How a Bad Day Got Turned Around

Spoiler alert: it was a puppy.

When I was a kid, my mom and I used to love to read the book, “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.” It basically chronicles the tale of an elementary school student who, from the moment he wakes, has a pretty rotten day.

It’s one of those “if something can go wrong it will” kind of days.

A few weeks ago, I could have been the protagonist of that book. Man, I was having a rough one. And it wasn’t really any one specific thing, you know? Just little things that once you started noticing them began to really add up — kind of like Alexander.

It got pretty frustrating. At one point I said to myself, “Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.”

Sigh.

But then, as is the case working at an animal shelter, things changed.

We had puppies — little puppies — that we had in our foster-to-adopt program. This is where people take the little ones into their homes to foster and bring them back to be spayed or neutered and officially adopted. They have essentially already adopted the squirts, but this way, the pups can grow up in a home instead of in a kennel.

This program is particularly helpful to little puppies — it gets them out of the shelter environment and into a home, which keeps them healthy in the long run.

Well, in addition to this day beginning pretty poorly for me, it also happened to be a spay and neuter day for the foster-to-adopt program. As a result, we had human moms and dads drop off their little four-legged babies to be spayed and neutered and I happened to be at the shelter when one mom came back for her baby.

When she got into the building to pick him up, she was practically hopping — that’s how anxious she was. She said, “I just want to see my boy. It about killed me to leave him here. I cried a little.”

I can totally understand feeling.

So we brought him out to her and therein began one of the sweetest, most heart-warming spectacles I had seen in a long while and boy, did I need to it.

The little guy is a Chihuahua/terrier mix and as soon as he saw his mama, that little tail started whipping back-and-forth, despite the groggy look in his eyes. You could tell he wasn’t completely sure what had happened to him, because he wasn’t totally awake from his surgery and he seemed a little scared at his surroundings, but the minute he saw her it was like he knew everything would be okay.

She scooped him up and held him tight against her neck and kissed him like crazy. You could hear that tail flapping against her arm as they smooched each other. Even as she filled out the adoption paperwork, she never once put him down on the floor.

I jokingly said I hope I’m reincarnated as a dog in her home and she laughed and told me her husband tells her he hopes he comes back as one of her dogs, too.

It turns out both she and her husband are incredibly fond of the little guy. In fact, he’s got a fenced-in yard where he’s free to roam, but when they found a garter snake around one of the bushes in the yard, her husband actually built another little fence around that bush, so the puppy wouldn’t get in with the garter snake and possibly get hurt.

It also allowed the garter snake to live in relative safety in that bush — talk about serious animal-lovers.

She told me she even had the name of one of her dogs on her license plate. Now that’s devotion.

It turns out the little guy she was adopting from us was doing really well for her and that she just adored him. He gets along well with her other dog and really fits into the house. Almost like he was meant to be there.

I’ve heard of a theory — a pretty scientific one (my retired-chemistry-teacher dad will be so proud) — that everything is made of energy. There’s a vibrational frequency to everything on the planet, even things that we think are solid and not in motion actually have a molecular vibration. Words vibrate, emotions vibrate, our bodies vibrate.

Desks vibrate, chairs vibrate, floors vibrate. We may not be able to perceive it, but because they are made of molecules and molecules are always in motion, there is a vibration to them.

Have you ever instinctively been able to tell when someone is lying to you? Maybe something just didn’t seem right or even feel right about what they were saying to you? That’s because words that are lies vibrate differently than words that are true. There’s actually a different energy that comes from deception.

We get the information on a level that we may not be conscious of, but is certainly still there. I believe many of us can sense it if we are open to how that energy resonates within us.

On a very basic level, we are all tuned into the energetic frequency of the planet and all the plants and creatures on it. We just have to be willing to listen, not necessarily with our ears, but with our intuition and our heart.

I have to tell you, as I watched that mama and that puppy in the shelter, I could actually feel the love that flowed back and forth between them. I know it sounds Disney-movie-level cliche, but there really was something there.

The woman and her dog were holding onto one another — practically heart to heart — and it was easy to see nothing was going to come between them. It’s difficult to describe, but I really did receive something, a sensation, if you will, that settled somewhere in my chest with warmth.

It was not only visible, but also something that I recognized deep within me.

And as is the way with bad days, my mood got just a little brighter.

Maybe Alexander and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day just needed a good dose of puppy love — witnessing the animal and human bond sure did it for me.