Recovering from hip surgery is a long process. I suspect that many of you reading this article know that firsthand or know someone who experienced it! The physical therapist advises lots of walking to bring about a full recovery.
Recently, after Sunday Mass at our Columban residence, I was speaking with one of the people who attended about this need for walking and she said, “Get a dog.” It was a great idea, but not so practical in a house where we are not set up to raise a dog.
However, it did bring back very fond memories of “Brownie,” the only dog I ever raised (with a lot of help from those around me!). During my years of serving in Japan, I was active in Marriage Encounter for several years. My team was located near Yokohama, but I was more than eight hours away in a seaside parish called Shingu.
Once, when I was up working with my team, one of the members brought her beagle with the new litter of puppies to the session. They were just beautiful dogs, and I was petting one so much that the owner presented it to me when I was leaving for home. What a surprise!
The next thing I thought of was how am I was going to get the dog home? The beagle’s owners gave me a cage to transport the puppy, but it would mean that I had to carry it along with my luggage on the train.
As luck would have it, the day I was heading back to the parish was also the first day of summer, when all the middle school students were on their excursions around the country. The train was packed, and there was standing room only. There wasn’t even room to put the cage down. I had to hold onto it with eight hours of travel ahead of me. The puppy slept in the carrying cage for a while, but then it woke up and was moving all over the place, wimpering to get out of the cage. It’s important to be a good neighbor in Japan, so I was nervous about how the puppy would affect the people around me.
The trip was moving along smoothly when suddenly the train stopped. There was an earthquake and so all the tracks had to be checked to see that there were no disruptions. This took about an hour, and my arms were getting so sore from holding the cage that I finally opened the cage door, took out the puppy and folded the cage and put it between my legs. The puppy was delighted and was licking and squirming all over the place. Then a lady next to me offered to hold the puppy for a while and before you knew it, the dog was being passed from person to person all through the train carriage. The puppy was a true missionary! I was enjoying every moment of meeting new friends and expressing God’s love to them.
Well, the remainder of the trip home was a delight, and it gave me an opportunity to meet so many people in such a short time. The rest of the trip home was a breeze.
Then I had to figure out how I would manage giving a home to a dog in my rectory. Shoji san, the housekeeper, took care of that right away by getting a dog house that was put in the back of the rectory. Of course, she wanted to know the puppy’s name, and I decided to name him Brownie.
Brownie was a huge hit with the children and parents at the kindergarten, and you could hear “Bwouni” “Bwouni” all over the school yard. The children had a hard time pronouncing the ‘r’ in Brownie. Fortunately, one of the parents of the children was a veterinarian and immediately took charge of Brownie’s medical needs.
Dogs need to walk every day, and Brownie kept me in the best of health through our walks and runs. All I can say is Brownie was a lifesaver!
God bless!
Columban Fr. Ron Kelso now lives in the United States.
