A Dog Called Buddy

Here he is, all 102.5 pounds of him.  The puppy who we were told would weigh 60 pounds is much more than that.  He is huge, probably too big in retrospect for a family who lives in a house on a city lot where the size of the lot is measured in feet rather than acres.  And if his size is big, his energy is twice his size.  The guy is in motion all of the time and wants to play at every opportunity; 6am, 10pm and everything in between.  I don't think I realized how little I play in my life until we got a dog.  He brings me things--socks, stuffed animals purloined from Julia's room where she hoards stuffed animals, and wants me to hold one end while his teeth are clamped to the other end and he shakes his head like mad, trying to pry it loose in an animal game version of tug-of-war.  When he does this, he eyes get wild, truly mad, and I sense that he cannot stop himself even if he wanted to, which he does not.  Ten minutes later, he is a gentle giant as the kids lay on top of him on the floor.

We thought we would get a rescue dog from the pound until we realized how hard it is to get a rescue puppy from the pound.  Chicago is fortunate to have a good shelter system, and puppies are extremely hard to come by.  We tried to get nine different puppies from the shelter.  There is a rule that you have to meet the puppy before you adopt and the shelter will not let you meet the puppy until the entire family is there.  Six times we went but were too late to get the particular puppy by the time we had rounded everyone up from work and school and driven down to the shelter.  The seventh time they let us meet the puppy, Miranda, but would not let us take her home because she was brought to the shelter with a fractured skull and the shelter thought she should go to home without children to heal. The eighth time, the puppy, who was advertised as a lab mix, was clearly a six month old pit bull.  I know many people who swear pit bulls are great family dogs, but I was not going to take that chance.  I no longer remember exactly what happened with shelter puppy nine that prevented us from adopting it, but by this point, the kids were frazzled and frustrated at the meeting of many puppies and the lack of one coming home with us.  We called a breeder and found a litter of puppies ready to go home in two weeks.  The puppies all had been named after singers, and our guy was given the name Buddy Holly.  The kids wanted to change his name at first and suggested Pikachu or Charzard, two Pokemon names, but those don't exactly roll off your tongue when you are calling a dog.  Buddy stuck, and it suits him.  For the most part.