Free Ever by My Side by Nick Trout Page A

the firstprotective German shepherd I’ve ever met and he certainly won’t be the last.”
    I nodded, felt awkward, and made to shuffle out of the room.
    “Here,” said Mr. Jones, handing me a small dog biscuit in the shape of a bone. “For him, not you. Most of my patients prefer them to lollipops.”
    He pressed the biscuit into my open hand, while I offered a barely audible thank-you and ran out to catch up with Dad, who was paying his bill.
    “Next time,” said Arthur Stone in a polite whisper, “you might want to give Patch a little something an hour or so before he comes in. I can ask Mr. Jones for a prescription if you like. Make it a lot easier on you and easier on him.”
    Dad thanked him for the offer and after a few minutes Arthur returned with a small white envelope containing half a dozen bright orange tablets.
    “Next time,” said Arthur, sliding them across the counter and jutting out his chin, his chubby lips curved downward into the frown of someone who knows best.
    Dad thanked him once again with an appreciative nod, but when he glanced down at me to say, “Let’s go,” I sensed he remained haunted by a mixture of skepticism and guilt for having nurtured a dog who required chemical sedation to come out in public.
    To put Patch’s antics in some kind of context, I can look back on my career as a veterinarian and realize that sadly, he would be right up there with my top ten all-time nightmare encounters. I’m no behaviorist but Patch seemed motivated by a dangerous combination of fear, dominance, and desire to protect his pack—me and my dad. Sometimes you can try removing the dog from the owner, but with Patch there would have been no separating him from those he was sworn to defend at all cost.
    If I had been in Mr. Jones’s shoes, I would have been rolling my eyes and shaking my head the moment Patch was out of my sight. It may seem inconsequential, but as an owner who acknowledged his pet’s bad behavior, my father at least had one saving grace. An owner who appreciates there is a problem is always preferable to the smiling owner who quips as a pair of canine teeth sinks deep into your flesh, “Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention … sometimes he gets snippy!”

    As I entered my teenage years, my inner nerd began to stir. I was the geek who craved a chemistry set (so long as I could try to make a bomb), was enthralled by any television show featuring Sir David Attenborough, and, though I dared not tell a living soul, actually enjoyed algebra. It became apparent that if I kept to the sciences and stayed far away from anything involving the English language, it was possible that I might just make something of myself. It was at this point that my father’s inclination to coddle my academic efforts began to change. Don’t get me wrong, my father’s aspirations for his son were always well intentioned—consistent nudges interlaced with remembrances of his own failings in school, all aimed at preventing a similar calamity. But as I began to savor the feel of primitive peach fuzz on my cheeks and the first crack in my choirboy vowels, I noticed a shift in his focus on my scholarly success to bigger issues of career and even destiny. It wasn’t long before the time-honored question, savored by so many parents and grandparents, finally emerged from his lips.
    “So, son, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
    To this day, I’m not exactly sure how I broadcast my curiosity about the life of a veterinarian, but my father jumped all over this spark of interest and soon arranged an intense one-day immersionprogram, at the very same practice I had visited with Patch years earlier.
    Eager to make a good impression, I was worried that I would be perceived as an accomplice to Patch’s bad behavior. I tried to convince myself that enough time had passed since the troubling encounter with Mr. Jones and besides, I was assigned to a different doctor in the practice, the man I would come to think of