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.
