Terri and I hadn’t been living on Strathmore Drive in the city, when she proposed that we get a dog.
“What kind?” I asked. “How about a German-Shepherd” she responded.
When she was single and living in Portland, Maine, she had a shepherd named “Caleb,” who was, by all accounts, the model dog.
I’d had dogs growing up but never a pure breed and never a shepherd.
Our dogs were mutts that came from somewhere which now escapes me.
My sister, Jane, brought home what appeared to be an escaped junk yard dog, that she named “Lucky.”
He didn’t like anybody but her.
When my brother Jim came home from his tour with the poverty program, VISTA, it was a few weeks before the dog would let him in the house without one of us having to meet him at the door.
Lucky stayed with us for a number of years during which we had to pick the mail up at the post office because he would take the seat off the mail carrier’s pants.
His encounters with the mail carrier weren’t by chance.
He dug a pretty good sized hole under a bush next to our house and would lie in it up to his neck and charge out when the mail carrier least expected it.
On some nights he would refuse to come in the house and would lie outside chasing traffic-particularly motorcycles.
My father would stay up all night with the screen door propped open and try to entice him into the house, when suddenly a motorcycle would go by.
The next day I heard him yelling, “You’re no Goddamn good. You stay out all night. You don’t come home. You keep everyone up!”
It took a while for it to register that he was yelling at the dog and not one of my brothers.
Lucky disappeared as mysteriously as he came.
One of the neighbors told us that they thought they saw him go by in the back of a pick-up truck but he neglected to get the license number.
Terri came across an ad in one of the weeklies that said a German-shepherd was up for adoption to a good home.
We made arrangements to visit.
My first impression of Buster was that he was the largest German-Shepherd I had ever seen.
He came into the house and proceeded to go from table to table picking up any toy the children had left behind.
The owners told us that he was only a year old but they decided that since they had a number of small children that they just didn’t have the time to spend with him.
They assured us that he was very good with children and I was reassured by seeing that he seemed quite gentle around them.
Terri and I told them we would talk and let them know what our decision about taking him would be.
I have to say that he was one of the most beautiful dogs I had ever seen.
We both came away with the impression that he seemed quite gentle and, since Terri had experience with shepherds, we decided to adopt him.
We brought him home and our adventures started.
Probably the first thing we learned was that if he was outside off the leash, he went completely deaf.
You could call his name until you were blue in the face and he wouldn’t come until he felt like it.
That never changed.
We both had some real safety concerns about this.
He had moved from the country to the city and the traffic was much denser so the possibility of his getting injured or killed by a car was very real.
Our second concern was that he could get dognapped and wind up in one of those dog fighting rings that seemed to be proliferating at that time.
Since we were both working it wasn’t fair to leave him in the house all day and we learned that there were down sides to that.
Shepherds, in particular, suffer from separation anxiety and during the short period we struggled to come up with a solution, he destroyed a couch in our television room.
The solution would have to come fast.
I got estimates from a number of fence companies but they were not only expensive but there was no guarantee he couldn’t jump the fence.
Strathmore was a beautiful neighborhood and the last thing I wanted to do was put up a chain link fence that looked like the second coming of Attica Correctional Facility.
As it turned out, the solution was across the driveway.
We shared a driveway with Kevin and Denny Harrigan who became great neighbors and great friends.
They had a female chocolate lab named Casey and they were wrestling with the same dilemma.
While neither of our yards alone afforded the dogs much room to run, if we fenced both of them they had plenty of room to play.
We hit upon putting an invisible fence that ran around the perimeter of both our houses and the dogs would be able to keep each other company and have room to play.
It would prove to be one of the most entertaining sagas I ever was privileged to witness.
More to come next week.