Today is Clyde’s gotcha day, and I want to tell the truth about rescue. The kind of truth that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker or a tote bag. The kind that lands in your chest and stays there like a warm stone.
People like to say we rescue dogs, and yes, we do. We pull them out of shelters and ditches and bad luck and someone else’s failure to keep a promise. We sign papers and pay fees and buy the good kibble and the ridiculous toys that end up under the couch like lost planets. We do all of that, and still the real rescue runs in both directions. Sometimes it runs harder the other way.
Clyde found me again, and I know how that sounds to anyone who only believes in what can be proven under fluorescent lights. Those of us who know, just know. Some souls have a homing signal. Some love has a map. Some devotion takes the long way around the block and comes back wearing a different coat.
The first Clyde, the original Clyde, was something else entirely: a four-legged myth, a shaggy guardian angel with dirt under his nails. A dog who carried my heart on his four paws. He lived with me in my car on the edges of the UCSC campus. He followed the Grateful Dead with me. He watched me build a life out of whatever I could carry. He witnessed the whole strange, gorgeous circus of my becoming. He inspired Clyde’s Cookies, my vegan, organic chocolate chip cookies: a survival spell baked into a name, a business born from love and necessity and a dog who never once asked me to be anything other than alive.
He stayed. He stayed until he was seventeen, which feels like a small miracle when you remember what we were doing: miles, highways, parking lots, fields, weather, music, midnight. The kind of living that makes a person feral and holy. The kind of living that turns a dog into a legend.
And then time did what time does. It took him, and it took something out of me right along with him. Life kept life-ing. The world kept spinning. There are days I have wanted to step off the carousel. There are days my nervous system has felt like a live wire. There are days the weight of everything has made gravity feel personal.
And then this Clyde arrived.
Here he is, coming in for the heavy leans, snoring beside me on my pillow every night like he pays rent, making certain I show up. Making certain I eat. Making certain I walk outside and see the sky. Making certain I keep my appointments with the living world. He has taken the job seriously, like he clocked in and said: I’m on it.
He knows things, and I don’t mean in the cute “dogs are intuitive” way. I mean he knows. He knows when I’m going to have a seizure. He knows before I do. He shifts his whole body into readiness. He watches me with that steady, ancient focus. Guardian dogs just know. They read the weather inside us. They stand between us and the cliff. They become the tether, the anchor, the soft alarm system with fur and breath and unwavering devotion.
So yes, this is a gotcha day post, and also it isn’t. It’s a gratitude post, and also it isn’t. It’s a love letter to rescue, and to everyone who has ever walked into a shelter and felt their heart split open. It’s a reminder that the animals waiting behind those gates are not “less than.” They are not damaged goods. They are not charity cases. They are beings with stories, with courage, with the kind of tenderness that survives impossible things.
Rescue is holy work, and it isn’t only holy for the animal.
Sometimes you walk in thinking you’re saving a dog, and you walk out with the one creature on earth who will keep you on the planet. The one who will press his weight into your legs when you start to float away. The one who will insist on morning. The one who will drag you into the present moment by the sleeve. The one who will love you through all your versions, even the ones you don’t know how to love yet.
Clyde, my beautiful boy, my guardian, my snoring, heavy-leaning, heart-tethering miracle: thank you for finding me. Thank you for coming back around. Thank you for choosing me again. Thank you for making a home out of my body and my bed and my life. Thank you for the way you keep showing me what devotion looks like when it has four paws and no agenda.
If you’ve ever rescued an animal, you already know. The rescue runs both ways. The love arrives like a rope thrown into dark water, and sometimes it’s the only thing that pulls you back to shore.
Happy gotcha day, Clyde. We’re still here. We’re still singing. We’re still walking forward. And tonight you can have the whole pillow, like always. 🖤🐾
NAKEDJEN 