Giving Puppies

Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock

How do anyone know how much to give, to what to give to? Let’s label this, charity. Non-profit, that could be lots of things besides charities. My professional organization, can you call that a charity? A wing of it is a card-carrying (tax ID) non-profit and sponsors an annual scholarship contest, but it ain’t curing cancer.

At some point as an old teen or young adult, I saw slow-to-anger Dad read in the Fort Smith paper how it was sponsoring some drive for Make A Wish. He gave a shout — we startled — then wrote a letter to the editor. Make A Wish arranges for children with chronic or terminal conditions to get a wish fulfilled: visit Disneyland or receive a visit from a star. The newspaper should put its good offices, he said, behind a charity that can do some real good and help these kids, like medical research. The letter ran, the drive continued as before, and for the next several years.

One learns first from parents, what they do more than what they say. Not that we kids follow, just remember it better. Dad belonged at one time or another to every service organization in town: Rotary, Kiwanis, JayCees etc. and his favorite, Noon Civics Club. Business-networking then and now (though not called networking decades ago), but engaged in good charities. He was a Mason. A member of the Reform temple. Dad also was active in the local chapter of the Red Cross, even serving as its president. Decades of volunteering for the Fort Smith Little Theater and Broadway Theatre League of Fort Smith, term after term of board seats on both. Backstage work, sets and lighting, was his art; if not life-saving, it refreshed his creative soul.

Mom was a lifelong volunteer no less than weekly, usually at hospitals (Sparks) and projects for disabled children (via Bost). She retired, the last being afternoons at the med center gift shop when her hearing loss grew to where it kept her from answering its phone adequately, just months from moving to assisted living.

What’s enough? It’s a question that pops up, most recently on the death of a medium friend with multiple sclerosis, whose closest friends essentially trained themselves as informal practical nurses and worked in shifts in his home for several years. One reason or another and I decided not to qualify.

So I’m not a nurse. It’s a calling only some answer to. I have taught, though, and I could be a teacher in the future; the ease and satisfaction I feel there can be translated as a calling. Not everyone can be a journalist, either, and I have had that in me my entire adult life. Journalism requires a compulsion to fairly render something that happened or something said. To see that’s a gift you only have to try to read hand-cranked newsletters or small-potato news releases. Isn’t it interesting such helping professions are clustered at a certain point of the salary statistics? Charity works on middlin’ pay, some benefits, and ideals.

I might point to this weekend’s Bikes, Blues and BBQ, which insists it’s a charity. Or list my organizations past and present, but I’ve already written about many of them. Depending on how I feel, I could berate myself, here in public, for not doing enough. Or defend my choices with some defiance. I’d never say, however, I do enough. No doubt the saints who walk among us also feel they don’t do enough, either. See, a rationalization snuck in!

What’s better is to talk about kittens and puppies. My Beloved and I rescued our cats Tiki, age 7, a neighborhood stray, and Rosemary, 6, a pound adoptee. Our previous cats were similarly taken in. We should head for the alley or sanctuary when we adopt a dog, right? A benevolence that gets lots of press.

I’ve been allergic to dogs, but on a whim I had myself tested last spring. As happens with aging, I was told, it’s now slight for dog dander and/or saliva. If our house overall is clean and the pup is one of the hypoallergenic varieties, I should have no sniffles unless the overall atmosphere is high pollen and mold, when pets will help push me past an allergen tipping point but that’s eased by pills and inhalants.

If we get a dog, thus it can’t be a mutt. We realize that we probably shouldn’t adopt a breed rescue, when its parents are uncertain, as there might have a percentage of another breed. If the rescue does have a pedigree but it’s from a organization not the American Kennel Club, it can’t be trusted. We played with two auctioned puppy-mill pups with papers, but from an obscure group, listing a lot of East European names. We let another family take them.

Did Mother Theresa use brand names or generics for her toilette?

In a thought experiment, let’s visit the Fayetteville Animal Shelter in our heads. You and me, reader. We’ve done our homework. We’re looking as laymen for signs of health or illness, as well as temperament. Get a shivering, growling dog, and you’re in for years of woe, right? But isn’t that the neediest dog we’d be turning away from? We’re pigs, we’re curs!

The thing is, though, there are people out there with an interest in the least of such babies, if not a compassionate compulsion that’s nice, not a cross-double-reverse Munchausen. Not enough, no, with teeming masses of such animals put to death daily nationwide. Yet, a number get adopted out, the ones perfect for the single elder or the pets needing the energy of children.

This then is the world of do-good — a pound. Some stray cats are library shelvers and museum docents. The retired greyhounds race all of those 10ks for causes. Woher kommen sie? The ferrets run pantry drives for homeless and victim shelters. Every cat and dog in the pens gets picked so all the work gets done. Of course not.

That makes it a better metaphor.