Did you know that there actually is a song out there called
"The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins?" There is, and it is sung by none other
than Star Trek's Mr. Spock, so if you're a sci-fi/fantasy geek, please rejoice and enjoy!
However, if you're not into song and dance, then you may prefer to just hear a less musical tale, the one about the Bilbo Baggins I call my own.
It's quite a saga in itself, beginning sometime early last spring, when
my boyfriend's friend decided to get divorced. Naturally, when you're
going through an acrimonious divorce, the first thing you want to do is
get the kids on your side, so the wife in this story took the only
sensible course of action: she went to Korea and bought them a
5-month-old cocker spaniel puppy.
She
discovered quite quickly that caring for a puppy was beyond her
skillset, so the work was outsourced to the husband (as were most of the
responsibilities in this marriage—you begin to see why it was ending!).
But of course, the husband was overwhelmed with other tasks — tasks
like getting divorced — so he began searching for a new home for his
puppy.
The first (and let's face it, probably only) person he asked was Mr. Dog Person
himself: my boyfriend. At this time (late July), he and I were knee
deep in raising a puppy of our own (Kodiak was only 5 months old
himself), and I was not enjoying it. However, the worst (peeing every 30
minutes!) seemed to be over, and I was actually starting to feel pretty
confident in my puppy-rearing abilities. So I told my boyfriend, who
relayed to his friend, that if he absolutely could not find anyone else
to take the puppy, we would do it.
And
so we did it.
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| Here's one of my first and favorite pictures of him. |
For some unfathomable reason, the wife had chosen to name
this beigish-whitish creature "Cocoa" (or maybe Coco or Koko, which
were equally terrible names since he was a male), so the first thing we
did upon acquiring our new charge was to saddle him with a new name.
There
is no particular reason we chose "Bilbo Baggins"—Al simply threw out a
couple of suggestions that I didn't like, and this happened to be one
that I did. But over time, he grew to suit his name. As his hair grew
out, his paws became shaggy and enormous-looking—just like hobbit feet
are supposed to.
The
first few weeks of owning him were rough. Although he was supposed to
be 5 months old according to his papers, he acted much younger than his
brother Kodiak. We suspect that his vital stats had been fudged in order
to clear him for export to the United States. He was a hyperactive
whippersnapper with too much pep in his step for my taste, and he wasn't
even remotely house-trained. I was all in favor of passing him on to yet
another family, but my boyfriend would only give him away if it were to
a person he already knew and trusted. That left us precious few
options, and everyone who claimed to want him got cold feet soon after.
As the months passed, it seemed unfair to uproot him for the third time
in his short life, so I accepted him as a permanent part of mine.
Although
I still wasn't terribly fond of the little fellow, when my boyfriend
and I went through our own divorce of sorts, I offered to take full
custody of Bilbo. At the minimum, I think I disliked him less out of the
two of us.
But
he grew on me slowly. Having a dog around was something of a consolation prize when I suddenly
had to face up to being single after almost 7 years of near-continuous
couple-hood. And although I'm still not keen on Bilbo's insatiable
desire for constant activity, I do enjoy being the recipient of his
also nearly insatiable desire for companionship.
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| What's sitting still? |
Although he's a lot of work, he's also my buddy, and I'm sure we'll have many stories to come!
