-^-for posterity-^-

i walked outside of the guesthouse to head off to a meeting one afternoon when a dog walked up to me. he was a black dog (cho muc in vietnamese meaning ‘ink dog’ or ‘squid dog’) and he walked as if his back and his front were connected not with bone but with skin, tendons and a digestive tract.

he walked up to me and his tail began to wag. it was a long tail, about half as long as my new, semi-handicapped dog friend, and it seemed to control the direction his back half headed in. as he approached me, he didn’t seem to be quite like any of the other dogs i have seen roaming around these parts. most dogs that roam the busy roads and pathways around these parts are gnarled and wise. this dog was clean and young and wore a handsome, red collar.

he came right up to me and smelled my feet, something no random dog would do, and began to nibble on my pants. i, being a person who is not easily amused by puppies or babies or flowers, was rather annoyed. i was about to walk away when a person walked around the corner and explained to me that this was, in fact, his dog.

it turns out the dog is named ‘jonathan’. i have a coal black dog that can not properly walk named after me. this is the third dog that has been named after me since i have arrived in vietnam.

i was then told the story of how jonathan first learned how to walk. evidently, this poor dog was not able to walk for the first few months of his life and would, ‘swim,’ around the house on his belly. there was some concern that jonathan would never be able to walk and people had given up hope. one vet decided the reason jonathan was not walking was because he was inside and he simply needed to feel the dirt between his toes to get up and get going. he was taken outside where he continued to swim around on his belly in the mud.

then, as if through the divine intervention of some heavenly figure and the mud, the dog stood up and began to bound around. jonathan was healed. jonathan could walk.

a common question asked of me around these parts is, ‘how do you feel?’ it’s a direct translation of a vietnamese phrase which i would more correctly translate as, ‘what do you think about…?’ if i was to be asked what do i think about having a semi-handicapped dog named after me, i would not know how to respond. the macabre nature of the situation causes me to tilt my head a bit to the right and grin.