Monday, February 01, 2010
Purrfect pairs
JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times
Paula Eager adopted Maud, a brown-spotted Dalmatian, nine years ago. "There was just something in her eyes," Eager says about the moment they bonded.
NONA NELSON The Roanoke Times
Dexter, a retired racing greyhound adopted by Nona Nelson in 2005, has really bonded with her husband, Phil.
Nona Nelson, The Happy Wag
Read Nona's blog, The Happy Wag:
Recent columns
However our paths happened to cross, I like to think that I've chosen the pets that live in my home.
But sometimes, I really think it's the pet that chooses the person.
My husband, Phil, grew up with a dog but never had a pet in his own home until we adopted Dexter in September 2005. I was the one who first met Dexter and wanted the retired racing greyhound to live with us. But it's Phil with whom Dexter has really bonded.
It's Phil whom Dexter follows around the house and on whom the big dog loves to lay his head.
While I know that our affectionate hound loves me, he is his Daddy's dog. The bond was organic and almost instant, and they would be lost without each other. Dexter chose Phil.
When the right person and the right animal make an emotional connection, it really can be a love story.
A junkyard romance
For Roanoke resident Paula Eager, the love story began near a dump in southern Florida. Eager first told me about her and Maud's story one day last spring at Six Wags Dog Park in Salem.
Eager said she was visiting a business in an industrial area near Miami in 2001 when she first saw the estimated 1-year-old, brown-spotted Dalmatian, hobbling with a pronounced limp, and a black Lab puppy.
Eager said the shop owners told her that often people dumped their unwanted dogs at a nearby junkyard. A professed cat person who said she knew nothing about dogs, Eager felt compelled to help the pair of homeless pooches.
She took the dogs first to her veterinarian, who told her that the Dalmatian's right hip was out of its socket, then to an animal shelter in Fort Lauderdale, where she hoped the dogs would be adopted.
The shelter took the puppy that would easily find a home, but the workers told Eager the future was grim for the Dalmatian; her injury and the shelter's lack of funds for corrective surgery meant the young dog would be euthanized.
As Eager drove away from the shelter with Maud in her back seat, she said she looked in the rearview mirror and asked the dog, "What in the hell am I going to do with you?"
The bond between them, she said, began at that moment.
"There was just something in her eyes," Eager said. She wasn't supposed to have a dog in her rented home, but she was determined to help Maud, named after actress and model Maud Adams, find a good home.
The journey begins
That task, she found, was easier said than done.
"What I found was people had about as many dogs as they want," Eager said.
A friend of Eager's said her brother and his partner were moving from South Florida to Portland, Ore., and wanted another pooch as a companion for their dog.
So in May 2001, Eager sent Maud off on a cross-country road trip with the couple, confident that she had found the dog a loving home.
But things didn't work out exactly as planned.
Eager said she learned through her friend that Maud was not thriving in Portland.
She ran away from her new home. She destroyed some of the couple's antiques. It just wasn't working out.
Still feeling responsible for Maud's well-being, she arranged in July for the pooch to fly to New York to live with her daughter, Parke Eager, on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
New York state of mind
Despite long walks in Central Park, life in the Big Apple didn't suit Maud, either. She was restless and unhappy. She gnawed the knobs off Parke Eager's dresser.
Parke Eager found Maud a new family, with two young daughters, another dog and a spacious home in Sag Harbor, N.Y.
By October 2001, the Dalmatian was in her fourth home. By the holiday season, Paula Eager said, it was apparent that this was still not Maud's idea of home.
She was driving her new family nuts. One night, while they were out attending a Christmas party, Maud noshed on the family's gingerbread house, destroying the holiday project.
The journey ends
When Paula Eager learned that Maud once again needed a change of address, their destiny was sealed.
"Pack her up and send her back to me," Eager told her daughter. After a journey of almost 8,000 miles, Maud ended up back where she started: the Florida home of Paula Eager.
The duo has relocated a few times, and settled in Roanoke, where Eager operates a media consulting business, in 2005.
Maud's naughty behavior that bounced her through so many homes seemed to correct itself when she was reunited with Eager. So has her bum hip.
"She stole a Perdue roast chicken off the counter once," Eager said, recounting Maud's only transgression since they've been together.
And really, under the right circumstances, who wouldn't be tempted to swipe a roast chicken?
The cat who loves me
I can relate to Paula and Maud's saga, although my love-at-first-sight story involves a feline.
I love my three dogs with all my heart. But the critter in my house that belongs exclusively to me is my cat, Thai.
He walked into my Tennessee town house one evening in February 2002 uninvited. I didn't have the heart to turn him out in the cold, but I had every intention of taking him to a shelter the next morning.
But somehow when I looked at that kitten, with his big green eyes, pink ears, and black-and-white mask of a face that reminds me of the "Phantom of the Opera," we connected.
Thai begrudgingly shares me with the rest of our family and those three annoying dogs. But he is happiest in the rare moments when we are alone, when he has my undivided attention and I rub his back just the way he likes it.
He purrs only for me.
Thai chose me to fall in love with. And I fell for him, too.
