Dedicated to the one I love.

Our first dog was a present for my 5th birthday. I don’t remember, but I must have been asking for one (although my dad is as soppy about dogs as I am, so I may just have been an excuse). After all the family dogs of my youth, I adopted my first “grown up” dog a few weeks after my 21st birthday – the biggest, blackest dog at the Berkeley Humane Society that day. He was a huge lab mix, with only one note on his kennel: “Loves cats.” He did, and he loved everyone else, and was perfect in every way. Even non-dog people adored him; my cat-loving friend Jane called him the “teen angel,” and when I was in graduate school, my friends used to call to ask if they could borrow Fred to go for a walk or a run, or just to hang out.

A few years after I got Fred, I adopted another big black dog from the Berkeley Humane Society. Chula was definitely not a teen angel. She was half-feral, or maybe three-quarters feral, no less terrified at home than she had been at the shelter. For fifteen long years, she was as high-maintenance as Fred was easy. Her extreme fear of new things meant that when we put up a new window curtain, added a piece of furniture, or even placed a box of tissue paper on a table, she refused to enter the room. If a garage door went up suddenly during a walk, she would have to be dragged down that block the next time (and the time after that).


When I got married and moved to Gainesville, Chula was still insane and Fred was showing signs of age. A few weeks after we arrived, we found a woman giving away a four-month old puppy that she called a “Weimaraner mix.” He had eaten all the shrubs in the tiny patio where she kept him, all alone, all day long. As we were thinking about it, she said, “That’s okay. There’s a guy wants to hunt him.” So we took him home. Inti was a Florida brown dog, whose only resemblance to a Weimaraner was his almond-shaped amber eyes, which more likely came from the same pit bull ancestor who passed on his enormous mouth, into which he could fit four tennis balls at once, maybe five if one of the other dogs showed interest. Inti was never very gracious with strangers, but he was the love of my life and the best possible family dog. He even tolerated our kids’ idea of fun, playing hide-and-seek with his precious tennis balls.


After Fred died, we started fostering dogs for Gainesville Pet Rescue. Inti and Chula hosted a series of visiting dogs until the inevitable foster failure, another big black dog, Balo, who was smart, nervous, and bonded like crazy glue with grumpy Inti.


I was hesitant to bring in another dog after Chula died, because Inti and Balo were both elderly and I didn’t want to upset their golden years. Still, we missed having a dog who didn’t sleep 23 hours a day. One afternoon I took my youngest son, who was three at the time, to the Humane Society to visit the cats (yeah, right). As we were leaving, a volunteer was taking out a stocky little brindle dog. (She seemed little to me – at 48 pounds, she weighed 30 pounds less than most of the dogs I had lived with.) Rafael ran up to her, squatted down, and pulled a toy from her mouth. (So much for all his training in proper dog etiquette.) She wagged her tail and kissed him. We brought her home a few days later.


Tozi was almost perfect right from the start. She was polite and gentle not only with kids but with my old dogs, letting Inti hobble down the hall after tennis balls and cuddling up next to them on cold nights. However, she failed to meet the gold standard set by Fred because she has a prey drive that puts your average terrier to shame. She has gone over, under, and through every type of fence imaginable and killed every animal smaller than her that she can reach, from dragonflies to an adult raccoon. Most recently she blasted a hole in our living room in order to reach some rodent in the wall. Tozi is good at reminding us that prey drive has nothing to do with behavior around humans or, indeed, around other dogs.

Inti and Balo died exactly two weeks apart, both of osteosarcoma. Tozi seemed as inconsolable as I was. Having only one dog in the house was way too lonely, so we made the rounds of local rescues. Tozi let us know when she approved of a candidate, and we took home the one she liked most – a handsome, goofy American Bulldog mix who was named Thunder because of his fear of thunderstorms.


A couple of months later, we added Libby, another Florida brown dog with an incredible temperament despite the fact that she had grown upon the end of a tether and had to have her harness surgically removed because her skin had grown over it.


Our little pack fit together well, with Tozi as benevolent dictator, Libby as enforcer, and Thunder as sometimes clueless underling who always managed to be first in line for cookies. Three seemed to be the right number, until I went to the shelter for a volunteer event and met another pair of amber eyes. Boomer stared at me all afternoon and climbed into my lap when it was finally his turn to get out of his kennel. When I left, I couldn’t help myself: I asked the adoption staff to let me know if that gray dog ran out of time. I lost sleep worrying that the wrong person might adopt him. It was almost a relief when the shelter called to say that he was on "the list" for the next morning. I did not hesitate, except for a passing thought about what this might mean for my marriage. On the way to the shelter I called a friend who directs a rescue and asked if he could go into her program as a foster dog. I am eternally grateful that she said yes, even though my husband believes that I never had any intention of letting that dog go.


He might be right. Boomer was a mama’s boy from the start. He follows me everywhere he can and never misses a chance to fall asleep with his giant head in my lap. He embodies for me what Vicki Hearne says about pit bulls: they “do grab on and hold; but what pit bulls most often grab and refuse to let go of is your heart, not your arm.” Happy Valentine’s Day. Please don’t let go.