John Delach

After we lost Harry and Bubba, Jumbo became an only dog. Curiously, he didn’t seem to mind this at all. In fact, he reveled in his new-found attention.

Enter, Sandy, an insane Golden. My son had warned me that one of our colleagues  at work, a chap named Rob, told him that he needed somebody to take his dog.

Soon after, Rob came to my office to ask if we would adopt his family’s one-year old Golden Retriever, Sandy. He explained that Sandy was the first dog his family ever adopted, but she turned out to be a problematic, a first dog with a box full of problems. Questionably, I allowed him to bring her over one night so we could see what we were getting into. Rob jumped on this.

It turned out that Sandy was so uncontrollable that on one of her attempts to bolt out the front door to find the kids in her family, she caused his wife to fall breaking her leg. The interview didn’t go well. Rob brought all of Sandy’s possessions, many that closely resembled torture devices. When Rob released her, she proceeded to jump to the top of our living room furniture and race around the living room, totally out of control. Poor Jumbo just tried to get out of her way.

Despite the obvious issues and Sandy’s nuttiness, we kept her. How do you spell, sucker!

 Sandy would remain a work in progress her entire life. One thing that Mary Ann succeeded in doing was changing her name. Mary Ann hated the name Sandy since it was a first dog name and decided to give our new dog the  name of Maggie, after Bubba’s mother.

By this time, Jumbo had reached the age of seven or eight years old, the ages where Golden Retrievers contract cancer and I swear he decided to quit rather than endure Maggie’s reign of terror.

Our biggest issue with Maggie was her inability to ride in a car without getting sick. And by sick, I mean really, really sick. She was so terrified that, in addition to throwing up, her body would get so tense that she would break out in a enormous body sweat that would cover everything. We limited these discharges by purchasing an airline crate and lining the inside with newspapers before putting Maggie inside. Most of the timer, the crate gave her a sense of calmness, but, if we encountered bad traffic that included large trucks, our Golden Retriever would be overwhelmed.

Then we replaced our GMC Taheo with a brand-new GMC Suburban. Our first trip to New Hampshire was uneventful and when we reached Little House, I let her out, but she decided to stay in my truck. I drove her around on our circular driveway. She remained calm and I opened a window so she could stick her head out. When this worked, I drove her back to town and then returned to our house. She was perfect!

Unbelievably, Maggie had broken the code of riding in a vehicle and soon became a traveling dog. We actually drove her to three winter vacations on Sanibel Island making two overnight stops along the way. She actually complained about the length of our journey on the third day by vocally expressing her dissatisfaction with long and loud groans.

While Maggie didn’t have nine lives, she did escape death several times. One time she followed a critter into the woods at our New Hampshire house. We didn’t know something was wrong until that night when I petted her belly while she laid on the couch with me. She didn’t whimper or show any other reason that she was in pain, but my hand came away bloodied by a wound she had on her belly.

We took her back to Port Washington where Dr. Ann, our local vet took her in and treated her with anti-biotics and opening her wound and cleansing it several times a day for three or four days. Dr. Ann’s treatment saved her life and added years to Maggie’s  life with us.

But nobody could change her craziness. We loved her, but nobody else in our family did.

Our dog dynamics changed when our son, Michael and his wife, Jodie asked us to rescue their mixed dog, Buster. Jodie had adopted Buster from the North Shore Animal Shelter here in Port Washington while she and Mike were still dating. Jodie loved Buster and he loved her. Then life took it’s course, they married and had their first child, Drew. All went well until he became mobile. Long story, short, Drew annoyed Buster, Buster retaliated, and Buster joined us in Port Washington.

Buster accepted his new home, but Maggie never treated him fairly. Still, he never entered the CT house again. Those rare times, when we stopped at his old home, he refused to get out of the truck.

I have already written a piece about a trip to Sanibel with Maggie and Buster that is better than something new I could compose, and that will be next week’s piece