I began fostering Gus when he was three months old. He’d been thrown out of a truck cab on I-25 and the kind person following the truck pulled over, ran back, and took Gus to the Humane Society. They mended his hip; the limp didn’t stop him from climbing over my fence until he was well into his teens but it did make him into a brave, stoic little puppy.

One day into the foster I told my boyfriend “I’m keeping him.” He was surprised at my vehemence; it was as though I expected him to disagree. Perhaps he should have; about a month into Gus’s tenure I realized I wanted a puppy, not a boyfriend, and the latter was out on his heels before he even got to ask me why. Months later he asked a counter person at the Humane Society “Why is she being such a butthead?” and can’t say that I blame him. But I didn’t care about his opinions by then.

Gus was sweet but not the brightest doggie honor student, even though he looked to have some border collie in his decidedly mixed lineage. When I read Allie Brosh’s post about her Simple Dog at Hyperbole and a Half. I was afraid to take the test. When I did, I thought “Yup. Got to enter him in the Canine Special Olympics next year.” Since that wasn’t yet A Thing, we skipped it.

Gus could reach anything up to about five feet vertically. He wasn’t a chewer, he was just a re-placer. I’d find a slipper in the yard, or a Tupperware in the dog bed. I can’t blame him for the tampon on the bed, though; that was a later foster, and I adopted her out toot sweet. I did give him a side-eye when I came home one day to find my underwear laid out in a circle, and him, bright and expectant, in the middle. A doggie stalker. How sweet.

My brother and I shared a house, and since our schedules rarely coincided, we put a basket atop our free-standing closet. It was large and out of Gus reach. We used that until he moved out; but I kept it there for years; through the benign fatty tumors that appeared on Gus’s body in odd, unexpected locations (one made him look like he had a double penis), through the primary glaucoma and subsequent removal of his left eye (if I was of a mind to dress up a dog on Halloween, I would have put on his red fleece cape and added a parrot on his shoulder and made him a pirate. The leg limp was as close to a peg leg as makes no difference).

Turns out I wanted not only a dog but a husband, and when I married he and Gus would regard each other with a beneficent, perplexed gaze. “I know she loves me; and I know she loves you; yet we’re nothing alike. Go figure.”

Gus died last year. I miss him. So here’s the Gus-Proof Basket, in memoriam; a holder of old things and new.