It was May and already summer, for all intents and purposes. School was out for most University students, and downtown Baton Rouge was infected with their blissed-out, donezo rabidity. For my own part, I was disappointedly immune to the disease, to the happiness, having failed to fulfill the requirements for graduation – having failed College Algebra.
It was summer all right, the summer of my life – and the dog days, at that. At twenty-five years old, I wasn’t a puppy anymore. My spring was nearer my tail than my muzzle, and youth was suddenly lost in sevens, seemingly. In dog years.
I’d been burned this semester, at any rate, burned an even black in life’s rotisserie: I was reeling from a robbery, a wreck, a job resignation and a real good ass-kicking at F&M Patio Bar in New Orleans. My mother had died in December, and I’d since been lost without her, an orphan, an Oliver Twist.
Puncher’s Sports Bar was where I found myself one night in May, alone and with friends for one’s birthday, collared to a barstool, choke-chaining a maddog of disillusion and chain-smoking unfiltered carcinogenic thoughts, waiting for a last call – the bar’s or my own didn’t much matter to me.
But it was then that life called off the dogs and threw me a bone.
There are incalculably many millions of animals on America’s streets, avenues and boulevards, according to the ASPCA. In Baton Rouge, Park Boulevard is one such thoroughfare. And that night, one of these strays was a dog.
We nearly put the pup to sleep on our way home from the bar, slamming on the brakes by the slimmest of margins to skew to a stop beside the lucky dog.
The pooch was a canine caricature, almost. Pitiful-precious, like Droopy Dog. Schmaltzy-sweet, like Huckleberry Hound.
A mutt’s mutt, by all accounts: a beagle-skunk mix with a bark like a black sheep’s bleat and a potbelly that scrubbed more asphalt than a Chicano lowrider.
“alrighty, then,” like a hungover Ace Ventura, I began to sleuth about for Cheech’s owner.
It was a game of Blue’s Clues, as Cheech and I designated it, and our search began on craigslist.com, abruptly ending when a shrewd anonymous gumshoe tipped us off to the Lost Pets of Baton Rouge (LPBR) Facebook page, a joint-enterprise of four local saints, themselves “a mix of people that volunteer heavily” with animal rescue efforts, said LPBR co-chairman and University alumna Mindy Brooks.
“A pet is part of your family,” she said. “It’s very rewarding to help reunite families.”
Indeed.
Largely through the LPBR community and its resources, I successfully located Cheech’s owner, a University student who came to pick her in a beat-up, run-down hoopty of a car whose thrumming engine rang clear outside my apartment complex.
As I waited for him with Cheech, and as his car jalopied closer, not yet visible but audible, nonetheless, her ugly-as-ever puppy-dog eyes became as wide as saucers – flying saucers, flying platters, in fact.
Cheech – or Lucy, as it turns out – was found.
I didn’t have the heart to ask him for a reward: I had already received one, in truth.
And in the lost-and-found with a dog named Cheech, this old dog learned a new trick.
Life.
Phil Sweeney is 25-year-old English senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_PhilSweeney.
 
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