I’m sure you’ve figured this out by now, but dogs are my favorite creature, by far. When I interviewed at Penn, one of the vet students tasked with sort of interviewing potential incoming students while mostly keeping us entertained during the wait for our real interview sessions asked the group at my table what our favorite animals were. My answer was the dog. What is there not to love about dogs as a whole? (I get that there is a lot of individual variation.) They’re fun and funny and love life in the moment, always ready to smell the flowers, roll in the mud and spring through the fields. They can be such snuggle bugs and so surprisingly emotionally intuitive. They usually don’t talk back. (Anyone who has met Rook knows there are exceptions.) Even when they forget their names or their manners, they’re just plain good friends to have at the end of the day.
I grew up with dogs. When I was really small, my parents lived with my maternal grandparents, and they had a red Cocker Spaniel named Benjamin, who my Babcia adored. We got Ebony when I was two. Then Roscoe when I was seven, and Joule when I was thirteen.The only time I remember living without at least one dog was the first six months after I moved out with Justin. (We had Rickie though, so she was part way there.) Our lease didn’t say we could have a dog, but I missed the day-to-day with one something awful. I sometimes went to my mom’s house and picked up Joule to go on adventures with me or to just come back to apartment for an afternoon. It didn’t help that during the summer of 2008, several people I knew were bringing home new dogs. Justin’s best friend got a dog, Kai. One of my closest friends adopted an adorable, fluffy mixed breed pup that her boyfriend named Chevy. Another of my friend’s brought home a young adult Dachshund she called Echo. Even my mom decided she was ready to bring a second dog back into her home and wanted a puppy.
And that, my friends, is where Flint (fka Blue fka Wags) entered the picture.
I can’t remember what turned my mom onto Catahoula Leopard Dogs, but something about the breed appealed to her. She started looking at rescues for a Catahoula or Catahoula mix. In her search, she came across a post on Craigslist from a foster just outside of Philadelphia for a young, adult male Catahoula mix. My mom was interested, but my stepdad was set on a puppy. The dog in the ad was guessed to be about a year old. My mom showed me the post, and that was it. I NEEDED him.
Justin will tell you how obnoxious I was about it. He was a bit uncertain because 1. he had never had a dog 2. he was worried about how much time caring for a dog could be and how it might affect free time 3. he didn’t think our landlord would allow it. I pestered him enough that he eventually said I could ask Bob, our landlord, and if he said, “Yes,” then we could meet the dog, if he was still available. Bob said that if his upstairs renter was OK with it, and I was confident that the dog would not be destructive, we could get a dog.
I don’t remember the date that we first met “Blue,” but I know that Justin, my mom, my brother and I drove to the foster’s apartment and met him in the grass outside of her building. He was so terribly shy, but he took to my brother pretty quickly. The rest of us, he probably could’ve done without. I definitely needed to bring him home.
From there, I had a VERY lengthy phone call with Janeen, the woman in charge of placing “Blue.” I don’t remember specifics about our conversation other than that it seemed to last for ages. She really wanted this dog to be in the BEST home possible for him. There was someone else interested in him, so they wanted to give them a chance to meet him as well. Afterwards, Janeen and the foster would talk and decide which family would be ideal for Blue. Turns out the other potential adopter wanted a dog to train as a therapy dog, while we just wanted a regular old dog for our personal companionship. The foster felt that maybe therapy work wasn’t in the cards for this reserved boy.
I was ecstatic to get that call from “Blue”‘s foster and couldn’t get my adoption fee in the mail fast enough. (I can’t remember 100%, but I feel like, at the time, they weren’t set up to take online payments. I had to mail a physical check to Montana, wait for her to get it and for the check to clear before we could bring our new dog home.) During all of this, Justin was a bit skeptical. After all, his crazy girlfriend had just paid an adoption fee for a dog that didn’t seem to want anything at all to do with us when we met him. What did he know about adopting dogs though? I was the resident dog expert.
