Bring a little Krypto (dog) into your life

Two Januaries ago, on a 10-degree day, I met a black dog with white speckled paws at a Tractor Supply in New Jersey. She had just been flown up by a dog rescue group in Puerto Rico, and looked lonely, sad, and lost. I was also lonely, sad, and lost after losing my previous dog, too young and too tragically, to liver failure six months before.

Maybe, I thought as she looked up at me with soulful puppy eyes, we could help each other, too.

What a scammer! This dog wasn’t sad, lost, or lonely, but crafty enough to use that gaze to trap me. Bonnie, as I named her, wasn’t 2 to 4 years old, as her paperwork suggested. But instead was maybe a 9-month-old puppy, less burgeoning adult and more absolute terror, and had used her wiles to bulldoze her way into my home.

Within the first few weeks of living with me, she destroyed not one, not two, but three reading lights, the TV remote at my and my mother’s house, and ripped holes in more socks than I could count. She thought gnawing on the leg of an end table was a better option than a dozen chew toys I bought her, and that tissues, especially dirty ones she pulled out of trash cans, were a snack (which I’d later find in her poop, along with my earplugs).

She could go 15 hours without peeing — no matter how many hourlong walks I took her on — before eventually finding the one spot on my expensive dining room rug that I hadn’t covered with pee pads. To try to control her destruction, I shut every door to every room in my house, gated her out of the kitchen, and, per a trainer’s instructions, sometimes leashed her to me, even while she was inside.

Bonnie was small enough to pick up and carry into her crate — if I could catch her. I frequently did not, and for months, rushed to not be late to almost every appointment I had booked.

When I saw the new Superman movie, I knew why a friend said Bonnie reminded her of Krypto, a superdog who is a constant headache for the last son of Krypton. The white, shaggy dog runs amok through the Fortress of Solitude, nips at Superman’s ankles, and, when the hero needs help after he loses a big battle, Krypto first jumps on him in glee, to perhaps compound Superman’s already existing fractures, instead of offering him any useful assistance.

These dogs have driven us to the edge of madness. I thought more than once that maybe Bonnie would be better off in another home. But when Krypto goes missing, Superman storms into Lex Luthor’s lair, and at the angriest I have ever seen him in any iteration of the character, demands to know, “Where’s the dog?”

Likewise, when Bonnie slipped out of my mom’s gated backyard, I panicked in a way I didn’t think I would about a creature that had caused hundreds of dollars of damage to my home.

We put up with this because good people love dogs, especially the hard-luck cases. Superman director and writer James Gunn said he based Krypto — in both personality and image — on his rescue dog, Ozu, who had been saved from a hoarding situation, and then invoked terror in the Gunn home.

But like Ozu (and maybe someday Krypto), Bonnie has become less of a menace as she finally grew into adult dog form. She only carries my book light from one room to another, and if she finds a pair of clean socks, she uncouples but doesn’t destroy them, then places them where she thinks they should go, even if that’s in her crate.

She still pulled my chest muscle when she darted after a squirrel on a walk, and she tries to hide under the dining room table when I need to put her in her crate, but she also sits patiently by my desk when she knows I’ve been working too long, snuggles up against my leg when I can’t quite stay asleep, and has made both my 7-month old neighbor and a friend’s mother of indeterminate age squeal in glee at meeting her.

Google searches for the term “adopt a dog near me” spiked by 513% on the movie’s opening weekend, and I can see why. Because despite not listening to Superman or his friends, the dog is still a hero, just like Bonnie has been to me.

When I came home from the theater, I let Bonnie out of her crate and gave her extra pats and a fresh peanut butter-filled treat, which she proceeded to carry into my bed and destroy, which required me to change the sheets. Maybe she doesn’t know what a difference she’s made in my life, and maybe she never will.

But dogs continue to be good, even when they’re bad, and so many need homes right now.

If you, too, need something to help you through this dreadful time, you can’t go wrong with introducing a little rescued chaos into your life. Or at least cheer a little Krypto chaos on screen.

Jen A. Miller is the author of “Running: A Love Story.”