The dog days of spring

We went to North Shore Animal League last weekend, intent on getting a new dog. NSAL is a top-notch shelter, and over the years we’ve adopted quite a few of its animals: Toby came from there, of course, and my family’s dog when I was a child, and my wife’s dumb cat who ran away a couple of years ago. You do not go to North Shore and leave empty-handed. It’s just not possible.

Or so we thought.

Our criteria for a dog is: No rat-sized “yip dogs,” as we call them. Oversized dogs are tolerable but not preferred. Shorthaired dogs like labs won’t do because something about the short, spiky fur causes my wife to stop breathing. Nor did I want a dog with a mane that would require a live-in groomer. That eliminates a whole lot of dogs, but it also leaves many choices on the table…

…none of which were available at North Shore that day. I couldn’t believe it. Cage after cage after cage of adorable, un-adoptable, black lab puppies. If we weren’t looking at a black lab, we were looking at a shorthaired hound. There was not a single dog there that met our not exactly stringent demands. We left after walking through the place three times — surely we were overlooking something?? — and Lea cried the entire way home.

We’d been trying to work, as well, with a number of local rescue agencies and shelters, but all of these places are underfunded and understaffed. Even getting a response to a simple e-mail inquiry was like Waiting For Godot. No wonder people turn to pet stores and expensive breeders.

So yesterday my wife read that North Shore was sending one of its mobile adoption centers up to Connecticut, about an hour away from us. We decided to go, even though we knew we would likely see the exact same black labs we passed on a few days earlier.

And yes, a few of those labs were there. And so was a 2-year-old lab mix separated from her family after being rescued from the flooding in Nashville. And a 10-month-old mix of various large breeds; if we had adopted this dog, we could have called it “Enormo.”

And also, there was Maggie:

She wasn’t Maggie at the time, but she is now. They think she’s a mix of border collie and Newfoundland, which is almost a guarantee that she is not. (Fourteen years ago, NASL told us that Toby, who was practically a purebred border collie, was a pointer.) Maggie has a Newfoundland’s face, but “Newfis” get pretty big, and Maggie’s paws are not particularly outsized, so your guess is as good as mine. All we know is we’re glad to have her. Lea is over the moon. Alex is cautious but intrigued. And Janinne and I have now closed the door (most of the way) on Toby’s passing, and are turning our attention to a whole new source of dog poop.

Number of minutes that Maggie was in our house before the first incident: Less than five.