Thirteen years ago, on Friday, August 29, 2008, “Blue” arrived at his new home. His foster dropped him off for us with a yellow and green, John Deere collar, a red nylon 6ft leash, a stinky tan fleece blanket and a wishbone-shaped Nylabone chew toy. (I put that very collar on Magic when we brought her home; I wanted the good Flinty vibes to rub off on her.) As soon as she left, he ran to one of our front windows, put his paws on the ledge and just stared after her for an eternity.
We really didn’t waste any time throwing Flint into life with us. It was Labor Day weekend. Justin’s brother, Adam, and his girlfriend had just bought a house in North Jersey and were having a big housewarming party. The day after Flint arrived, we all hopped in the car and headed up there for the weekend. When we came home, Justin’s younger brother, Kyle, moved into the basement of our apartment, as he was set to start a job right after the holiday in Malvern, didn’t yet have his own place and his mom’s house in South Jersey was just too far of a daily commute, even it was going to be temporary.
While in North Jersey, Flint and Adam’s dog had a grand time running through the woods around the house and managed to cover themselves in poison ivy, unbeknownst to us until Justin broke out upon our return. He’s always been incredibly sensitive to it. This time around, he had to receive a nice shot of steroids in the butt to kick off his treatment, sleep on the couch for a week with his arms raised in the air because he couldn’t stand to touch anything and call out of work for that week as well. Not a great intro to life with dogs probably. (Since that experience, if there is any chance that we think any of our dogs could have possibly brushed against poison ivy while out on adventures, they get hosed off before they can come into the house.)
On the first day that Flint was home alone and we were at work, I came home at lunch to take him out only to find he had somehow escaped from his still locked crate and was snuggling with a pair of Justin’s boxers on our bed. He came back to work with me that afternoon, and I bought a plastic airline crate from a coworker that had never really used it for her parents’ standard poodle, in the hopes that he would do better in that than the wire crate we had borrowed from my mom. Ultimately, the plastic crate did work better to contain him. It still took weeks to get him to not cry when we left him behind in it.
On the first day Justin stayed home with poison ivy, Flint hid under our bed from him. Justin pulled him out, only to have him run back under and refuse to come out again until I got home, continuing the not so great intro to life with a dog. In those early days, we’d try to pet Flint, and he would just stand, frozen in place. He really didn’t know what to do or how he felt about being touched. It was one of the saddest things I had ever seen, really. At the time of adoption, his stool was positive for hookworm, roundworm and whipworm. He was finishing treatment for demodex mites and was still regrowing hair in a patch on his back from those. He tested positive for exposure to ehrlichia, a tickborne disease, so he received a round of doxycycline for a month at the recommendation of my boss.
I asked Janeen if she knew anything about his history. All she could say was that they had pulled him from a shelter in Georgia. Before that, anything was possible. She pretty much said, “Dogs are a dime a dozen in that area. If he ran away, no one would have looked for him. If he wasn’t doing the job they had intended him to do, someone may have just kicked him out of their truck on a back road somewhere and kept right on driving.” There was no way to know. He obviously hadn’t been well loved, that much was pretty clear. At least he didn’t have heartworm along with all of his other parasites. That was a miracle in and of itself.
I could go on for days talking about Flint, remembering our time shared together and how incredible he was. The last time I held him or pet him or looked into his sweet face was Saturday, December 30, 2017, a day that feels like it was eons ago. At the same time, I cried driving to work on Friday morning because I knew that today was only two days away and missing him still hurts. It’ll always hurt. I’m bawling now, as I write this paragraph (although I somehow managed to stay dry-eyed up to this point). My heart feels like its in a vice most times that I remember him. He was the best friend I’ll ever have, my heart and my soul, and I’ll never be the same as I was before he came into my life. Of all of the people and animals I have lost, I miss him the most of all, every day. Any time I dream of him, I wish it could last forever, and if we do go somewhere after we die, I had better be going wherever that dog went.
“To call him a dog hardly seems to do him justice, though inasmuch as he had four legs, a tail, and barked, I admit he was, to all outward appearances. But to those who knew him well, he was a perfect gentleman.” ~ Hermione Gingold
