A little slice of life

On the way home from work yesterday I passed a beautiful black lab, sitting at the end of a driveway, just at the edge. Waiting, looking past me down the road. Rather expectantly. Shifting side to side, as if he knew something was about to happen. I imagine he was waiting for his human to come home. Maybe he heard his car coming off the freeway a few miles away, or at the end of the road.
It made me smile, thinking how much that dog loved his people. So much that he sat there, fidgeting, back and forth, Here They Come, Here They Come. I wonder if that family appreciates him enough.
Our dog Riley does that back and forth thing when he knows something good is about to happen. And he snorts and sneezes, too. His Happy Dance.
I know dogs didn't start out so loyal to us, hell some aren't. They've been bred to the nth degree until some of them look like genetic nightmares. We humans don't always do the right thing, do we? I think I heard some where that a quarter of all Dalmatians have to be put down because they are born deaf and blind. Humans did that with selective breeding.
But we did get something right, didn't we? Dogs that will follow us around, who love us, even if we forget to give them water every now and then? Riley's great joy in life is to play fetch with his Bear. Of course, he also likes to lick his whatits a lot too.
It would be a little harder to come home and not have our Riley waiting for us, welcoming us home.