Not long after Amanda and I were married, I started lobbying for a dog. (Amanda liked cats more at first.) After some persuasive conversation, we agreed that we would start our search for a smallish dog that wouldn't shed much. Knowing we wanted to put off having children for a while, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to work on "parenting skills." We knew we wanted a dog that needed a home. Not only were we flat broke, we didn't really see the point in paying the pet shop hundreds of dollars for a designer breed.
Following several visits to the local pet shelters and a place called "Love at First Sight," which almost lived up to its name, but not quite, I got a call on my cell while we were sitting in our little half painted house on Long Boulevard in the heart of Nashville from a kind but no-nonsense lady named Alice. Turns out she's a friend of a friend and heard we were looking for a dog and this sweet dog just showed up on her doorstep and... "Were we interested?"
This is one of the first lessons I learned from Ginny: Don't be too set on your own agenda. As Alice described the dog, the only thing that sounded very positive was that she seemed to be pretty much house trained, and she was very friendly. Growing up with a brother and only boy dogs, my first problem was that she was a bitch. Amanda assured me that girls were OK and sometimes could be cleaner and easier to care for than boys... hmm OK. Secondly she's pretty big. Our house is so small that her kennel would almost be more roomy, but it's not like we have a lot of expensive furniture... "Oh yea, she doesn't really have any hair right now because she had the mange, but it looks like one day there could be quite a lot of it... hair that is. Mmmm, and she accidentally bit me the other day but that was totally my fault" Alice said.
OK. So let's get this straight. She's a big girl who is recovering from the mange, looks like part Golden Retriever, (very hairy) and part Shepherd of some kind, (also very hairy) and she "accidentally" bit the person who was feeding her? Ah, what the heck, bring her on over. Let's give it a try.
We decided to meet on neutral territory so KFC fit the bill. We are excited as we pull in and here is this sixty pound, truly pitiful looking, orange and yellowish gray dog and all I can say to myself is "I love her." Why? Maybe it is partly because I believe in "redemption" as my Pastor, Dan Scott pointed out one day. Boy was there a lot to be redeemed about this dog. But, I think it was mostly because, like so many other things in my life, my ugly little half painted house, myself -a somewhat talented but very broke pretty much unemployed-except for a once a week church gig, newlywed musician in a city where you could throw a rock and hit a musician with a resume a mile long and real gigs. Yeah, so she's nothing but potential... she'll fit right in. She'll be perfect! As soon as we walked in the door and sat down on our seventy-five dollar hand-me-down couch, we looked at each other and then at this smiling dog, and we knew, the trial period is over, she's ours.
So we bought "Dog's for Dummies" and both read every word. She was impossible on a leash and our new neighbors got to know us as "that crazy new couple who runs through the neighborhood screaming "GINNY!!!" every other day. She got away a few times. And I spanked her so hard that I was afraid some of them might call PETA and have me hauled off. This brings me to the second thing she taught me: "Be patient, and keep doing the right thing, and it will pay off."
But that is still just the beginning of what that fuzzy dog has taught me. Not only has Ginny turned out to be a well behaved, beautiful, member of our family, that ugly little house has paid off for us in an unbelievable turn of real estate fortune, but that's another story. I took her to get her stitches out this morning at the vet, (she partied a little too hard on New Year's Eve night and cut herself on a chain link fence while visiting an old friend.) As she sat there with her tail wagging while the vet was taking out her stitches, my heart was full of pride in this sweet dog that nobody wanted. She sat on the cold, stainless steel table with a perfect game face on, ready to face whatever she had coming with a great attitude and nothing but a thankful heart because, strange as it sounds, this dog remembers where she came from. And she never takes it for granted. That's a lot to learn from a dog.
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