And then came the other puppy. He was introduced to me to make Rumble look good. A “second tier” boy also six months old, he had never been potty-trained or received human guidance. But he was so excited to see me, clumsily stepping over himself and earnestly puzzling over the word sit. I felt instantly that this vulnerable little being hadn’t had the chance to connect with anyone yet, that he was ready to give all his love to someone. My entire being angled toward him like a magnet. I took him home and called him Sunny.
The name fit his sweet personality and yellow fur, but I’ll admit there was more to it. I had just moved to gray, misty Seattle via a roundabout path. Months prior, burned out at my magazine job in New York City, I quit and then spent months traveling to places like Russia and Egypt. Eventually, I came back to the US and ended up landing an exciting job in the Pacific Northwest, where I didn’t know a soul. Along with the apprehensions of moving to a place totally unknown, I had also been managing depression for almost a decade, and I knew from experience that unfiltered sunlight made a huge impact on my mental well-being. Maybe Sunny could too.
In the years that followed, Sunny became my travel buddy. With him on the folded-down backseat of my Subaru wagon, we explored a part of the country that was new to my eyes. We started small: Within the first couple of months of living together, Sunny and I went wading into low-tide pools on the beach of Golden Gardens Park; in bitingly cold water, we found giant moon snails the size of baseballs and ochre starfish as big as my hand. As Sunny sniffed the insides of empty shells, I felt, for the first of thousands of times, how his fur felt tipped with salt water. On weekends, we meandered through the Ballard Farmer’s Market to buy flowers, goose eggs, and succulently sweet Dungeness crab meat. With my whitefish tacos and fried clams from the walk-up Little Chinook’s stand at Fishermen’s Terminal, I’d sit on a bench facing the marina and Sunny would watch the ducks in the water, where, I still remember, a ship called Knotty Girl bobbed.
