Shaggy Dog Story

My wife's favorite television program...and we don't even have a dog!

I had to link to this story from Truckee Today, a Truckee, CA special supplement to the Reno Gazette-Journal. I've been stumbling upon occasional installments of the Cushman family's saga here in Buenos Aires ever since they pulled up stakes and moved here two years ago.

They lost the family dog up around Olivos and got it back through the good offices of my favorite TV show...not that I even watch TV, I don't. But this particular program has granted me hours of peace by completely opiating my wife every Sunday for God-only-knows how many hours that the program goes on.

You really should take a peek in on the show if you get a chance. It is a tremendous hit here. Your host Raúl Portal and his Cuban dog, Chicha Candela, put on a show in which people who have lost dogs and people who have found dogs (and other pets, too, I think) get together and see what matches up. You can show up at the studio, or call them on the telephone, or send them an email...or just tune in to see if your little darling has been found.

Raúl is a former local police officer, with all the baggage that accompanies that, who (I was wrong about him being a police officer) somewhere along the road to Damascus decided to devote his life to reuniting pets and their owners. He started out as a small segment on another program, I believe, and eventually ended up with several hours on the América network and his own production company. You can't get any simpler production values, live-TV, wireless mics, pretty assistants, a studio audience, Portal pauses every now and then to hawk a product. And then, several times per hour, you get owners and pets miraculously reunited and all of the attendant emotion that you'd expect. This program would work anywhere in the world.

But now for the BEST part: what I liked most about Beth Cushman's story was how is was a perfect little microcosm of the Buenos Aires experience. It's an antidote to some of the truly horrible things that people write and publish about other people, other cultures and big cities in general.

You squeeze some 11 million people of all walks into this space and anything could happen...you could even lose your dog.

Everybody in the big town considers themselves to be experts on living and surviving here and, to varying degrees they all are. Beth and her fulanos go from loss, to hope, to joy, to fear and finally a happy ending.

It's a story that could leave you with the realization that a big part of any bigcity-dweller's self-preservation kit has to be the firm conviction that evil is truly uncommon. Otherwise, you ain't really livin'.