The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

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. 

 

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.

 

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!