Max is part of the reason I haven't been visiting blogland much lately. He's sick and has needed some special attention the last few weeks. I try not to make this blog a Diary of Debbie Downer, but I need this right now.
Max came into our lives 3 years ago. Sparky and I lived in a duplex we were renting with our friend Lindsay and her big, beautiful Black Lab, Reyse. For my birthday (February 17th, for future reference) Sparky's gift to me was a dog - but one I picked out on my own. No surprises. None of this cute, cuddly furball with a ribbon around it's neck stuff. I contacted Jennifer at
Mid American Boston Terrier Rescue about a few of the dogs they had available for adoption. We had just bought our house and would be closing and moving in one month. I didn't want to put a dog through more trauma than necessary so I let Jennifer know this in case they thought it would be a problem.
The dogs I was interested in had all been adopted and Jennifer thought the move might make for added stress for one of the poor pups. However, she would keep me in mind for any other dogs that came up for adoption.
A couple weeks later, Jennifer emailed me about a dog that was being fostered in Newton, about 45 minutes from Des Moines. An older couple had actually adopted him but Max wasn't mixing well with their cats so they had to give him up. They were keeping him until he found a new home. Jennifer sent me this photo collage:
Aaaannndd... my heart melted. I forwarded the message to Sparky and asked if we could meet Max. Later, I found out that Sparky had thought Max was ugly in the pictures (he doesn't think that anymore) but he was willing to play along.
IF we were going to take Max home, we wanted to make sure he and Reyse got along so that weekend Sparky, Lindsay, Reyse and I packed up the car and traveled to Newton to meet this guy. We pulled up to a nice farmhouse and were greeted by an adorable older couple. They had Max in the backyard for us. We walked around the house and through a gate where a black and white monster waited for us. He was barking and jumping as soon as he saw some new friends.
While I was leaning down to introduce myself and Max launched himself off the ground, full force, to greet me with a kiss. We smacked into each other in the middle (I ended up with a fat lip) but that didn't deter Max. He jumped and barked until I was sitting on the ground with him getting covered in kisses. His foster parents looked on and said, "We've never seen him do that to anyone before." Love. (We later learned that this actually was a fairly typical Max greeting but I felt special at the time.)
He gave Kurt and Lindsay similar greetings and then moved on to Reyse, who was exploring the expansive backyard. After a little butt-sniffing and sizing up, Max proceeded to mount and hump Reyse, despite the size difference. Clearly, this one was going to be in charge. Fortunately Reyse is a fairly passive dog - so they got along just fine. We spent about a half hour playing with and learning about Max. He had been found roaming around in Kansas City, no license or microchip. He had been trained by someone because he was housebroken and knew basic commands. His age hadn't quite been determined with any certainty but he was an older dog. His teeth were fairly worn down like an older dogs but the vets thought it was because he had been in a kennel at one point and had chewed on the bars (this didn't surprise us later). He acted like a much younger dog than his teeth showed so the guess was that he was around 6 or 7 years old. Besides kennels, Max also liked to chew on his leash when out on walks so his foster dad had put some plastic tubing around his leash to keep Max from chewing through it.
In that short 30 minutes, we had found our dog. I think it was a little unexpected for his foster parents. Even though he was terrorizing their cats, they wanted to keep him - I think the cats only won out because of seniority. I called Jennifer to tell her we wanted to take him home and find out what the next steps were. She suggested we take him that day for our "trial period" (ha!). It broke my heart to see the disappointment on the old couples faces. They packed Max's things up, kissed him good-bye and stood in the driveway while we pulled away.
We made it back to the duplex where Max quickly made himself at home.
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