When I first met the dog I now call Ziggy Elf Corgi over eight years ago at the Newberry County Animal Shelter in Newberry, S.C., it was as if he adopted me and not vice-versa.
Ziggy, a purebred Pembroke Welsh Corgi, came with a name that first made me think of Ziggy Stardust battling spiders on Mars. He did not have a red lightning bolt on his head like Ziggy Stardust, but he did have a white stripe between his brown and sable fur and a white patch on his back, which are the classic “elf saddle” markings the Welsh said Corgis had.
Ziggy licked me through the fencing of his caged area in the shelter and looked quietly at me with shining, gigantic brown eyes while the other dogs barked. As I stared at him, he cocked his slightly rounded yet pointy-eared head.
Years later, he learned barking from other dogs at an overnight kennel the way that some children learn to be loud at some daycares.
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As an Oz fan and Oz author, I had not even come for him but for a female Cairn terrier, possibly a mix, that I had seen at a fall promotional event I was working at as a full time instructor at a technical college. I wanted her to be my own Toto. Incidentally, Toto in “The Wizard of Oz” film was female, playing a male terrier role. But I discovered my “To-faux” had been adopted right after the event, and one of the shelter workers referred me to Ziggy by location and name.
I took him for initial walks at the shelter and realized another reason he could have been named Ziggy. He liked to zig and zag around quickly. Ziggy was one year old when I found him, and he had not been trained in heeling or most anything. He was like a little tugboat, pulling me hard as he almost ran when I walked him. Even with somebody as portly as me, he would tug, tug, tug and almost pull me off my feet. His energy and affection were what I needed, and I took him home. He somehow knew I needed him and picked me. Also, through his affectionate actions with just a bit of mischief, Ziggy encouraged me to call him my fur-angel with a crooked halo.
I filled out the necessary paperwork, paid the adoption fee and took the non-house-trained one year old Corgi home, buying him some supplies as well, including a crate to train him in, and some food and toys.
What I did not tell many at the time was that I was looking to adopt a dog because I was having escalated clinical depression and clinical anxiety after the loss of my father and grandmother earlier that year in 2013. Ziggy proved to be an excellent choice because each time I cried or even wept or got very nervous, he, with great instincts and what I perceived as care, would come right by me and stay there, licking away the tears and waiting until I was calm.
He peered at me with big brown eyes and harrumphed if I ever got too shaky. Though very hyper much of the time, during these moments, Ziggy was very still and attentive. And I knew then I had found a very special fur-angel with a crooked halo on his pointy, rounded off ears when he wanted to get into mischief or be stubborn. Those qualities gave him even more of a personality to be interesting. People say that Corgis are big dogs in little bodies, but they can also have some quirky personalities like cats.
At times, Ziggy’s tricolor aspects as he chased around things made him more like a Neapolitan clown, but the three colors he had were brown for connections to the earth with the walks he loved, white for the purity of his heart and sable for an awareness of the darkness I was going through.
We had our struggles as I crate-trained him to keep him from messing up the carpet in the bungalow I was making payments on to own. He tried to hide his business in the corner of one room. But by using the crate and rewarding him for doing good business during our many walks, I eventually house-trained him.
I worked full-time, teaching day and night classes at two campuses of a technical college in Newberry and Laurens, S.C. and eventually back at the main campus of it in Greenwood, S.C. as well. Early in the morning before work, I would walk Ziggy around my big backyard and down past the railroad tracks into the town at times. There was a little pile of railroad rocks away from the tracks — a replenishment rock pile – which was one of the strangest places he liked to do his business. Talk about him having his fluffy Corgi butt caught between a rock and a hard place!
During lunch breaks, I would return to walk him again. Then, between my late day class and earliest evening class, I would come back again to walk him. I would reward him every time he did good business. Each time, I would have him return to his fairly large crate which he would not mess up as a kind of den territory.
