Kids

Isabelle Chau

July 22, 2018

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Those of you who know me know I love dogs, specifically two little pups named Ariel and Riley.

Oh god. Here she goes again. Talking about her dogs. Enough already.

Well, sorry to disappoint.

Ariel Blossom Chau—Blossom, so that her initials would be ABC, of course—was born October 14th, 2007 in Jefferson City, Missouri, and joined my family on January 3rd, 2008. She was, and is, a shy puppy, her tail wagging, nestled between her legs as she inched forward out of her crate for the very first time. I will never forget the scent of her crate. She had a few accidents during her journey to New York, but they were masked by the bed of newspaper confetti. Somehow, it was a pleasant smell, the same smell that revisited our house when Riley arrived two years later. Ariel’s fur was coppery with patches of white, and straight, except not on her ears. Her ears, wavy and silky, framed her trusting face and limpid eyes. She was simply too small to have eyes that big, like Puss in Boots from Shrek—except real. It wasn’t fair to the other dogs out there.

I was in love. Being eight-years-old at the time, I didn’t know the consequences of my adoration.

Ariel and I grew up together. Every day after school, I’d come home to her, walk her, feed her, play with her. She likes to explore, sniffing anything and everything. She’s wise and coy, using her looks to charm. She likes people a lot more than dogs. When we’re at a dog park, she goes up to all the dog owners and avoids even the small dogs. It may sound ridiculous to some, but there really is no companion that compares. She knows when I am sad, happy, excited, angry, or eating too many snacks. She’s been there when I’ve failed and when I’ve cried.

Riley, our younger dog, passed away this year while I was in college. I was devastated. I remember getting the phone call from my parents while making myself a bowl of cereal in Middle Earth. He died of heart failure and collapsed in our living room. As I heard the news, I immediately fell to the floor in tears. He was too young. I didn’t get to say goodbye.

Time passed.

I’m enjoying the summer, seeing old friends, family, and learning a lot about Alzheimer’s disease. Specifically, I’m working in a neurobiology lab mapping regions in the brain affected by amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark pathology of Alzheimer’s disease, but I refuse to bore you with that now. As I was saying, this summer has been fruitful, but, in the back of my mind, I wonder how much time Ariel has left. Ariel is eleven now, and her head occasionally twitches. My parents are “temporarily” moving to Hong Kong for work when my sister Alex leaves for college in the fall. In fact, my father has already moved. It’s strange not knowing if and when my parents will move back to New York. It’s weird that they have decided to move just because they are now “empty-nesters,” and it’s even weirder that Alex and I are adults.

After going to the same school from first grade to twelfth grade, I now feel that every year passes by so quickly. The freshmen when we were seniors in high school are about to be seniors… It seems like we were just seniors.

Ariel will soon be going to Hong Kong with my parents, and I’ll be going to Berlin, while my sister heads to California for her first year of college. I guess this is what happens when you grow up.

But, part of me misses the days when my family lived at home, together.

The other day on the beach, a girl about five years old came over to me, my mother, and Ariel, having been pulled by her six-month-old Jack Russell. Her brother and parents continued to walk to a nearby spot on the beach. This little girl told us all about her new puppy: how he liked all other dogs, how he ate shells on the beach, and how far he would run if let off his leash. It seemed she could talk for hours. My mother and I engaged in conversation for a while, but after about ten minutes, we wondered if she was going to return to her parents soon or if her parents thought we were creepy strangers. The girl, however, didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t have anywhere to be. She wasn’t worried about the future or the past. In that moment, she simply liked talking about her dog.

You can learn so much from kids these days.