A Dog Named Ralph

A picture of Ralph on the walkway to our dock. Photo taken by Nicole Barden.

In the olden days, not super old, but just old enough, there was a dog named Ralph. Now this doggie was a yellow lab that on his first interaction with water at the young age of pup almost drowned.

You see, his owner had taken him to a dock that floated on the river ever so peacefully. The owner wanted to show Ralph the water, so she set him on the dock to let him sniff to his heart’s content.

As little Ralph neared the edge of the dock near the water, he just kept walking. He walked straight off the dock and sunk. Now this scared the owner so much that as she was reaching for the sinking lab pup she noticed he just looked up at her as he got farther away.

Just as Ralph landed on the bottom, the owner was able to grab him and pull him up out of the water. All Ralph did was look at her and cough a couple of times. Then he shook his little body to dry off. The owner who was in a complete panic decided it was time to get as far as possible away from the water. So she picked him up and took him up to the house so she could get him dried off.

Now the moral of this story is, don’t let a bad first impression with something new determine you will never do it again. Ralph was with our family for 13 years. There were many times in the summer that I would arrive home from work, and Ralph wouldn’t be there to greet me. I would yell, “Ralph, Ralph, where are you?”

That’s when I would walk up so I could see the river, and there Ralph would be swimming by himself with not a care in the world as he swam and played in the water. He would see me and mosey back up to say Hi but good old Ralph would wait until he was right by me to shake off. I think he just wanted to share some of his fun with me.

— Nicole Barden 5/6/2021

Originally published in Illumination on Medium