Life lessons FROM A DOG NAMED Friday

Bonnie Garmus, author of the best-selling book-turned-TV-series Lessons in Chemistry, shares the unexpected joys a beloved pet brought her family.

- Bonnie Garmus

One weekend when my kids were young, we visited the local animal shelter. We'd always had good luck adopting a pet this way in the past but on this day it felt more like a scene from Prison Break. As one dog banged his water bowl against the bars. 40 others barked obscenities and snapped at the air.

“I don’t think today’s the day,” I said. My husband, David, agreed. But unfortunately, we’d brought our kids along. “How about this cute one?” Sophie shouted. She was pointing at one of the hardened criminals we’d already taken a pass on. “So cute!” Zoë yelled. “Can we take her out to play?”

We asked the shelter employee if that was OK, and unfortunately she said yes. And so we took Ma Barker outside, but only because we didn’t want our kids to think we were the types who judged a book by its cover, even though we were.

We walked her around a muddy path, our girls pointing out her features like overexcited used-car salesmen: “Lookit! She has ears! And…and…a tail!” But what she didn’t have was teeth. The bottom row was gone. And fur — she’d lost most of hers to mange.

As the dog plodded along in a way that indicated that this wasn’t her first rodeo and she already knew how it would end, I went back inside to read her rap sheet. It turned out she’d been seized from a home due to neglect. “Severe neglect,” an employee confided. “The owner was jailed.”

“What happened to her teeth?” “Tried to chew her way through the chains. Ground them all the way down to the nubs.”