Dog of my dreams

 

Jacob with Scooby, the only Aussie I've ever hard (several years ago, obviously)
Scooby deserves his own story--a wild hard but as sweet as he could be

A frustrating weekend dominated by the ongoing search for the perfect dog. Last week, we met a dog named Merle Haggard—I love his name!—a medium black dog billed as a Border Collie but what in Missouri we called a farm collie. He had been abused somewhere along the way and the foster said is terrified of everything. Indeed he was shaking with fear when we entered the foster’s house, though he went quickly to her for protection. Eventually he warmed to me enough that he would tentatively come close enough to take a treat from my hand. I felt so sorry for this baby, and, yes, I thought he would probably come to trust me so that I could keep him safe. But there are enough people in and out of my cottage that he’d spend half his life terrified and a trip to the vet would be an ordeal for man and dog. Jordan felt so sorry for him and wanted to take him, but I told her I didn’t fall in love. Someone from the rescue agency called about our meeting, and I told her the same. I have concluded this will probably be the last dog I have, and it has to be just the right fit. My intuition has to say to me, “This is the dog,” and I have to sense that the dog feels that way too. What makes it hard is that I swear this baby’s eyes were pleading with me.

I asked to meet another dog—an Aussie mix, billed as trained, calm (if Aussies are ever calm), easy I thought. The rescue person told me he was scheduled to be shipped to a rescue farm in Washington in late April, so I thought “Good, we can meet him before then. And if it goes well, he won’t have to be shipped.” The case work or whatever nixed that, saying it had been in the works for a long time and the paperwork was done. All that, of course, is reversible to me, if their mission truly is to find him a home. I felt like I’d hit a brick wall. The woman said they had a couple of Aussies and she’d send me something—she hasn’t.

I heard that this rescue agency—a big one—advertised a dog adoption at a dog park. When the day came, they said they didn’t have any dogs. They have hundreds in foster care. How is this possible? The world of dog shows is a thing unto itself, and now I am finding so is the world odf dog adoption.

Christian found a site called Rescue Me (rescue me.org)—you punch in your state, the animal you’re interested in—dog, cat, bird, horse, and some odd ones. Voila! Forty-some Aussies in Texas. I spent hours scrolling through them, marked a few as special, and landed on one I really thought was a fit. The dog is in the Houston area, very close to Colin, so he could go meet him. The dog was to have his vaccines updated and a wellness check today, and then the owner said she would like to arrange a meeting. So we wait. Meantime, I do keep scrolling.

It dawned on me in the wee hours of the morning that the Houston dog reminds me of the farm collie I had in Missouri when I was oh-so-young! My brother and the man who would become my husband were at a horse auction when a farmer came in carrying a litter of pups in a bushel basket. They bought one for me and brought her home. Joel named her Bathsheba Finkelstein, which he swore was the name of a girl he dated in the Bronx. We called her Sheba.

Sheba was a wonderful dog, sweet, easily trained, I guess, because she was fine in the house, and I don’t remember doing much. She could sit in front of a six-foot fence and fly over it. She had a litter of puppies with a beautiful, purebred mahogany male collie we had. Once, when nursing puppies, she jumped up on a counter, in my absence, and ate an entire pan of fudge. Chocolate is supposed to be lethal for dogs, but it didn’t faze Sheba. For days, when you picked up the puppies, they smelled like chocolate. When we left Missouri, we reluctantly found her a farm home where she could roam far and wide.

I sent a picture of the possible dog today to an old friend from Kirksville days, and he immediately remarked on the resemblance. So a part of me would say that six-year-old boy was meant to be mine, but adoption people everywhere warn against such magical thinking. We wait.