This is my boy, Gerry.
He was in my life for the last six years.
He came from Texas. I came from Rhode Island.
He was supposed to be a bird dog.
I was supposed to be a wife.
Sometimes people give up on you,
and you get to reinvent yourself, if you’re lucky.
This is the story of how we found each other.
9.07.17
ALONE: A studio apartment for three years, and then a house for two years.
I was a week or two into searching for an adult dog on petfinders.org, and hadn’t yet gone to a local shelter. My parents have always adopted their dogs from the South, and so it seemed natural for me to look online and not locally. Also, I moved to my home just a year and half before, so I didn’t have any connections to the community yet, and being a single, recently divorced woman, didn’t make me all that interested in advertising my “living in a house aloneness”.
As I mentioned, I was recently divorced, but I didn’t just leave the man I had known and believed in for twenty years, and was married to for 11 of those. I also left behind our dog, A Labradoodle I had found online, in hopes of giving us something else to love and focus on while we were going through marriage counseling. (Thank God it wasn’t a baby)
As SOON as we adopted the dog, my ex-husband refused to go to any more counseling. We were “fixed”.
Sam, became a two year old Labradoodle and had given me reason to stay in that house a little bit longer than I wanted too. I said good bye to him 20 times before I was able to work up the courage to tell my husband to let me go. I apologized to Sam more than I can express. It’s like a bad country bumper sticker.
I will never really know AT all how Gerry came into this world. I don’t even try to imagine it, because as of now, it’s not important. The only importance I ever first considered in Gerry’s life was that someone turned him over to an animal hospital, and they took him in.
Legend has it that a Dr. Gerald “So-and So”, was on call when my guy was admitted in at 58 pounds of dog, most of which were heart worms,, and he appeared to be about three years old from his teeth. He had no fur on any of his four elbows, and his left ankle has always been raw and red, probably from some chain or tether. He had symmetrical burn marks on the inside of both of his ears. A “training” technique I was told.
Dr. Gerald called a woman whom he knew to foster/save Labrador Retrievers. I don’t recall her name, but she was associated with L.A.B. Rescue, on petfinder.org. She told the vet that she literally, had “No room at the inn,” for another dog. The vet persisted and asked her just to come in and do a visual evaluation on the Lab, just by looking at him through the kennel bars, if she could find the time. He wasn’t sure whether the dog was worth saving or not; he was that badly abused and close to death. God willing, she agreed to visit.
Blessed is the action of this woman. When she showed up, where she showed up, I will never have the opportunity to view, but she was familiar enough with the facility and had a big enough heart to go there.
The one of two times I spoke with “Jane “, she told me all of what is to follow.
“I walked into the kennel, and there he was curled up in the corner. I shrunk down to the ground at the kennel door, because I didn’t want him to be afraid of me. I held out my hand to him, and he looked at me…a good sign. As I sat there leaning against the bars of his kennel, trying to make myself as small as possible, I could see that he was trying to crawl towards me. He didn’t have enough muscle mass to really crawl. As tears flowed down my face I leaned forward and he gently licked my hand. I knew right then and there I was going to take him home.”
Thus,” an end to a a beginning, and another beginning to an end”, as T.S. Eliot would like me to remember.
Gerry went home with this wonderful woman in Texas, and got to know his first home, I imagine. She had other rescue dogs, and so he got to be with them, in a situation like him. He was never comfortable socially with other dogs though. When we’d walk, he’d whine and cry at the oncoming canine. As soon as I could convince the other owner that he was a rescue and friendly and just felt like he must know every other dog in the world, (or sadly so, I’d think…looking for “someone”) he would freeze up and let the other dog do all the sniffing, and the hair on his back would go up. I will often wonder what he thought about then. He was only one or two times aggressive in response to the other dog.
I saw one picture of this angelic woman. Her home included a backyard pool that had a shallow end just for dogs. Folks, if I win the lottery, I’d do it too! Gerry had it good (even though I don’t know if she discovered, he hated water, the ocean, or any form of pouring rain.)
Luckily for me, she didn’t fall 110% in love with Gerry; or maybe she did. She told me on that first phone call (I wanted to know what type of food to fed him), that she “almost didn’t “let him go.” I thanked her earnestly, and tried my best to send my sincerity through the telephone line. I promised her, that she had “let him go” to a woman who was really ready to pour her love in another creature.
This isn’t as easy as I make it sound, nor am I going to dwell on the point. It only comes up, because it made my longing to have my own dog to take care of, all that much greater. It would have been very easy for me to be impetuous and get one as soon as I moved in, but I was 41, not 14. By the end of my first winter in the house I realized I needed to have bunion surgery on my right foot, badly. THIS had been the summer “of the dog!” I hadn’t banked on a bunion “impeding upon a nerve” that caused great pain and numbness in my toes. I knew I was going to have to wait to get a companion, and put off the search, because I would be in no shape to take care of a dog on my own, no matter what the age of the dog. I sacrificed the whole summer for that surgery.
I wanted to really be ready.
Now I think, thank goodness for my grandmother’s genes, that made me more likely to get bunions, because had it not been for the pain in my right foot, I might have adopted another dog that summer and not met my boy. Thank you, Nana.
I let logic rule; just one last year without a canine companion so that I could have the situation that I truly desired. I wanted to be in my house and have a dog help me make it a home. I wanted to be able to run with him up and down the hills of the backyard I bought with the idea of him in mind.
Being on crutches teaches you a thing or two about age and humility, and I am lucky I was wise to this idea and didn’t adopt a dog. I told myself that I could do another winter alone. I’d be stronger, that way I figured.
Regardless, “time” knew what it was doing.
Whether I was right or wrong doesn’t matter. Gerry blended into my world as easy as food coloring to water. He loved being the only dog, not to mention the only male or other creature in my house. It was just he and me, and the few dog commands I had learned with my former pup, Gerry learned immediately and was a quiet, touch -me -dog from the start. We lived here for two years, until he told me it would be okay if David moved in.
Every know and then I found myself pointing out to David, how LUCKY we were that Gerry is the dog that he is. He is the definition of mellow yellow, and I’d really have loved for Donovan to meet him. The disc jockey in Woodstock has played us that song on one or more occasion with great happiness, and would even ask me how long would it be before I was in my car to get to hear it.
Gerry hardly ever barked. It was only when he was startled by a knock on the door we don’t use, or when the deer in the backyard were taunting him, merely by existing, that I’d hear him whine in pain.
He had dreams in which he talked in his sleep and shook with disturbance, and I’d say kind phrases using his name repeatedly, to slowly wake him from the realm of bad dreams and other worldliness. I have been upstairs in a whole other room and heard him cry out loud. It catches me in the heart and I found myself hollering down the stairwell, “It’s alright! Gerry’s a good boy. He’s a good boy!”
He is the child I never birthed.
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