The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
By Wm. David Burns.
Last year, the Franklin Reporter & Advocate chose Katie Nordhaus, the extraordinary director of our Township’s animal shelter, as its “Woman of the Year.” It was a wise and well-deserved celebration of her distinguished service.
Last week, we had an experience in our little corner of Franklin that reassured me—against lots of evidence to the contrary—that the essential goodness of people who are otherwise strangers to one another can sometimes prevail in a world that too often is more marked by hostility and vulgarity than kindness and charity.
Here’s what happened: Around 7 pm last Thursday, my wife, Valerie, was returning to our home after a day in New York. She was in the car of our friend Nancy, a professor at the medical school, who was joining us for dinner.
Val and Nancy were unable to enter our driveway because it was blocked by a car. They observed a young man walking on Dahmer Road. Traffic was stopped. Uncharacteristically, other drivers were refraining from blowing their horns or otherwise demonstrating impatience.
The young woman near the car in our driveway, sensing she was blocking the entrance, reported that the guy walking in the road was with her. They stopped in an attempt to prevent a small, apparently blind, “stray” dog wandering in the road from being hit by a car. (Our driveway is perhaps 40 yards from the now four-lane and heavily used Amwell Road. The traffic on Amwell Road is no fair match for a family pet or any form of wildlife, let alone a sightless creature.)
With Nancy’s car now in our driveway and the young woman’s car safely parked, Val and Nancy joined the search for the little blind dog. It seems that a passer by (one of the folks who slowed down to take in the scene and learn what was happening) decided to alert her neighbor (from a street off nearly Bennetts Lane) about the drama on Dahmer Road.
This neighbor, apparently an “old hand” at canine rescue, soon arrived on the scene, along with her daughter. They brought a leash, a container of dog food, and a determination to keep the blind pup out of harm’s way.
So now we have six people on the scene. Only the members of each of the three pairs of interveners knew one another. Sadly, given the urgency of finding and securing the blind pup, no names were exchanged (though it was learned that the young couple who initiated the rescue had been on their way to a sushi restaurant in Skillman when they stopped to save a dog’s life!).
As the blind pup wandered in the grass just off the road, the experienced rescuers gently coaxed it to stay near and soon were able to install the collar and leash. The pup was scared, but somehow reassured. It ate all of the offered food and willingly took refuge in Nancy’s arms (Nancy and her dog, Tilley, are habitués of their town’s dog park).
Meanwhile, calls to the Franklin police assured the group that the Animal Shelter was staffed and able to take the pup. No one from the Shelter could come out just then, but they’d send a police person to the scene who could bring the now out-of-harm’s-way pup to the shelter. The young couple resumed their trip to the sushi dinner.
Shortly after, a kind officer arrived. She offered to escort our Bennetts Lane neighbors and the little blind pup to the shelter. Val and Nancy joined me for a drink. And that, as we say, was that: interesting, successful, touching, but somehow incomplete.
For me, however, it was a story that needed something like an ending.
By now, it’s Saturday afternoon and I am still wondering how this all might, or actually did, turn out. So I look at the Township’s website and see that the shelter is “open.” I call and get a recording inviting me to leave a message. So I do: “Katie, can you tell me what happened with the little blind pup?”
It so happened that Nancy and her husband were joining us for dinner on Saturday; Tilley was here too.
We are about to eat when the phone rings. It’s 7:10 pm on a Saturday night. And the caller is none other than Katie Nordhaus. We put her on speakerphone.
It turns out that, about 20 minutes after the blind pup, whose name is, I think I recall, “Chickie”, entered the shelter, her owner called to inquire if any dog of her description had been found. And indeed, her dog had been found! Found and returned to her by a team of folks unknown to one another.
Maimonides, writing on levels of charity, claims that, in its second highest form, neither the receiver of a gift nor the giver of the gift is known to one another.
And, this only raises the question of just who received the “gift” in this story. Surely the blind pup benefitted, as did her owners, reunited by the pup’s return.
Who else? I’d say just about everyone else in this story: the band of six “rescuers” who got the gift of forming an impromptu collaboration that kept something awful from happening and wound up making the pup’s owners happy. They got the gift of saving the pup’s life. But also gifted were all of us: we who have neighbors and passers-by who care, a police officer willing to escort the car carrying the blind pup to the shelter, and, of course, Katie Nordhaus and her team of folks at the shelter who do such good work and respond, even on a Saturday night, to an inquiry about a lost dog.
Let’s all take a minute to reflect on how community can work when we care and want it to work and how we might extend similar courtesies to our fellow human beings (as well as to our neighbor’s pets).
