You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (14 page)

An e-mail went to Joy from Sheryl and I was CC’d. It was a forward:

Joy wrote back:

Sheryl responded:

I relished having a part in this club.

But then I got back to my situation. Thursday came and Sherlock and Beatrice got into a real tear-up and though she came away unscathed, his eye was injured and swollen shut. I’d seen that before with Otto many times. It was probably a scratched cornea. I raced him to the vet and got the drops and ointment. I told them he was being adopted the next day and they said it was fine as long as the new owner took him to follow up with their own vet. It was the kind of injury that was fairly common but if untreated could turn serious and lead to the loss of an eye.

I called our man and gave him the choice—I could keep Sherlock until it healed or he could take Sherlock and take it over. He wanted him now. End of story.

It was raining on Friday night, but Sherlock’s new dad arrived right on time. He was a burly guy and paid me in cash. He wasn’t sure if he was parked legally so he was hurrying, but I made him stop to hear what the eye treatment was. Sherlock and he fell in love immediately, and I was patting myself on the back. I had asked him to keep me posted and he e-mailed me the next morning:

It was my first successful placement, from pulling to homing. And I was feeling quite pleased with myself . . . until Tuesday.

The woman who’d done the home check, the one who said how great a home this guy would be, forwarded me an e-mail from the woman who fostered the boxer he’d adopted from them. It said, “DO NOT LET THIS MAN ADOPT FROM ANYONE! HE KILLED MY DUSTY! I WILL ALWAYS FEEL RESPONSIBLE FOR LETTING HIM HAVE ONE OF MY BABIES!!!”

It was a little loony-sounding, but discomfiting nonetheless. I forwarded it to Sheryl and responded to the woman, saying, based on your recommendation he’s got my foster now. What was the story here?

She said the woman heard that he’d let the boxer out in his front yard where there was no fencing even though he’d promised never to do it and the dog had been hit by a car and killed. Now, he’d told us that he had a boxer who died from cancer. None of this was making sense. When we went back to the vet, they said they’d treated a dog for seizures and then put it to sleep on the day after the other dog was killed. They had no record of a dog who’d been hit by a car.

At this point, we were freaking out. Number one, this had all been hidden from us, and number two, it was starting to sound like he had two dogs killed in a two-day period; number three, he had Sherlock. It had also been four days and this vet had not seen Sherlock about his eye and no appointment had been made.

I was totally second-guessing myself, wondering if I had tried to push all of this through because I was anxious for Sherlock to move on. I spoke to Sheryl and she said, “Don’t even go there. He was recommended with flying colors and even if someone had visited him, this isn’t something we would have known.” Either way, I was anxious to get it resolved.

We decided to have Mary Lou call him. If it seemed like he had lied, we should take Sherlock back. There were too many loose ends. I called the Boxer Rescue contact listed on that website and the woman called me back to say her group had split from the one I talked to, and that she knew this guy was on the DNA (do not adopt) list. I suggested she take him off their website success stories.

So Mary Lou called. We were talking about whether to make up a story that some blood test that had been done on Sherlock came back positive and we needed to get him back. And if he said no, should we just steal him?

When Mary Lou called, he told her he’d been expecting to hear from her. For whatever reason, Boxer Rescue was trying to ruin his life. Then he told her the story. The boxer had cancer and had been having seizures. Tragically, he “got out” of the house, wandered into the street, and was hit by a car.

Mary Lou is tough but she’s a good and fair judge of character. “I spoke to him for about forty-five minutes,” she said, “and one thing that stuck in my head was that Boxer Rescue never would have known what happened to the dog—he reported the accident to them and they freaked out. While none of us likes to see anything happen to our prior fosters, there are a lot of dogs we never hear about again and go on faith that they are fine.” She said he didn’t seem like a bad guy to her and he did say if we wanted Sherlock back, while it would break his heart, he’d understand. That made all of us feel a lot better. Then he sent me an e-mail:

In the end we decided to send Joy to do a home check as quickly as possible. If she felt the home was not safe, she would take Sherlock with her. She did it and said that although they were a little wacky, they were good wacky and her recommendation was to leave Sherlock right where he was.

Which we did.

I felt ultimately good about Sherlock’s placement, but it made me think a lot about what makes a good home for a pet. A while back there was a discussion in our group about the automatic “no” someone wanted to give to an applicant who was single and worked away from home eleven hours a day. One of the board members, a single working mother, said, “If that’s the case, then you wouldn’t give me a dog.” The person argued that we
know
our board member and what a good dog parent she is. It was a lengthy debate and one that was never quite settled. Look at me, I was single, living in a tiny studio, and working when I got Otto. Could there have been a better home for him out there? I think not!

When you’re looking for a home for your foster, you want everything to be perfect. A loving family with a fenced-in yard, who can afford to take care of the sometimes very costly medical issues that come up. The benefit of a whole fenced-in yard is a big issue. I live in an apartment, so my dogs are only walked on leashes, but no matter how careful you are, accidents can happen. Archie’s death was an accident, just as Moses’s death was. There is so much to consider, but fundamentally you are considering a person who is choosing to adopt from a rescue group, not buying from a pet shop in a mall.

When the story started to unfold, and we thought that we’d been misled, I thought for sure Sherlock was coming back to me. It was totally enlightening to me that Joy and Mary Lou allowed for there to be a gray area. Their collective good judgment and sanity were a relief and for that I was grateful. There have to be strict guidelines in place for potential adopters, and a group has to be allowed to turn people down. Like people who spontaneously buy a $2,000 dalmatian in a pet shop after seeing the Disney movie, then change their minds when they see what having a dalmatian actually means, and drop the dog at the front door of the local animal shelter, not everyone is meant to have a dog. There are times when a dog is placed in the most perfect home, only to be returned to the group because the perfect people were unhappy. That wouldn’t make us stop placing dogs in perfect homes, and by the same token taking the time to look a little closer at what might not sound ideal on paper could lead a dog to the happiest place he will ever go.

LESSON NINE

How to Feel Good About Your Neck

By the time I turned forty, Madonna, Sheryl Crow, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kim Basinger had all
fortied
stunningly. So I didn’t have an issue with the age at all. Nothing would be different from thirty-nine. I wasn’t going to suddenly start wearing longer skirts or cut my hair above my shoulders. I was still me, though I do remember looking up “middle age” in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, where I was slightly relieved to see it defined as beginning at forty-five. The one good-bye I said was to my future second child. I felt very strongly that my body wouldn’t be able to handle a pregnancy after forty (it hadn’t done that well at thirty-six). While I saw a multitude of women having first, second, third, and fourth babies after forty, and doing it gracefully, it was just something I didn’t feel I could manage. And it was an easy decision, except that it wasn’t. Even after I made it, I internally debated it nonstop and occasionally discussed my conclusions with Paul. Was it selfish to have only one child? I adored my brothers. Would I be depriving Violet of something that meant so much to me? But if I did it and was miserable—which I was convinced I would be—wouldn’t everyone suffer? And once we had the baby, I wouldn’t be able to work; with the kind of money I made, we couldn’t afford the amount of child care we’d need. I had finally gotten into this nice rhythm with taking Violet to school, going to the gym, and getting a chunk of work time in before I had to pick her up after school. And I liked being the one to drop her off and pick her up. Everything was just the way I wanted it . . . so I had to punish myself. If it was that good for me, it must be a lousy, selfish act. The one thing I knew was the more time I spent debating it, the less chance there’d be that I’d ever be able to do it. Suffice it to say, I drove a lot of people nuts and carved in some new worry lines in the process.