In this season of goodwill, it is ironic that I have learned the painful truth that no good deed goes unpunished. While I was preparing to deliver a load of Toys for Tots, my dog Harper was plotting an act of defiance that culminated in my complete humiliation.

Having packed all the toys in my car, I headed for our neighborhood drop point. Rounding a corner, I giggled at the yellow lab I saw prancing around in a yard a street away from mine. Tail flapping, ears flopping, he was strutting his stuff with the exuberance of a kid let out from school. 

“Well, isn’t he the jolly fellow,” I mused aloud as I passed him. “He reminds me of Harper.” With very good reason. A cursory glance in my rearview mirror revealed to my shock it was Harper.

He had apparently slipped out of the house unnoticed as I was carrying armfuls of toys to the car and his body language clearly announced that “Harper Gaitan’s Day Off” was now in full swing. I slammed on my brakes and called to him out my open window. At the sound of my voice, he stopped mid-prance and shot me a glance. The exclamation points in his eyes told me he knew the jig was up, but he hesitated as if weighing his options: freedom and frivolity vs. two steady meals a day, plus completely undeserved treats.

To my relief, his appetite won out and he galloped over to the back of my car, waiting for me to open the cargo gate. That’s when things went south. When Harper encountered the large box of toys occupying his customary spot, he refused to jump in. It mattered not that there was room for both the box and him, he was having none of it. I desperately tried to muscle all eighty pounds of his resistant body into the car with one forceful shove. A colossal failure. Harper panicked, slipped my grip and tore off to parts unknown, while, to my horror, my bladder unexpectedly let loose with unstoppable force.

Despite the embarrassment, not to mention discomfort, of my soaked-through yoga pants, I couldn’t afford to let Harper’s trail go cold. I jumped back in the driver’s seat and took off. I caught sight of him as he dashed at lightning speed between two houses and breached “no-man’s land,” the deep, forested gulch that lay between my neighborhood and the next. I abandoned my car on the side of the street and ran after him, right into the heart of nature’s booby trap where surely no human had set foot since primeval times.

Harper’s four legs traversed the uneven, rocky terrain much faster than my two. When I finally emerged, I was covered in mud, with random bits of twigs and vines tangled in my hair and a bleeding gash where an errant section of barbed wire had ripped through my wet pants and slashed open my thigh. Harper was nowhere in sight.

I was seconds away from collapsing in a pathetic, sobbing heap when fortune smiled, or woofed in this case. I followed the incessant woofs to the top of the hill where I found Harper barking frantically at a cat perched atop a fencepost. He blatantly ignored my urgent calls for him to come to me, but his preoccupation with the cat allowed me to sneak up from behind and grab his collar. Success! I had him! But what to do with him? I had no leash, and I couldn’t walk him all the way back home through Death Valley, hunched over, holding him by the collar.

I swallowed the very little pride I had left and dragged him with me up the front steps of a complete stranger’s house to ask for help. When I saw the festive “Feliz Navidad” Christmas decoration on their front door, I panicked. My predicament was barely explainable in English, much less translatable to Spanish. I needed my Colombian husband to magically appear for back up, but that wasn’t going to happen, so I took a deep breath and knocked.

When a very nice-looking, but clearly wary, young man opened the door to my shaking, bedraggled self, I managed to stammer out, “Hola, tengo un problema muy loco. Puedes ayudarme, por favor?”

He took a step back (I certainly couldn’t blame him there) and surveyed me with more curiosity than fear. “Duuude, like, what happened to you?” he asked in perfect teenage English, eliminating the language barrier for me.

I described my situation as best I could through my sniffling gulps and his barely suppressed laughter. I ended the rambling explanation by begging to borrow a piece of rope to use as a makeshift leash. He didn’t have any rope, but his older sister was visiting from out of town and had brought her Chihuahua with her. She graciously offered to let me borrow her leash, which was the weight and diameter of dental floss, mind you, long enough to get Harper home. I gratefully accepted and hitched Harper up, silently praying the slim length of nylon thread designed to restrain a mouse wouldn’t give way pulling Harper’s heft.

And that is how I, mud-covered, with wet undercarriage and bloody thigh, came to be trekking back over hill and dale, rock and ravine, with a mud-covered, unrepentant Labrador in tow, on my way to do a good deed a week before Christmas 2019.

As for next year’s Christmas charity drive, it’s PayPal all the way for me.