My Gypsie Girl

I stared at the Facebook post my boyfriend Rich had tagged me in, at a despondent and badly photographed black dog, slightly of the Labrador persuasion. Her neck was bent in a submissive, touching gesture of cowed despair that was moving, to say the least. All around her was dirty concrete, floor and walls. I read the caption Rich had placed above it.

‘Doesn’t she look just like your dog? It’s a shame she is going to be put down tomorrow.’

I was gobsmacked. Shit, no, fuck no, HELL just NO.

He knew I volunteered at a local rescue. He knew what this would do to me. Further proof, as if I didn’t know already, that I was dating a guy with certain narcissistic tendencies. How the hell did he expect me to handle this information? Especially since the dog in question was in Raleigh NC and I was stuck at work in Philly.

There was a number. I called. A man with an unparalleledly condescending Southern accent answered the phone and listened patiently to my stammering request to take Lot Number 9 away from there. Like, tomorrow.

“We are closed tomorrow but we are open until 5:00 today,” the man said.

“Well, here’s the problem,” I said, assuming he would help me, “I live outside of Philly and I am actually at work until 5:00 today, but if I pay the adoption fee can I just come pick her up first thing tomorrow?” A reasonable request, surely. I was confident of this. We all wanted to save lives, right? On the same team?

“We are closed tomorrow but we are open till 5:00 today,” the man said again, implacably.

My tone, I confess, took on somewhat of an edge.

“I LIVE in PENNSYLVANIA,” I returned, “I cannot get to you before you close today. You are nine HOURS from me. I promise I will be there, I’ll even come before you open. “

“I’d like to help you,” the man said, with infinite patience, “but we close for euthanasia every Wednesday. As a matter of fact, she was supposed to be put down last week, but she was kept back, because, you know, she’s so nice. But we cannot be open to the public on Wednesdays. No exceptions.”

It was hopeless, I just hadn’t quite grasped that yet. “Can’t I just kind of slip around the back?”

“We are closed tomorrow but we are open till 5:00 today.”

I hung up.

I wasn’t beaten. Not yet. Because I am part of a movement. A grassroots movement, with low overhead, surely, but a movement nonetheless, to Save Them All. I pulled some strings on my rescue network, and they tugged at some more strings, and all down the East Coast texts and messages and calls finally hooked me up with Jacqui. Jacqui is a Brit expat who runs a beagle-only rescue, and she made me promise about eight times to be at the strip mall in Raleigh before nine AM so she could get to work, and to bring the $25 adoption fee because she’d be paying it and letting the dog crash at her house, just for the night.

Just till 9 am, when I better be there to get her. And bring the money, okay?

I took no offense. I knew about people tricking rescue volunteers into taking in cats and dogs they didn’t really want or agree to, just get them out of the killing system, away from the abattoir, because they knew a foster mom or dad wouldn’t throw the animal away. I had a psycho cat that someone dumped on me like that. Actually, ten years on, present-day, I still do.

I went home and went straight to bed, setting the alarm for 1:30AM. I got up and went out in the still June morning, set my GPS for Bumblefuckville USA, and headed South. Usually, a road trip is a cause for celebration in my books, but there was nothing exciting about dark highways for hours on end. I stopped at Wawa for a 24-ounce coffee before I got too absorbed in navigating. Thank God for GPS.

In Rich’s defense, he did stay up with me, and call me and chat to keep me awake. Although in retrospect it was less than the least he could do. He was just like that woman who dumped the cat on me – he didn’t want a dog, or to be bothered with the whole fostering ordeal, so he used me and my soft heart to do his dirty work.

The sky lightened on a truly depressing line of cheap, bedraggled stores half-encircling an enormous, and almost completely empty, parking lot. I went to the small grouping of cars near the front and just got out and waited.

But I had been spotted, and the beautiful woman with the long brown hair walking toward me had a dog on a leash, for me.

A very young dog, that was for certain. And a very BIG dog. I stared at her enormous paws.

Oh, I did not want a messy, chewy, destructive, needy puppy -I’d said it a million times. It was ok, I’d just foster her through my rescue at home. But I was so flabbergasted I actually collected the poor pooch into my car and had driven halfway across the lot before I texted her frantically: Wait, I still have your money!

As to the dog: our first meal together was a quiche from Panera, our second, meatballs in a cup when I finally reached a Wawa and breathed the air of civilization again (jk).

She was as good as gold the whole way home. I showed her to the girls at my rescue and they said, oh sure, we can sponsor her. We recognize her. Her littermates and siblings come through here all the time. And so Lot number 9 was listed for adoption. But I gave her a name first: Gypsie, for the sojourn she had made with me to safety and stability. In retrospect, I could have named her after Harriet Tubman but perhaps that wouldn’t be quite respectful.

Two weeks later Gypsie was playing on my rooftop deck and fell down the steps, screaming in pain. I ran outside but she just lay there, looking up at me in misery. My vet saw her immediately and it wasn’t long before he brought me into the back office. His face was solemn.

“She has broken her leg in two places,” he says, “I cannot fix.”

“Okay, no problem,” I said evenly, “where do you recommend I take her to do that?”

My vet was flabbergasted. “You – you want me to wake her up?” he asked, incredulously. He obviously had been assuming that I would want to euthanize her on the spot.

Not happening. Not today. I did not lose a vacation day as well as a fair amount of sleep to rescue this dog, only to do to her what the patient-voiced Southern man in Raleigh would have done.

Not. On. My. Watch.

I called the head of my rescue. She gave me the name of a 24-hour emergency vet with a fantastic surgeon who put a metal rod in Gypsie’s leg and put her in cast for six weeks.

Keep her quiet, they said. I put her in the tiny laundry room, where she busted holes in the drywall trying to break the cast open and chewed the molding in frustration and boredom. It didn’t matter, because she was my dog now.

I didn’t lose a vacation day and lose a fair amount of sleep AND put $4,500 on my new credit card for this dog to be somebody else’s baby.

She’s ten years old this year and still runs like a dog who’s never known strife. She is about eighty pounds of incredibly soft fur and bulky, cobby muscle. She is almost human in her understanding, loves strangers, especially kids and other dogs, and doesn’t need a leash. The lady Jacqui, who first rescued her, is referred to in my house as “Gypsie’s godmother” and we are still Facebook friends.

She loves the beach, long walks, and car rides. She charms everyone she meets who gives her half a chance. She is MY dog, devoted to me the most, but so happy that her joy overflows to other people and pets. She smiles often. She doesn’t leave my side and I never, ever want her to.