Why We Were Brought Together
Isabel’s daughter Allison had named the puppy Hannah Montana after that dreadful Miley Cyrus character, and of course Isabel was okay with it. After all, it wasn’t her dog, it was Allison’s, a gift from her father and the dog was to stay at his house. Right.
“Ha!” Isabel huffed less than a week later as she watched Hannah M. saunter slowly in front of her down the hall. “That’s how naive I’ve proven to be. Yet again!! What a patsy I am.”
Out of annoyance, Isabel refused to warm up to the animal, insisting twelve-year-old Allison care for the mutt herself. (“Well, that was my intent all along,” Isabel’s ex pontificated, “that Allison learn responsibility by caring for a pet, and—“ That’s when Isabel hung up the phone.)
Hannah Montana was some kind of Corgi/Chihuahua mix, a ferocious dog with an unattractive over-bite displaying sharp tiny teeth. Isabel listened to her tinny yap and chanted: Hannah. Montana. you. are. not. my. dog.
Nonetheless as high school graduation neared Isabel was prescient enough to know Hannah Montana would not be welcome in an ivy league dorm room. “But you aren’t my dog,” she whispered that first evening after Allison had departed for New Haven. She attached the leash to Hannah’s collar and the two abandoned middle aged women went out into the warm September dusk. “Of course, I’m not your dog,” Hannah mumbled. “But like it or not, you’re my human.”
Isabel glanced around. “Did you say something? You didn’t, did you?”
Hannah’s tongue lolled contentedly in the delta breeze.
Imagining the dog’s voice stoked an ember of liberation in Isabel’s heart. She knew she was long overdue for a few changes. “Call me Issie,” she told the dog. Hannah Montana yapped, conveying that she preferred to be named after a blue state rather than a red state. “Callie it is,” Issie promised her.
The two of them took up sailing, and Callie’s hyperactive nature was calmed when they were out bobbing on the gentle lake. “This is why we were brought together,” Callie told her human, and Issie knew it was true.
Together they had the courage to learn to surf in Santa Cruz, to climb Mount Shasta, and to explore the Costa Rican rain forest on bicycle. “Finally,” Issie said one night as she embraced her canine companion, “Finally, I am at peace.”
“Oh, Issie,” Callie yipped, “You know I don’t really exist, don’t you?”
Issie was direct. “That’s okay, Puppy Girl, neither do I. We are each of us, together or apart, nothing more than a collection of atoms.”
They walked together along the sandy river bank, dreaming into reality a broken world that still knew how to laugh.
