All the Ills I Can't Fix (And a Small One I Can)

sometimes we choose love

A sunset in Amman.

Every morning and every evening, I go out to the garden with my puppy, Boo. I rub her back, she sniffs at the wind, and we observe the comings and goings of our sleepy corner of Amman. I like to squat down on the pavement so I can see it through her eyes: plastic bags swirling like tumbleweeds around the dirt lot across the street. Men riding their bikes one-handed while talking on their cell phones. Teenagers drag racing, their brake lights like rubies catching the sun. Boo is alert and excitable throughout these sessions, her left ear pointing up, the right endearingly floppy. When we lived in Cairo, Boo rarely left the cocoon of our walled compound, so maybe it’s no wonder her new favorite activity is watching the world go by.

The other night, as we sat quietly together, the world came to us. Out of a still blue twilight, a stray dog bounded up to the gate. She was larger than Boo, standing tall and stiff with long, sandy-colored fur that was caked in mud—she’d been sleeping in puddles to escape the summer heat.

Boo stuck her head through the grates to sniff; a few curt growls later and the stray was off, disappearing past the street lights on the corner. I doubted we would see her again. Amman is full of strays who are just passing through, meandering neighborhoods, feasting on trash, and returning to their packs. 

A night or two later, I drove Nick to the airport. When I returned home, I sat in the car, idling on the street while I waited for the carport gate to roll back, and no sooner was there an open sliver than I saw a white streak dart into the garden. The stray had been hanging out nearby and had seen her chance. Boo sensed an interloper from inside the house. She started barking maniacally, throwing herself against the door. 

I wasn’t sure I should approach an unfamiliar and potentially insane street dog, so I called Nick, who hadn’t yet boarded his flight, to tell him that he’d been gone all of one hour and I was already in a jam. Our conversation went something like this: 

“What the hell do I do??”

“I don’t know, try to get her back out?” Nick said. This was the obvious answer. But the stray looked so content lying on cool grass instead of pavement still hot from the sun. She didn’t seem so insane after all.

“Maybe I should just let her sleep here and call someone in the morning?” I said, hoping Nick would agree with me.

“Don’t set that precedent. Try stepping outside and see if she’ll follow you out.”

So I did. And she did, but she didn’t leave. She sat at the gate, whimpering for attention. I figured she must be starving, so I brought her some food. She ate it too daintily to be all that hungry. Her slow, deliberate bites let me get a closer look at her: loose skin folds swung from her belly, and her nipples were hard and swollen. A mother. Whatever happened to her puppies, I didn’t want to know. 

I called Nick back, gushing about what a sweet girl she was. “I don’t think it’s food she’s after,” I said. “This dog wants a pack.”

“Just promise me you won’t adopt her while I’m gone,” Nick said, because this was exactly how we’d gotten Boo: she just showed up one day, tiny and alone, and I couldn’t resist swooping in to save her. I like to joke that Boo glommed onto me, singling me out as exactly the type of sucker whom she could have wrapped around her little paw with nothing more than a few wags of her tail. The truth is I glommed onto her. I needed Boo more than she needed me. The worst thing about living abroad—or anywhere outside the rich, privileged, American bubble I come from—is the constant exposure to all the ills of the world that I simply cannot fix. The abandoned puppies, the begging street children, the bedraggled kittens with goopy, pleading eyes. I needed to cradle Boo in my arms and know that there was just one less innocent suffering at the hands of our jacked-up universe. 

As I stroked the stray’s head through the gate, I felt that pang of need once more. But Nick needed to live in peace, free of the itchy throat and eyeballs a long-haired dog would cause him. I’d already burned all my political capital getting him to agree to adopt Boo (read: I sobbed until I broke him down), and while he’d come to adore her, I didn’t want to push him like that again.

“Ok,” I said. “I promise.”

I went inside to my soft bed, and the stray curled up in the dirt lot across the street.

The stray stuck around in the neighborhood for days, resting under cars in the heat of the afternoon and jumping low garden fences to spend the nights in safety. That’s how I always referred to her: “the stray.” When I spoke to her, I simply called her “sweet girl.” It would have been simpler to name her, but naming her would make her my dog, and I had to keep my promise to Nick.

Boo and the stray.

I hadn’t promised not to look after her, though, so I gave her water and fed her twice a day. She and Boo quickly made their peace—within a day or two of our first meeting, they were playing like littermates every morning and night, pawing and gnashing their teeth through the garden gates. They would greet each other with joyful cries, and the stray would poke her head through to rest it on my lap. She followed us on every walk, and I would get tangled in Boo’s leash like a fly in a spider’s web as the two tackled each other and tore at the scruff of each other’s necks.  Each time we got back to our gate, I had to steel myself to close it in the stray’s face.

“Sorry, sweet girl,” I’d say. Dislodging her snout from between the doors felt like a heinous act of violence. “You have to stay outside.” 

