Kaboom!

Kaboom! is the day of the big fireworks put on by a popular radio station in San Francisco. It usually takes place around the middle of May.

Kaboom! is also the day we picked up our first greyhound “Latte”.

Today is May 12th, 2007 and it’s a special day on many fronts:
- It’s my step son Keith’s birthday
- It’s the day I pick up my greyhound Latte from the adoption agency
- And it’s the day of Kaboom!

It’s also a special day because it is the culmination of my begging of my husband to get a dog. I just don’t know why it took so long to convince him (you’ve heard the arguments: it’s too expensive, takes too much time, ties us down, …) but convince him I did!

We used to dogsit my brother-in-law’s border collies and Lab. While we just love those dogs, we decided that a more “low-maintenance” dog would be better for us in the long run. So the search began …

One day, at the Marin Humane Society, while scouting for the pup that actually wanted something to do with us, we ran into a lady with a greyhound. It was a beautiful white girl, a little shy, so graceful, and with eyes that just melted me away. To our unbelieving eyes she said that greyhounds don’t need all the exercise we assumed they needed, that in fact they are couch potatoes, and that they make wonderful pets. Those were all criteria that fit in with what we were looking for.

So, off we went to a number of meet and greets with a few local greyhound adoption agencies, the border collies in tow (we had to make sure they would get along), of course. And that did it, confirmation after confirmation that greyhounds are wonderful pets and indeed quite lazy. Just what we were looking for.

We came home with a few packets of adoption applications and that sense of excitement that you get when you know you’re getting a new car.

While all the agencies we spoke with were led by wonderful people, we decided on the one that indicated they had local groups of greyhound owners that got together on a regular basis and had an online forum for information and where we can ask questions.

After a successful house visit to ensure that our place was safe and appropriate for a greyhound, we knew it was only a matter of time before we would share our place with a tall, beautiful, liquid-eyed creature.

Enter “Hallo Southpaw”! We got the call on a Wednesday or so that a dog was coming in from Colorado and that he was going to be ours to be picked up on Saturday. I went to the web and looked at the dogs up for adoption and there he was: seemingly without ears, looking awkward and scared, a white and brindle barely 2-year old male greyhound who was in desperate need of new name.

A bottle of champagne and a few pages of notebook paper later, we had settled on “Latte” primarily because of his color, and secondarily because it made sense coming from the bottom of the bottle of champagne after discarding names like “Ferrari”, “Speedo”, “Testarossa”, “Espresso”, etc…

Then we got the call on Saturday, just before we were leaving to go to Walnut Creek to pick him up … the dog was lost – at the airport, not sure which airport … How can anyone lose a 70 pound greyhound in a big box? Actually, they lost two greyhounds.
After a few agonizing hours, we got the word: the dogs were found, they just went to the wrong pick-up place at the San Francisco airport – something about “cargo” or “oversized luggage”. We never told him that some people considered him to be either of those.

Despite the fact that “Latte” had a pretty rough week – getting ripped out of his environment, getting neutered, traveling for hours on a plane, getting lost at the airport, riding in cars with strangers – the moment we entered the room where we were to pick him up, he walked straight over to us and planted a big wet one on our lips. That sealed it – he was our baby!

And a baby he was – these first couple of days …

It started with the ride home. We had to lift him into the car because he either didn’t want to or didn’t know how to jump into a car. Then, he got totally stressed out in the back seat by himself, until one of us joined him and petted him all the way home. He was hyperventilating almost the entire trip. A trip that extended by an hour because we had to go to the store that we owned in San Francisco because the employee who was supposed to close up forgot his key.

So here we were, stuck on the Bay Bridge on our way into San Francisco, watching the Kaboom! fireworks while petting our brand new, panting greyhound …

A day I’ll never forget. Our first day with a greyhound.