OK, with the craziness of our early Post-divorce year, Anabelle and I had managed to lose not one but BOTH of our dogs. With my weekly travel and the chaos of the Company Apartment in New York, our old Frenchie Peach Blossom had been exiled to Jojo’s house in Alabama and our puppy, Noel, had been scooped up by my friend Gregg and taken for a “visit” to New Orleans where he promised to Breed and Return. Sort of a Catch and Release program. Only as his unamused and long-suffering wife later informed me the year and a half old pup turned up at her Garden District home in  full heat  (her first) and enjoyed the non-stop attention of her fleet of Water Spaniels. Mardi Gras was underway and what with one thing and another we feared for the worst - Span-hauhaus. I was horrified. The vet assured us that Noel was not expecting but so much time had passed that she had bonded with the extended clan so that when I went down for work-she was hurriedly ferried to Maine by her doting new “Father”. So, as things began to settle down in New York with the store there and work going well, Anabelle and I started shopping for a Frenchie. My ex was never keen on my bulldog obsession as Frenchies can cost 2-5 thousand so we had managed to get Peach Blossom and her predecessors from various rescue outfits. Blossom actually coming to us from a breeder where she had been a breeding bitch for 3 years in a crate after her win at Westminster for Best of Breed-her name was Madonna. 10 years later and thanks to Jojo’s careful all-meat and Worchesthire Sauce diet, Peach Blossom was a full 12 pounds heavier and now deaf and mostly blind and not travel-raedy by any stretch of the imagination. But we wanted and NEEDED a French Bulldog. So we hit the internet and found as if by Miracle- a rescue Frenchie only an hour and a half from Birmingham. This is actually critical because as far as I know you have to travel to get a French Bulldog rescue-the rescue crew adamant about no air cargo. So, off to rendezvous with my older brother, Jerry, and his family in Atlanta we deterred to the Alabama countryside to what was in fact a Boxer rescue-er with over a dozen boxers in residence and a lone Frenchie, Missy. As Billy and I unsuspectingly made our way downstairs we opened the doogie gate only to be meet with a shark-like frenzy as 2 tons of boxers met us literally head on-I was knocked to the concrete and emerged bruised and ecstatic-sort of like swimming with dolphins but with way more slobber. Billy was smitten by a 9 month old male boxer and I held fast to Missy. We stopped back by on our return from Atlanta and decided Billy should join us and rescue “Charlie.”

A great deal of worry and cleaning ensued as we prepared for the HOME VISIT in Alabama from the boxer folks. How could we possible clean a house of 4,000 square feet crammed to the rafters with Jojo’s “treasures.” There were 1000’s of beaded dresses she had  “collected”, 100’s of needle-pointed pillow covers, 10,000 books, a metric ton of fabric for her sewing projects and every toy-book-scrap of paper of our collective childhoods to be dealt with. The two-car garage had not housed a car in over 25 years as it was the repository of craft projects and dead plants and several refrigerators and freezers full of way-past-their-expiration foodstuffs. With Momma and Billy double-handedly keeping Marlboro in business, smoke hung in the air like a dense miasma. We cleaned with untold fury. We “hoovered” the living and dining rooms which had been untouched for decades and offered our best hope for a decent impression. The Boxer Rescue Birmingham point person showed up and was delighted-they loved a “lived-in” home and second hand smoke’s unsalutory affects were but a bit of bogus science-bBilly passed with flying colors. We would get “Charlie” after the New York French Bulldog folks had made their home visit. Our New York apartment was tiny but immaculate and crammed with antiques and as et-friendly as could be-stools abounded-our dogs slept with us-we knew it was cramped but it was on the doggie paradise of the Upper Eastside a mere block from Central Park. They visited when our cousins were there-it was all just a formality. Then we waited and waited and the call came-Billy had passed but we hadn’t. Seems they did not like the old building or the antiques and they claimed there was no elevator-there is one-it rarely works-but how could they know? Anabelle and I dusted ourselves off from this crushing disappointment and vowed to pay retail.