Finding Blue, Part 1 of a Love Story

Blue is probably as close to a child as I am ever going to have. He is a yellow lab/retriever mix with a lil sumptin' else thrown in.  He is without a doubt the sweetest tempered dog I have ever known and everyone loves him.  Blue came into my life seven years ago this month.  I had just moved everything Charles and I owned and our two cats, Baby and Sweet Pea, to Norfolk, Virginia to the house we bought a half a mile from the Chesapeake Bay. It was July 2004 and it was hot and humid and rainy.  When I stepped outside, I felt as though I were melting.  We bought an old home that needed some TLC - a new kitchen, paint, carpet, windows - oh hell, it needed everything!  It was, however, on a beautiful piece of land - a lot and a half and it backed up to a wildlife preserve that was in the process of being restored.  All manner of cranes, birds, fowl and swimming things lived in it.  When we bought the house, it was filled with trash and empty beer cans and all the wildlife - the ensuing transformation was incredible to witness.

We were moving to Norfolk for a softer, gentler life.  Charles wanted to pursue his artistic gifts more fully and we hoped to have children.  The chaos of Los Angeles had worn us out.  I moved to our new home ahead of Charles to begin the restoration. Charles stayed in Los Angeles to finish up some deals, and he'd join me soon.  I arrived July 1st and celebrated my birthday on the 5th alone.  I got to work immediately and hired a contractor; they began in short order tearing the kitchen down to studs.  I was left with a mini-refrigerator and a microwave as my only modes of cooking so I ate out often! It was grueling living in a house with basically no A/C except a few window units and no kitchen, but I loved going to Home Depot and designing our new kitchen and breakfast nook.

July 15th, I woke up very happy - it was my 13th anniversary sober and soon Charles would close his deals and be here with me in our home.  It was a hot and muggy day made worse by sporadic rain that only made it hotter and muggier, and I stayed in as much as possible.  The phone rang mid-afternoon and it was Charles - to wish me a happy anniversary, I thought, but I was wrong.  Very wrong. Charles had cancer, bladder cancer to be exact.  I was shocked and devastated.  My life changed forever that day. The cancer was advanced (more than I knew at that point and more on that later) and decisions had to be made quickly. Charles would stay in LA and begin treatment - chemo and radiation - and I would stay in Norfolk and continue to oversee the rehab.  As much as I wanted to sell the house and move back to LA, I knew if wasn't feasible to do so without a kitchen - and at that point, I thought there was hope he would win the battle. So, I would stay put and fly to LA when I could and Charles would come to visit me in between rounds of chemo and when he was done he would move here as planned.  That was always the plan, at that time I thought it was curable, beatable.

It wasn't until later that I discovered that Charles hid the severity of his cancer from me - I don't know if he did so to protect me or him, or he was in denial - very common by the way - or if it was a little of each, but he began to have severe mood swings and we fought over the phone every day about ridiculous things.  I couldn't say anything without causing a fight and later after his second round of chemo, when he came out to visit and I actually physically saw him, I understood.  When he walked off the plane, I didn't even recognize the frail, bald, old man whose face lit up when he saw me.  I was sick...sick inside like I had never been and I knew that very instant that he way dying no matter what he said.  A shameful part of me didn't want to admit this dying man was my husband because in the same moment that I recognized he was dying, all my dreams started to die as well.  Had I known from the beginning then that his cancer was Stage IV metastasized, I would have been back in LA pronto, screw the house...and in retrospect, maybe there was a part of me that didn't want to know how bad it was either.  I had plans for us, for our life, dammit.  I tell you these things because they are hard truths and they need to be said, to be brought into the light.  Terminal illness shakes up your life and your belief system like nothing else and whatever role we play in this first circle of hell - limbo - we struggle in vain against the steel door that is inexorably shutting on our lives, our futures, our dreams.

But in those first few months, before I understood the truth of the matter, I was utterly helpless and trapped and felt useless and alienated. For some reason, I started looking through the classifieds every day.   I read all the ads, I was looking for something, but I didn't know what - from bikes for sale to help wanted to pets for sale.  Surely there was something in here that would fix me, make it all better?  Right before Labor Day, I saw the ad that finally caught my attention: Lab puppies for sale. $50.  That was it, five words and a phone number.  I admit, I was drawn in by the price as much as the Lab label, and before you wonder - of course I knew I wasn't getting a real, pure bred Lab for $50, but I figured they had to at least look like Labs.  I called the number and a man with a very heavy country accent answered.

