It was after five on a Thursday, and we were with friends at a local wine tasting when my cell phone rang. It was our daughter, calling from Atlanta. "Mom, there's a purebred German Shorthaired Pointer at the Humane Society. Do you want her? She's beautiful." I told her truthfully that I didn't know the breed. "Mom, they're the BEST dogs, and this one is just beautiful. Do you want her?" Well, we had talked about getting another dog, but we weren't sure we wanted to make the commitment. I said I wasn't adopting a dog that I had not even seen. "But she'll be GONE! Mom, I'm going to get her. You will love her!"
I hung up the phone after telling her that I was not promising we would take that dog and told my husband Lizzie wanted to rescue a purebred German Shorthaired Pointer for us. "You told her no, didn't you?" he said. Two people at our table immediately said they knew someone who would want the dog if we didn't. This response, of course, made me perversely think that if others valued these dogs we might be interested in one too. Another phone call from Atlanta: she had the dog and she wanted to keep her. "Great," said my husband. "It's her dog. Let her take care of it." However, I knew that apartment living and two roommates weren't conducive to successful dog ownership. The next week consisted of lots of phone calls and emails and a few tears. My suggestions that Lizzie find a home for the dog up there met with stubborn opposition. Lizzie wanted her, and if we could just keep the dog for six months, Lizzie's apartment lease would be out and she and a dog-loving friend or two would rent a house with a fenced yard together. In the meantime, I had been doing some reading on the Internet, and I was feeling strong reservations. GSP's are HIGH energy dogs. They are sporting dogs, hunting dogs, bird dogs. They require a LOT of exercise, my sources said, and if they didn't get it they became destructive. The perfect home for a GSP was with a young athletic family, preferably a family living on acres of land. GSP's needed to run five to eight miles a DAY, and they were the perfect companion for the distance runner in the house. The thing was that there was no distance runner in our house. I'm 50, and my husband is 68. We had both just retired and planned to apply ourselves to our individual writing projects. He plays tennis, and I do photography, garden, quilt, do home maintenance chores, occasionally do yoga and/or hit the gym. There were no extreme athletes in this house. "You will lose so much weight walking her, Mom," my daughter said. The next weekend Lizzie brought Heidi home to stay for six months.
