the dawg

Today was interesting. I had only one English class (in two hours, I've got a beginning Korean class), after which I was free. So I dithered in the faculty office, and at some point just after lunch, three girls came in with a skinny, trembling, sweet-tempered, and very old little dog. The girls' English wasn't too hot, but with a mixture of English and Korean I determined that they had found the dog on the street, and that they thought the dog belonged to a prof in our office. That turned out not to be the case: the actual owner of the dog was indeed a foreign prof, but the prof was someone from a different department who had a similar first name. I took the dog over to Room 400, the department staff room, and sat with the Korean ladies while other people tried to track the dog's owner down.

The dog itself seemed to like me. It didn't resist when I picked it up, and it licked my face when I cradled it. I wasn't sure what language to speak to it at first; I tried Korean, but the dog didn't seem to understand me. Maybe it was my outlandish accent. Since the animal belonged to a foreign prof, I thought it best to switch to English, but the dog seemed too frightened to obey any commands in English. It was well-behaved, at least, and it didn't pee or poop anywhere. The mystery that we all puzzled over was how in the hell the dog wandered onto campus to begin with. I assume it got out of its home and tried to find its master. Was a door or a gate left open somewhere?

Eventually, a student knocked on the office door and said she represented the prof in question. The dog lit up: it obviously recognized her, so I knew this was no dog-napper. The girl thanked me for holding the dog, which was named Kiki, and then she and the animal left. Thus ended our half-hour adventure—the bright spot in my day.


_