Waellll - he didn't have any mo' labs but his sista had a bitch (he actually said "bitch") had a litter had one lef', a male, did I wan' it?  I immediately answered yes.  I would drive there tonight in case there was a mad rush of potential buyers from Norfolk to Bumfuck, North Carolina to grab this last prized puppy before the holiday weekend!  To this day, I still have no idea where in North Carolina he lived, but it was almost 3 hours away.  I left at dusk.  I drove on the interstate most of the way and then I got off and followed a bizarre series of directions the man gave me.  They went something like this: Go down the road about 10 miles.  You'll pass a corner store and then go over some railroad tracks.  Then you make a left by the big tree and go down the road a bit past a school and then...anyway, you get the drift and as you can imagine, I got lost.  I couldn't find the BIG tree.  They were all big, for God's sake.  I was an LA girl lost in the back country of North Carolina.

Utterly lost, I had to call the man.  My cell phone had no reception, and I didn't want to stop at the local corner store - they were all rough looking men in overalls and pickup trucks and it made me nervous. (What can I say? I'm a sheltered city girl!)  I drove back out to the interstate and stopped at the Circle K or whatever it was and asked if I could use their phone.  The man told me to meet him at the corner store parking lot in 30 minutes, he'd bring the dog, he was driving an old red Ford pickup.  Back I drove to the corner store.  I parked in the lot with my car facing out towards the entrance, lights on, engine running, in case I had to make a quick getaway.  Thank God, I had an SUV at that time, not my cute little convertible VW, but regardless, every one pulling in and out of the store's lot gave me a long, hard look.  Today, I realize that they probably all knew each other and my car stood out - a stranger was in their mix and they were curious - but it was dark, I was in the woods, alone, and  I started to worry that I was going to have my very own Ned Beatty Deliverance experience.

After what felt like an hour, the pickup pulled into the lot.  A guy in (you guessed it) overalls climbed out.  I rolled my window down - Miss Pam, he asked?  Yes! I said.  Here you go, he said.  I got out of my car as he went to the back of his truck and opened a metal crate in the back.  He reached in a pulled out what I think was the saddest excuse for a dog, let alone a Lab, that I had ever seen.  The puppy was tiny.  Yellow, patchy fur - the little bit of it there was.  Through the thin fur, I could see a few fleas crawling about on his body.  His belly was round and bloated with worms and his eyes were caked shut with mucus from an eye infection.  He was a total, pathetic mess.  I took him in my hands and held him up to the overhead light in the lot to examine him further.  As I did so, he opened one little eye, and a bright blue beacon took me into account.  You know that moment mothers have with their newborns? Well, I don't pretend to know what that's like, but something as close to that as I will ever experience happened in the moment that his little, rheumy eye caught mine.  I was sold.

I gave the man his $50 - boy, did he see me coming, I thought.  In reality, he should have paid me to take this hot mess, it was going to cost me easily another $200 at the vet tomorrow, I knew.  As consolation of sorts, I suppose, the man told me that the puppy had just been wormed.  For the record, the puppy was going to have to be wormed three more times in the next few months before his stomach stopped dragging on the ground.  I got in my car, my new puppy fitting in one hand from palm to finger.  I put him in my lap and kept my hand on him the whole way home.  He looked at me once with the one blue eye that wasn't totally crusted shut and then slept.  I could feel his puppy breath on my fingers, the warm belly on my thighs.  Once in a while, he'd lick my hand and before we got home, I was totally in love and that dog owned me.  A part of my heart had turned dark and heavy with Charles' cancer - the puppy didn't fix that, but a new part of my heart opened up, filled with love and it provided me much needed comfort and companionship. As much as that puppy needed saving, I needed saving even more.  He threw me a lifeline I didn't even see coming.

And that was the beginning of me and Blue.

Tomorrow, Part 2 - Blue goes to the Beach!