The Puppy Formerly Known As Rocket **

Rather than trying to discern what Barack Obama intended when he made his now infamous "lipstick on a pig" remark yesterday, I decided it was time to have a post unrelated to politics. In that spirit, I'd like you to tell you about Henry...

It has often seemed to me that many of the big things in life happen when we are not planning for them, and so I probably shouldn't have been too surprised when my wife, Hayley, called me three weeks ago with the news. It wasn’t as though it was completely out of the blue, either, because as we near our second anniversary, she and I have found ourselves having discussions and debates that many couples at this stage in their marriage undoubtedly have. We thought we were ready around Christmas time, but ended up talking ourselves out of it. Could we pull it off while living in Manhattan? This spring, we again gave serious consideration to the matter, but in a tough year on Wall Street, we were concerned about what effect such a change in our home life might have on our careers. This time, though, it looked like it was really going to happen, and as soon as we hung up, I knew our lives were going to change dramatically.

“I found him”, Hayley said. “His name is Rocket, he’s six months old, he’s at a shelter in Brooklyn, and we can meet him tonight!” Rocket was a Labradoodle (a cross between a Labrador Retriever and a Poodle), and he was in need of rescuing after inexplicably being given up by his original owner. She had found him on Petfinder.com, probably her favorite website in the world, and one she has visited daily for the last year in a heretofore fruitless search for the third member of our small family.

After work that night, we went to Brooklyn as fast as we could. Arriving at the shelter, we announced that we had come to meet Rocket, and someone on the staff was dispatched to retrieve him. The door soon opened, and out bounded the scrawniest, most unkempt dog I’d seen in some time. He jumped on Hayley, then me, then back to her, moving with the frenetic energy that only a puppy has. A few minutes later they asked us if we wanted to take him for a walk around the block, and so we set out for our “test drive”. Once outside, it was obvious that Rocket was just happy to be free. He was sniffing everything, looking everywhere, trying to say hello to everyone, and generally just all over the place. His legs were too long for his body, like a 13-year old boy in his “awkward stage”, and he didn’t seem to know what to do with them when he would try to pick up his pace. Though dirty and a little too skinny, it was easy to see that underneath all of that was a truly gorgeous dog, and naturally, we were completely hooked. “This is our dog, Bragg,” Hayley said, and I couldn’t disagree.

Back at the shelter, we told the manager we wanted Rocket. He gave us an application to fill out, and began to rattle off the laundry list of supplies we would need to properly care for our new puppy. I felt like a cartoon character listening to the cash register “cha-ching” with every item he named. The application was lengthy, requested references, and, as is standard in New York, asked if our landlord allowed dogs and if so, whether there was a size limit. This was the question we had dreaded, because we were pretty sure we knew the answer. In the course of our deliberations about getting a dog, Hayley and our landlord had a hypothetical email exchange in which he informed her that dogs were allowed, but that there was a 10 pound limit. A 10 pound dog? Don’t most cats weigh more than 10 pounds? Hayley grew up with a Golden Retriever, and my family had a Standard Poodle – both large dogs. We are unequivocally “big dog people”, and unlike many fellow New Yorkers, we’d rather have a dog that could eat Hayley’s purse than one who could fit inside it. We made the joint decision to answer “yes” and “no”, respectively.

That night we went home to “puppy-proof” our apartment for Rocket’s arrival the next day, and as we sat down to dinner, I addressed the elephant in the room. “Hayley, what are we doing to do about our landlord?” Even though we didn’t want to admit it, we both knew that in fairness to the dog, we had to call our landlord and officially ask permission. After all, if he denied our request, it might hurt us, but the dog would be fine and would end up being adopted by someone else. If, however, we just brought the dog home in defiance of our building’s policy, we risked hurting not only ourselves, but more importantly, we risked hurting the dog too, and that was a risk we weren’t willing to take.

The next day we woke up early and prepared “talking points” for our upcoming discussion with the landlord. When I got to work, I called the shelter to inform them that we might have a complication, and that I would get back to them with a definite answer by noon. I asked about Rocket’s weight, and was told he was “between 15 and 20 pounds”. I asked if he would likely grow much more, and was told he was probably close to full grown. Armed with this information, we called our landlord. He asked what kind of dog it was (“a poodle mix” I hedged), and then he asked how big he was. “Well,” I said, “he’s about 15 or 20 pounds, but not expected to be much bigger”. “No problem”, the landlord responded to our great surprise, and Hayley and I hung up absolutely elated. We went to pick up Rocket that night.

Our first night with Rocket was somewhat turbulent, but we all made it through. Hayley and I had both taken the next day off from work to begin dealing with all of the logistics of our newfound “parenthood”. While driving him home the night before, we decided we didn’t think the name Rocket fit him well, and since we were told that at his age, there was not yet any name association or recognition, we decided to make a change. After throwing around a few names, we settled on Henry. We liked the name, we didn’t know any other dogs named Henry, and well, he just sort of looked like a Henry. We did, however, feel it was only proper to honor the first name he was ever given, so we made Rocket his middle name: Henry R. Van Antwerp, our dog.



We decided to take him to the vet for a full check-up, nervous new parents that we were, and a few surprises emerged from our visit. For one, Henry was not six months old, he was five months old. No big deal there. But a few of the other revelations were not as innocuous. We learned that Henry weighed 32 pounds – just a tad bigger than the “15 to 20 pounds” the shelter had told us (and that we had in turn told our landlord). Additionally, he wasn’t even close to being fully grown (as we had also told our landlord). In fact, said the vet, we were probably looking at a 70 to 90 pound dog when it was all said and done. Oh and by the way, he also has pneumonia! So a few hundred dollars later, we left the vet a little poorer, a tad shell-shocked, but still falling madly in love with our new puppy.

The last few weeks have been busy ones in the Van Antwerp household. I don’t think I’ve gotten more than five hours of sleep since Henry’s arrival, and Hayley isn’t faring much better. I haven’t had time to go to the gym, and she has fallen behind in her training for the New York Marathon. A small fortune has been spent on the vet, low-calorie, grain-free food, an endless amount of miscellaneous supplies, and of course, entirely too many toys. A woman we only met three weeks ago now enters our apartment three times a day with a copy of our key to walk Henry for 30 minutes. (She then calls Hayley or me to let us know how – or perhaps more appropriately, what – he did while walking). Along those lines, we have had more discussions about our dog’s “elimination” than I ever imagined, and in greater detail than I ever thought possible – to say nothing of what we have cleaned off our apartment floor or picked up off the Manhattan sidewalks. Baby Talk is now the official language of our apartment, and much to our chagrin, we both now occasionally refer to ourselves as “Mom” or “Dad” – in the first person! I have had several business meetings in which I have reached into my pocket only to find a dog treat there instead of my card. In short, our lives have been turned upside down, but we knew that would happen, and it was part of what we signed up for when we rescued Henry. The bottom line is that when I come home from work and he’s there to greet me, his tail wagging so hard that his whole body begins to wag with it – just those few seconds alone make every lost hour of sleep, every dollar spent, and every single change to our lives absolutely worth it. (But I think we may wait a little longer on kids)!

(An abbreviated version of this post can also be seen at Splice Today: http://splicetoday.com/).

** Special thanks to John Lingan, Managing Editor of Splice Today, for the title of this post!