Hello again, Koko! (Coco!)

A few days ago I went for a short run which lasted longer than I'd planned. About a mile into the run, I noticed a tiny dog sniffing around in the grass by the curb. As I approached the little rodent-like creature, I noticed that she had a pink collar around her neck and that there were no human beings in sight. Uh, oh, I thought. This little thing is lost.

I approached her cautiously, not wanting to be accused of dog-napping or to put myself at risk for getting my finger bitten off. The rotund little chihuahua was snorting into the grass as I put my hand out for her to sniff. I scooped her up and read her worn-out tag. "Coco" was engraved on the tiny metal tag as well as a worn out phone number that was difficult to read. Unfortunately I did not have my phone on me, so I found myself standing in the middle of the sidewalk, holding a wriggling fat sausage of a dog with no idea where she belonged.

So I did what any other person would do in my situation - I started knocking on doors. Fortunately I was standing in front of a row of townhouses so my task seemed easy. I walked up to the closest door and knocked. No answer. Hmmm. I started walking away when I heard the door opening. I turned around to see an elderly man standing at the door, staring at me suspiciously.

"Is this your dog?" I mouthed hopefully as I started walking back toward his door. I guess I looked like a serial killer or perhaps a lunatic dog thief/peddler because he gave me a dirty look, shook his head at me and slammed the door. Great.

I soldiered on. A knock at the second door produced a woman about my age who acknowledged me warily but slowly warmed up as she realized my predicament. No, the dog did not belong to her and she did not recognize it, but she was willing to let me in to try calling the number on the tag. As she was dialing the number her two kids were jumping up and down and asking if they could keep the dog. By this point the dog was frantically squirming and writhing and trying desperately to get away from me. The number turned out to be out of service - another dead end.

But then the woman said that her next door neighbor had a few yappy dogs - maybe I should try knocking on her door. Now that I'm writing this I'm wondering why she didn't mention this in the first place. But this is the type of society we live in now - where people can live in a row of townhouses and not even know that their next door neighbor owns a bunch of crazy chihuahuas. I don't blame her though. I know nothing about some of my neighbors who live a mere couple of houses away.

I knocked on the third door. A woman wearing a track suit and bright pink lipstick opened the door and shrieked "Oh, My, God!!!  Coco!!!!" Success! Apparently her husband had arrived home earlier and Coco must have slipped out the front door as he was coming in. As the other dogs yapped around her feet and her husband hovered behind her, I couldn't help but wonder if his carelessness had been deliberate. He didn't seem to share his wife's enthusiasm about Coco's miraculous return.

As I continued my run I suddenly remembered another dog that I had a hand in rescuing many years ago. When I was a kid, maybe about Jack's age, my sister and I and some other neighborhood kids found a large, fluffy, extremely friendly dog wandering the woods behind our house. He was dirty, his fur was matted and he was covered in ticks, but if dogs could smile this guy would have had a huge perma-grin on his face. We brought him to our mom who immedately got out her tweezers and picked every single tick off his body. We petted him and hugged him and begged to keep him, but because we still had our old dog Toto who was not a big fan of other dogs the answer was no.

We ended up giving him to our neighbors. The Jacobsens were an older, retired couple who lived two doors down. They were thrilled to give this sweet dog a home. He didn't have a collar, so they had to give him a new name.

Koko.

Isn't that funny? That was about thirty years ago. I've thought of Koko occasionally over the years, but he hadn't entered my head until my encounter with a very different Coco earlier this week.

The first Koko was a love. We used to go over the the Jacobsen's just so that we could visit Koko. They always invited us in, feeding us milk and cookies while we played with Koko. Koko's favorite thing to do was to crawl up on our laps while we sat the the floor with him, essentially giving us big, furry dog hugs. What a great dog.

Here is a photo of my sister with Koko and our cat Ketchup, shortly after we found him. I can't believe I actually found this photo - I had to dig through some boxes in our crawl space to find it.

My sister Vanessa, age 9, with Koko the happy rescued dog and Ketchup the cat in 1984

Koko is long gone, as I'm sure are the Jacobsens - but I'll remember his friendly face and the Jacobsen's gracious open door policy for the rest of my life.