I wasn’t planning on getting another dog. Like Jasper, Onyx was put in my path. Actually, I think it would be accurate to say that Junior was involved in bringing Onyx to me.
My mail lady, Jill, loved Junior. She would get out of her mail truck and bring him a cookie if she saw him at the gate even if she didn’t have mail that needed to come to the door. One day years ago I asked her if she had a chiropractor. Jill told me about the one she went to who worked on her and her dogs.
Dr. DeGrasse has her people practice three days a week in a regular office. On Tuesday and Thursday she practices out of an animal hospital. One Wednesday in June of this year I went in for an adjustment. Dr. DeGrasse asked me if I had thought about getting a friend for Jasper. I said I’d thought about it but hadn’t pursued it. (Actually the thought was fleeting since it had come just before I found that Jasper had eaten the bathroom trash again. Do you know how hard it is to get mad at a dog with a cotton ball stuck to its nose?)
Anyway, Dr. DeGrasse said a woman who worked at the animal hospital had found a puppy on the backside of Silverlake the past Sunday. (Backside means it was in a very remote, unpopulated area of a recreational lake.) The puppy was a female and had an eye infection but otherwise seemed okay. She said the woman who found her couldn’t keep the puppy because her dog wouldn’t allow another one in the house. So, like I knew exactly what I was doing, I got in my car and drove to the animal hospital to “look” at the puppy.
They brought the puppy out to me. I took her and sat with her for quite awhile. She was quiet, very thin, and had the saddest look on her face. I don’t care what anyone says. Dogs have facial expression and I’m not reading anything into it.
I was sitting in the waiting room with her and it seemed that most everyone there (clients) knew the puppy’s plight. When the puppy put her head on my shoulder and snuggled in, everyone in the room went, “Ahhhh”. Soon they were all saying, “Take her. Take her.” It was like they’d been practicing the chant before I got there because they were synchronized in the way only practice can achieve. Think Queen’s ” We Will Rock You”.
Well, I didn’t take her. I didn’t have a crate in the car and I wasn’t yet sure that I should take her. I went home and told Michael what I’d done and what I was thinking about doing. Michael is a friend who was staying with me at the time. If I got the dog, it would be my responsibility, not his. But, Michael is a good person to bounce ideas off of and has no qualms about telling me when I’m nuts. To my absolute amazement he immediately said to go get her. So, I did. Actually, we both went.
Michael took the puppy to the car while I waited inside to get the medicine for her eye. When I came out, he suggested that if I was going to stick with the “rock hound” theme for names, the only ones he could think of for a black dog were obsidian and onyx. Onyx she’d be.
The first stop was PetSmart. She needed a collar, a name tag, a leash and bowls of her very own. Things got out of hand in the toy department. I’d pick up a toy for her and Michael would earnestly ‘recommend’ that Jasper get a new toy, too. $112.00 later we were on the way home to stage two - introducing a new dog to ‘home dog’.
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