By Sophie

My name is Sophie (I also answer to Sophina, Sophie Sue and/or Doo-Doo), and yes, I am pawsome. Read on, and I’m sure you’ll agree.

 A long, long time ago (77 dog years, to be exact) I was a homeless pup in the South Bay Adoption Center. I was brought there when I was barely a couple months old. Soon after that I developed kennel cough and was kept separated from the other impounded pooches. My world as I knew it was a tiny, cold cage.

When I felt better, I was put in a cage with Bertha, a deaf bull terrier mix. It was great to finally have a friend to play with, but Bertha was the worst roommate ever. She was really bossy and barked all day and night. I could never relax.

One day a nice man came to the shelter and told the people that he was still looking for a buddy for Larry, his three-year-old American Staffordshire Terrier. He’d come to the shelter before, when I was quarantined, but he couldn’t find what he thought would be a good match. It’s a good thing he decided to come back and check again! When he saw me, he said, “Perfect!”

He brought Larry and my dog mom-to-be to the shelter so we could all meet and see if we got along. Larry was very handsome and muscular, and a wee bit shy around me. “Perfect!” I barked.

A few days later, after the adoption paperwork was completed and I was spayed, my dog dad picked me up and drove me to my new home. I can’t tell you how glad I was to leave my cage and crazy Bertha behind. The first thing I did was walk around and sniff my new backyard, which had a large, luxurious expanse of lawn. After standing on cement for a year, nothing quite compared to the soft feeling of the grass between my toes.

I spent the next day getting to know my new pal Larry. He was a purebred whom our pet parents had bought from a breeder, so he was extremely naïve about a lot of things. You could say we were both sheltered, but in very different ways.

The day after that, our dog mom had to go to the market, so she left Larry in the house and put me in the backyard. When she got back, both Larry and I greeted her at the front door.

“What the-“ she said, scratching her head. “Did I leave the back door open?”

Nope. The back door was closed. She checked around the house, wondering aloud if she was losing her mind. I just wagged my tail.

Then she saw the open window in the bedroom, and figured out how I had managed to get in the house. Mind you, it was a tall casement window (the kind you people crank open) that was only open a few inches, and I was still recovering from being spayed just two days earlier. But I did it, I really did it!

And that, my dear friends, is why I am truly the essence of pawsomeness. Never in a million dog years would Larry ever have done something like that.

Sophie was almost 84 dog years old when she passed to the Rainbow Bridge last November. She was adopted by i Love Dogs writer Laura Goldman in 1998 from a Hawthorne, Calif. shelter. She loved long naps, looking out the front windows and, most of all, her best buddy Leroy. Check out her other articles!