to me and rocked back on his heels. If he’d had on a pair of suspenders, he would have snapped them. Instead, he drawled, “It’s all right . . . I ain’t nothing but a big wimp, myself.”

Winding my way back down the mountain, I thought about the spiky-haired Native American woman in her gray army jacket who took time to give me tips on caring for a stray. I thought of the veterinarian who didn’t roll his eyes at my theatrics but instead showed more compassion than I have shown someone in far too long. I thought of all the people I have been in too much of a hurry to sit down and truly listen to the saga of their lives because I have been writing a story I considered far more interesting to tell.

I hadn’t even made it the 28.5 miles home when I knew that little Sammy’s showing up at my door in the rain and bluster of night was no coincidence. That by my saying, “Close the door. Quick,” the Lord had revealed to me what I had been doing in my heart to people and was giving me another chance to truly reach out and open the door of my heart again, if this time . . . only to save a dog.

Hi, Jolina here again. This week, I discovered this five year old post because my new website cycles old ones through whenever I reply to a comment. I was shocked that I had completely forgotten about Sammy, and the ordeal surrounding his rescue. I was even more greatly shocked by the time and energy I expended to save a dog I never saw again. Motherhood–and life–has greatly shifted my focus, and though that’s necessary at this stage, this post challenged me to open my heart again and expand my compassion to those around me. I hope it will a challenge you, too.

Be blessed,

Jolina