"Lost"

Everything was fine in my 20s except I didn’t have a dog, and life just isn’t good enough without one.  My BF said “Fine.  Get a dog, but it has to be purebred, male…”  His list of requirements was an insurmountable barrier, and that he knew it was evident in his self-satisfied smile.  I was the lowest person on the totem pole in an art studio and supporting BF in his dream of starting a business.  How was I supposed to pay for a purebred?

My mornings at the studio started with the dog section of the classifieds.  Purebreds were $300-500, and I didn’t have it.  Months went by.  BF was happy.  I was determined.  I finally found a listing for Dalmatian puppies for $110.  Okay!  I didn’t care if I had to eat lentils for a month.  I’ll pay $110!  I quickly called the number and found out that in a litter of 13, there was only 1 male.  “Please hold him for me!” I begged the woman.  I called BF and shared my joy.  We made plans to pick up the puppy after I got home from work.

BF made me call the woman again before we left the house to make sure she still had the male.  No, she didn’t, but she still had a dozen beautiful little girl puppies.  BF said “No, it has to be a male”, and I did something I had never done before.  I cried to get my way.  Well, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t start crying to get my way.  I cried because I wanted a dog.  The getting my way part was sitting in the middle of everything so BF had to see me crying.  The more he tried to ignore me, the more I cried.  He eventually relented.  He said we could go “look” at the puppies.  No promises, “just look”, and then he got a box and an old towel to put inside it.  I knew we were doing more than “looking”.

The puppies were a scene from 101 Dalmatians, spilling out all over the woman’s garage.  The proud parents checked us out, and Papa Dalmatian showed off by running around the expansive property in the twilight, a white and black blur, while one puppy made it clear to me that she loved me more than all of her sisters.  I was in love.  BF could’ve said “no” in that moment and I would’ve put him out on the street.  I’m pretty sure he knew it too.  We brought Ivory home.  BF loved her too, and we eventually got a male to complete the set.

So what’s all this got to do with “lost”?  If you’ve ever had a Dalmatian, you wouldn’t ask.  Sometimes I’d remember watching Ivory’s dad running in the fading light and realize that I should’ve seen his beautiful power as something to dread.  Dalmatians have to run.  They were bred for it.  They also don’t like running in circles.  They run in straight lines, and things like railroad tracks, roads, and fences aren’t going to stop them.

One time, BF took the dogs to work with him, but they didn’t come when he called them.  He slept in his truck hoping they’d show up, but they didn’t.  He came home alone with his tail between his legs, and I quickly printed up flyers (already on the computer from the last escape) and got my little brothers to help me pass them out.  “Look pitiful!” I told them as my desperation reached new levels of panic.  We drove up and down streets and handed out the flyers to anybody we saw.  I forced a flyer on one old man, and he insisted he hadn’t seen my dogs.  “Woof!”  I barreled past him and found both of my dogs locked up in his fenced backyard.  I can’t believe he lied to me in front of my two adorable little brothers.  The dogs almost looked sorry for an instant, but they never learned their lesson.  I kept the LOST flyer filed on the computer.

This picture is a Polaroid transfer, which is a pretty cool process of floating the emulsion of the photo off of the paper and floating it onto a different kind of paper.  You can get some cool techniques out of the process, but this print is pretty straight forward.  The other photo is of Ivory and one of my little brothers when they were both little and cute :)