How it all started
Buddy DeDog
2/1/20262 min read
I don’t remember much about the day my mama left — just the cold. The kind that sneaks under your fur and settles in your bones. I was barely a year old, still small, still learning the world, when suddenly the world got a whole lot bigger and a whole lot scarier. One morning she was there, and by nightfall she wasn’t. No goodbye. No warm nudge. Just me. Alone on the South Side of Chicago.
The streets became my family after that. Loud, rough, unpredictable — but they taught me fast. If I wanted to eat, I had to earn it. And trust me, I earned it. Every. Single. Day.
Food didn’t come in bowls. It came in scraps behind restaurants, dropped hot dogs at bus stops, or whatever I could snatch before someone bigger tried to take it. And oh, they tried. Big dogs, mean dogs, dogs who’d been out there longer than me — they all thought they could push me around. But I wasn’t about to let the world chew me up. I fought. And I won. Not because I was the biggest, but because I was the hungriest — in every way.
Clothes? Money? Those weren’t things dogs were supposed to worry about, but winter in Chicago doesn’t care what species you are. When the wind whipped through the alleys, I’d dig through trash until I found something — a torn shirt, a ragged blanket, anything to curl up in. I’d drag it to my hiding spot under an old porch and pretend it was enough. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn’t.
But even on the hardest nights, I kept going. Something inside me refused to quit. Maybe it was hope. Maybe it was stubbornness. Maybe it was just the belief that life had to be more than cold concrete and empty stomachs.
I learned people, too. Who might toss me a piece of chicken. Who might yell. Who might try to hurt me. I watched everything. I remembered everything. I survived because I paid attention.
And then one day… someone finally paid attention to me.
They didn’t see a stray. They didn’t see a problem. They saw me — Buddy. A dog who’d fought every day of his life and still had love left to give. That was the day everything changed.
My childhood on the South Side shaped me. It made me tough, made me smart, made me grateful for every warm bed and full bowl I have now. I’m not just surviving anymore. I’m living. And if my story helps even one person see the strength in a dog like me, then every fight was worth it.