“You haven’t had so much fun in ages, have ya?” says Father Ingalls to a breathless and ecstatic bandana-wearing Finnegan, who’s lying at my feet.
Allow me to explain. This interview starts with a chase, literally. Fifteen minutes before, as I entered Father Ingalls’ office, Finnegan the Pembroke corgi barrelled out and bounded down the hallway. I panicked.
As I chased Finnegan across the lobby of the A&A, I believed I’d just started my worst interview yet; I had let the new chaplain’s dog run away. It gets worse.
As he became more and more riled up, he was harder to catch. One minute he was sniffing through the garbage in the basement of the A&A and tearing down hallways; the next he was running circles around the KSU voting booth. Fortunately, a fellow student with dog-wrangling-powers supreme scooped him up.
Don’t worry: despite this little hiccup, Finnegan is still a very, very good boy.
That brings us to the present moment, seated in Father’s Ingalls’ office. Father Ingalls has a sense of humour, and smiles about Finnegan’s escape. He points out that Finnegan loves to be chased and “be a free dog”; who could be mad at that?
Finnegan is the Ingalls family’s second corgi. They got him just over a year ago when he was six weeks old. Local corgi breeders are few and far between, so he came all the way from a breeder in Augusta, Maine.
He became a part of the King’s family this past September, but the move wasn’t easy on him.
“It was pretty tense at first, just because it was so different. He was not himself for a couple of weeks. I was worried I was going to have to find someone else to take care of him and not bring him. He was biting, he was really noisy, if I left him in the office he’d start barking, it wasn’t good.”
Fortunately, Finnegan soon settled in and went back to being his normal, happy and “spunky” self. When I ask Father Ingalls what his favourite thing about Finnegan is, he answers without skipping a beat: “His smile!” As if on cue, Finnegan breaks out into a big, goofy grin.
Anyone wanting to visit Finnegan is welcome to come say hello during his daily walks around the quad, or stop by Father Ingalls’ office on the ground floor of the A&A. He always loves a walk, so if it strikes your fancy, you’re more than welcome to take him for a stroll across the quad. Just don’t forget the poo bags!