At night, we would speed-walk downtown in the little town of Prosperity, S.C., past the acidic yet fishy smells of the Greek and Italian place that also sold seafood, and near the rich gravies and sausages of an elderly German lady’s restaurant. We would near-run by storefronts of junk stores and antique stores, past a vintage pharmacy, beside an art store, and past this one café that served homemade donuts the size of a Corgi puppy’s head! (When we returned home, Ziggy was free to leave his crate and play, drink water, and eat, etc. and lay on the couch with me or on a special, soft green stool I had for him. I used to train him with a timer when I fed him in the mornings because I would need to feed him, have him eat his food immediately, and then, a little later, take him out for business. He also had water and a little food in his crate during the day when I was not there, and the water would be refilled on breaks.)
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Ziggy and I would often half-jog down to the small-town municipal park, and what I discovered was that Ziggy was not only good for my mental health but for my physical health. He was high-energy and required a lot of walking. And through those walks, I would sometimes get more in tune with nature such as listening to the frogs like I did in my even more rural hometown or watching the fireflies go to and fro in patches of woods not far from the park. Seeing those fireflies and later reading about the Welsh myths about Corgis being horses for fairies and elves served as a foreshadowing to what I would one day do with Ziggy – to make him a major character in a graphic novel series and a minor character in my novels. Many of our other walks where other things happened such as a truck barreling through the little town and almost running him over or a large branch almost falling on him in high winds made their way into my graphic novel. Other aspects made their way into fiction.
Ziggy has always loved to go on adventures. I took him to a tennis court and thought I could play fetch with him off-leash, which he loved. But he figured out a way to shinny through the closed door to the fence and went running in a field behind the tennis courts. I went chasing after him (big mistake), and he thought it was a game. Then, I got wise. Like a parent does with a child at a playground who will not come with them when it is time to go, I said, “Oh, well, time to go. I guess Ziggy just wants to stay here.” I headed back to the car and opened the car door to his crate. Soon, curiosity got the better of him, and there he came.
I would take him for long walks at nearby Dreher Island State Park on a little island in Lake Murray. As we walked by the waves of Lake Murray (yes, larger lakes have waves), Ziggy seemed afraid of them and would back away from them, putting his pointy ears down. I thought of him as struggling a bit with anxiety, too, and put that into my fiction. One day, though, when we were walking, it became close to ninety degrees. The waves were going quickly in Lake Murray and all of the sudden, from the bank, Ziggy went kerplop… straight into the water to cool off. He was never afraid of water again! But the murky, fishy water did require that he get a bath, which is the one form of water he still disliked.
I would often take Ziggy back to Columbia, S.C. where I lived for many years and would go walking with him with my late disabled friend Julie and her service dog, Ted, at paved walking paths near rivers or in neighborhoods. Ziggy eventually went through PetSmart training, and even after that, though he was informally helping me as an emotional support dog, became named a formal emotional support dog via a letter from a psychiatrist. He has gone with me to many author events across the country with some of the books I based upon him and more.
In fact, on National Superhero Day on April 28 last week on Facebook, I named Ziggy Elf Corgi as my superhero. Ziggy and I have walked on literal Yellow Brick roads in tourism areas, down nature trails, around big yards and fields, down urban sidewalks, up and down strip-malls, at rest-stops, through tons of pet-friendly businesses, and in many towns and cities together throughout the country. We have played fetch at home and in pet-friendly hotel rooms and other games such as the jump-rope arm game and a herding game outside where he runs around me in a circle.
During the past few years, we have both participated in the Augusta Georgia Corgi group which meets at various dog parks in the CSRA where the dogs can safely run loose in fenced-in areas, and we have become friends with folks there. We have also become friends with an authorial colleague and his family and have walked with them at least once in a month in a small S.C. town. We have met many new people and Corgis, including a few who became close friends. We have also become friends with comic store and bookstore owners in the CSRA where I have had signings with my best friend, a Corgi.
Were it not for Ziggy adopting me, I probably would have just ended up an old stray without many to love me. Instead, Ziggy consoled me and took me out to meet others. Adopting a shelter dog can help a person as much as it can help the dog. It is a great benefit for one’s physical and mental health. And I highly recommend it. I know Ziggy does!
Ron Baxley Jr. is a correspondent for The Augusta Press.
