The Friend Finds and Adopts Apollo

The Friend Finds and Adopts Apollo begins with an early-morning run and a startling sight: Deceased Friend looks up to see an enormous harlequin Great Dane standing on an overhang against the sky. The dog has no collar or tags, and after efforts to find an owner fail, Deceased Friend decides to keep him. The encounter brings Apollo into Deceased Friend’s life, while leaving his earlier life and arrival in the park unresolved.

The Encounter and Decision

Deceased Friend found the dog while running, after an earlier back injury had healed enough for a return to long walks and running in the park. The dog’s size made the sight difficult to mistake: he stood thirty-four inches from shoulder to paw and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. In an attached photograph, the two appear cheek to jowl, the dog’s massive head resembling a pony’s at first glance.

The absence of a collar or tags led Deceased Friend to suspect that the purebred dog might have been abandoned. Deceased Friend did everything possible to locate an owner, but no one came forward; only then did Deceased Friend decide to keep him. The decision was not welcomed by Deceased Friend’s wife, who was already not a dog person and regarded this particular dog as a lot to take on. Apollo’s sheer scale makes that resistance concrete: this was no incidental addition to the household.

Naming Apollo

Deceased Friend initially considered calling the dog Dino, then rejected the name as insufficiently dignified. Deceased Friend asked the Narrator to weigh in on alternatives including Chance, Chauncy, Diego, Watson, Rolfe, Arlo, and Alfie. The Narrator thought any of them would do; Deceased Friend ultimately chose Apollo. The sequence gives the naming its own small deliberation: the dog is first encountered as an imposing, almost nameless presence, then considered through a string of possible identities before receiving the name by which he becomes part of the story.

An Unknown Past

The circumstances of Apollo’s arrival remain uncertain even after a veterinarian considers what his condition might suggest. He appears clean and well fed, seems to have been socialized with people and other dogs, and shows no signs of serious abuse. His ears, however, have been cropped too short and left uneven, making him look meaner and less regal than he is; that and other features would have ruled him out as a show dog.

The veterinarian finds it unusual that a dog like Apollo would leave an owner without some exceptional cause, yet nobody claims him or recalls seeing him before. Possible explanations remain possibilities, not answers: he may have been stolen, abandoned by an owner who could no longer afford his care, or left behind after an owner’s death. The absence of a licensing or purebred-registration record offers no resolution, since many dogs have neither. The account therefore gives Apollo a vivid entrance but withholds a recoverable origin.

The Encounter’s Narrative Meaning

Deceased Friend remembers the moment of seeing Apollo as thrilling and uncanny, almost as if the dog had been conjured against the summer sky by a witch in a tale by Hans Christian Andersen. That comparison does not establish anything supernatural; it conveys the force of an encounter whose cause remains unknowable. The event joins an ordinary act of running to a life-changing decision, while the missing history behind the dog persists as an open space in the narrative.