But eventually, one day, the stray snuck in behind me. I didn’t have the heart to throw her out—she was spinning in circles around the yard, ecstatic—nor could I let her stay. Then I had a stroke of brilliance: she would need medical care after living on the street, and if I got a vet to pick her up and treat her, he would remove her, absolving me.

I made the call, and the vet pulled up quickly. “When did she arrive in the neighborhood?” He asked me.

“Two, three days ago maybe,” I said.

He explained that the city authorities had just done a round-up of strays to spay and neuter them and vaccinate for rabies. “When they’re done, they dump them in random places,” he said. “So that’s probably how she got here.” The vet loaded her into a crate in his van, and she went without much fuss—she was so trusting. He said he would bring her back to the neighborhood once her checkup was done.

After the vet left, he texted me, asking for a name. I assumed he meant the name of the human responsible, so I gave him mine. When he returned, he handed me a little booklet with the stray’s vaccination record and medical information.

Under “name of dog” it said: “Samantha.”

For weeks, I tried to find the stray a home. I texted photos of her to an Embassy group message, hoping that if I advertised her well enough, someone would take her in. Finally, a woman answered. She had shared one of the photos on Facebook and a neighbor had responded, saying it looked exactly like her lost dog. 

I sprang from my chair like a jack-in-the-box. I grabbed Boo’s leash and threw on some jeans, still buttoning my fly as we ran out the door to search for our friend. We had barely made it down the block before Boo spotted her and dragged me across the dirt lot, where the two dogs crashed and wrestled each other into the muck. My chest tightened as I pictured reuniting the stray with her family, the tears of joy, the happy whines.

“Found!!” I texted the woman who’d posted the stray’s photo.

“Wait, is the pup male or female?” She asked.

“Female,” I said.

“Dammit…the missing dog is male.” 

I tucked my phone back into my pocket while Boo and the stray kept splashing about, spraying me with mud, blissfully unaware of the emotional roller coaster I’d just ridden. I let them play a while before slinking home.

Not long after was Eid al Adha, which Nick and I spent in Istanbul. So many indolent, well-fed street dogs dozed in the plaza between the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, and I wondered who was feeding the stray, if she was starving back in Amman while we gorged ourselves on Turkish doner and baklava. Then, on a cool, hushed morning, as Nick and I sipped coffee at an outdoor café among the jewel-toned facades of Sultanahmet, I got a bizarre text from a fellow dog lover: the stray had jumped another family’s fence and followed one of them to the Embassy, where a guard had threatened to take her out to the desert and shoot her.

That sent me from zero to one hundred faster than a Formula One car. “This guard is deranged,” I said, flying into one of my rage-induced rants. “Maybe someone should take HIM out to the desert and shoot him and see how he likes it!” 

Nick pointed out that the guard’s reaction seemed out of character—no one had complained when the stray had followed me to the Embassy a week or so before. “I don’t think anyone is going to let her get shot,” Nick said. “She’ll be fine.”

“But what if she’s not fine?” I whined. I knew in my heart that if anything happened to her, it would be my fault—that I could’ve protected her by taking her in, and yet I hadn’t. I thought about Boo, safe and warm at home, and what horrors she might have faced if we’d left her on the street. My stomach twisted. 

“The stray is choosing us as her family and we’re rejecting her,” I said. 

There was no help for it. All we could do from Istanbul was message rescues in Amman and beg for their intervention, and they were already inundated with other desperate cases. I prayed to whatever gods would listen that the stray would come back to our gate—I couldn’t fix this, but I could keep feeding her, giving her water, and scratching her shoulders if she’d let me.

When we returned from Istanbul, I found a strange sight outside our house: the stray was there as usual, but she had a collar on, and she was tied to a telephone pole with a makeshift leash. A man I didn’t recognize was feeding her fancy wet food from a can, patting her head and smiling like a lovestruck doofus.

I ran inside to find Nick, my ever-faithful Arabic translator. “The stray is tied to a pole outside,” I explained hurriedly. “Can you go ask this guy what’s going on?” Nick obliged, and I listened from the porch.

“Ah, mabrouk!” Nick said. Congratulations.

My prayers were answered, and then some. The man was adopting her. I suppose even in this timeline, when all the big things feel wrong—when children’s limbs are blown off for reasons that escape me, when American politicians openly call for civil war—sometimes the little things work out alright. Sometimes we choose love. I cling to these moments with every ounce of life force I have in me. 

The man asked Nick what name he should give the dog. I ran inside to get her vaccination record, which would show him that she already had one: Samantha. My accidental namesake.

In case you missed it…

Last week, paid subscribers received When Home Ceases to Be Home, a poem reflecting on what it means to live in exile. My most recent essay for free subscribers was about my trip to a Lucha Libre show in Mexico City, and why we all need stories—even the campy, soapy ones.

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Next week, free subscribers will get an essay about why my college reunion—which I was so looking forward to!—ended up being no fun at all. I’m also planning more lyrical content for paid subscribers. Upgrade below if you’d like to follow along, and I’ll see you all back here next Thursday!