Literary Pet of February: Bruce

When we adopted Bruce in March of 2017, I was just barely out of my intern days. Her nose was still mostly pink. She was six-months-old, narrow, tired, and light brown.

She wasn’t hired as an office dog right away. At the time, the Catapult Portland, OR office worked out of the attic of a lovely old North Portland house near good bagels and handsome model-ish baristas. The attic (and the rest of the house) was run by two stately office cats, Homer and Romeo. Bruce, a cat-obsessed youngster with good intentions and terrible manners, was “not a good fit.” She spent those days sleeping on our apartment’s green couch, destroying blinds, and pulling the occasional poetry book off the kitchen bookshelf.

As she grew, the black spots on Bruce’s nose grew too. She was still narrow.

In October of 2017, the Portland team moved to a new office––one with a door and across the street from a weed store. Bruce was hired to fill the roles Romeo and Homer had served in the attic office––sleep near employees, increase general morale, and lend a sense of imposing elegance to the office environment. She wasn’t exactly great at all of this right away. Once, in the early days of the new office, I found her absently gnawing on a galley during a meeting. Winter was a hard time. We commuted an hour each way in the dark, leaving no time for sprinting around on trails. Slow, high-pitched whining was the unfortunate soundtrack to a few rainy months. Despite this, the Portland office saw a noted increase in morale.

Bruce’s nose slowly filled in with black––the islands of spots started to coalesce into something more like a continent. She became very attached to Dustin, Catapult's social media manager.

In April, after many happy months of being able to high-five each colleague in the office without anyone leaving their desks, we moved to a larger office down the hall. Bruce was promoted and given an entire couch to manage.

Her new duties included:

- Sleeping

- Resting chin on various knees as needed

- Vigorously wagging

- Lounging handsomely on the red couch

- Cord management (i.e. tangling her wagging tail into cords, creating a charming kind of chaos)

- Reminding staff to take walks

- Greeting staff/visitors with (occasionally too much) gusto

Bruce is now two-and-a-half years old. Her nose is almost entirely filled in with black. She’s a good dog––still narrow, still light brown, still an immensely joyful creature. She hates the car but bears it to spend days with her colleagues. She can sleep for almost seven hours straight. She now whines only when her best friend Sucia is in the other office behind the closed door. She’s the fastest dog I’ve ever met.

At the beginning, I didn’t know how quickly a life could morph into the shape of a narrow brown dog. The answer is: pretty immediately.

P. S. Given the caliber of pet-lit that abounds, I am certain I have not done Bruce any kind of literary justice here. To anyone who knows her, forgive me.

Photos by: Dory Athey, Hayden Teachout, Jenn Abel Kovitz, Dustin Kurtz

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