A Dog Named Boo: How One Dog and One Woman Rescued Each Other-and the Lives They Transformed Along the Way - Hardcover

Edwards, Lisa J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037389256X ISBN 13: 9780373892563

Verlag: Harlequin Nonfiction, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

She thought she was rescuing an abandoned puppy.
Turns out, he was rescuing her.

The last thing Lisa Edwards needed was a new dog. But when she came across an abandoned litter on Halloween, her heart went out to the runt who walked into walls and couldn't steady his feet. Lisa—healing from past abuse and battling constant pain from a chronic medical condition—saw a bit of herself in little Boo. And when he snuggled, helpless, against her, she knew he was meant to be hers.

The dunce of obedience class with poor eyesight and a clumsy gait, Boo was the least likely of heroes. Yet with his unflappable spirit and boundless love, Boo has changed countless lives through his work as a therapy dog—helping a mute six-year-old boy to speak, coaxing movement from a paralyzed girl and stirring life in a ninety-four-year-old nun with Alzheimer's. But perhaps Boo's greatest miracle is the way he transformed Lisa's life, giving her the greatest gift of all—faith in herself.

This is the inspiring true story of "the little dog who could," but more than that, it's the story of how one woman and one dog rescued each other—a moving tribute to hope, resilience and the transformative power of unconditional love.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lisa J. Edwards is a full-time professional dog trainer and behavioral consultant. She has been a registered Delta Society Pet Partner with three of her dogs and has made more than 400 visits with her pets to hospitals, schools, nursing homes and residential care facilities. In 2008 Boo was honored as one of five finalists for the Delta Society’s national Beyond Limits Award for his therapy work with Lisa. Visit Lisa and her family of dogs at www.threedogstraining.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

It isn't just the chocolate and the feel of mischief in the air that I've always loved about Halloween. All Hallows' Eve has always brought a welcome crispness to the air that tempers the oppressive heat and humidity lingering from overlong summers, and it always gives me a sense of beginning as the wheel of the year turns each fall. Halloween 2000 seemed no different from any other. That morning, I had no sense of what awaited me, hidden between a pizza parlor, a liquor store and a dilapidated supermarket that always smelled of bleach and mold. I had no sense of how my life—and hundreds of others'—was about to change.

Driving home from the vet's, I groaned when I realized I needed candy. I couldn't turn around and go to the nicer grocery store; the cats were eager to get home.

I hadn't had any trickor-treaters last Halloween, but at the time I'd thought it was because we'd just moved to Carmel from New York City. Just sixty miles north of the city, Carmel was a place lost in time and space. If I listened carefully to a gentle breeze, I could almost hear banjos playing the theme song from Deliverance. Now that I'd lived here for a while, I knew it was unlikely that hordes of children would be making their way up the dark, scary, quarter-mile driveway to my isolated house in the middle of the woods. I almost went straight home, but a beautiful Friday Halloween like this always brought out more kids than usual, and if one or two failed to calculate the negative cost-benefit of coming up to our house, I wanted to be prepared.

Pressed for time, I pulled into the parking lot of the nearest mall, strode determinedly toward the stinky grocery store, and was stopped in my tracks by the sign.

Puppies $49.99.

My legs changed course. My head and my walking stick were both powerless to stop them as they took me toward the green awning of the pet supplies store that had definitely not been there the last time I'd braved Bleach-and-Mold Mart. No, I thought to my legs, not puppies— Kit Kats! My legs ignored me. My heart reminded me that the last time I'd walked into a store with a "Puppies $49.99" sign, it brought me my first dog, Atticus, and changed my life. My head reminded me that the two dogs and two cats I already had were quite enough. I just needed candy.

"HI THERE!" shouted the young clerk with long brown hair and a pierced lip, a bit too enthusiastically.

"I, ah . . . the sign says you have puppies?" I ventured.

"Poor babies," she said, leading me to the center of the store, where a makeshift cardboard pen surrounded by mountains of pet food held a litter of puppies who couldn't have been more than five or six weeks old. "They were on the doorstep this morning with a note saying they'd just started eating food. I guess somebody figured we'd find them good homes."

There were five of them, three black and two yellow. There was definitely some Labrador in the mix, but the other breeds were anybody's guess. Regardless, the puppies in front of me were adorable. Four of them were bouncing all over and chasing one another around the makeshift corral with typical puppy enthusiasm.

But it was the fifth, the smallest, who drew me in immediately. A smaller baby boy with a black velvet coat and bewildered brown eyes, he was clearly much slower than his littermates and even other puppies his age that I had worked with in puppy classes. He wandered through his siblings' roughhousing, a toddler in a roller derby. They kept knocking him over as they zoomed by, and as soon as he got up, they'd body-slam him to the ground again. When he did manage to get out of their way, he drifted aimlessly around the pen. Like the eight ball in a game of puppy pool set into motion by an invisible cue ball, he bounced uncontrollably off the sides of the box, bumping into one side and veering off, before hitting the other and bouncing off again.

He was in my hand before I knew I had reached out to pick him up.

The tufted fur on his pure-white chest reminded me of a tuxedo bib and matched the snowy spats on his two back paws. His ears were tiny, folded triangles with points that didn't quite touch his jet-black head. He wore a funny, almost distant expression, as if he were listening intently to a faraway sound only he could hear.

Usually puppies squiggle wildly when removed from play by a stranger, but this one didn't squirm at all. Instead, he lay quietly, unmoving, calm and happy to snuggle up against me as I stroked his velvety fur. I raised him just off the ground for thirty seconds to note his constitution—was he confident? comfortable being handled? disoriented?—and as suspected, he just hung there, inexplicably relaxed or confused; it was hard to tell which. I got the sense he didn't even know he wasn't on the floor.

How could I not fall in love with this sweet, helpless little guy who was gazing at me with unquestioning puppy eyes?

The fact that there could hardly be a worse time to bring a new dog into my life was probably exactly the reason the universe put him right in front of me. There were plenty of reasons to put the puppy down and walk away. There was my husband, Lawrence, who was still recovering from emergency surgery. He had gone into the hospital with what we thought was a burst appendix but turned out to be severe, undiagnosed Crohn's disease. The doctors had to remove nearly two feet of small intestines, and he came down with a near-fatal systemwide infection following the surgery. Thankfully, Lawrence was stubborn enough to hang on (part of me thinks he did so just to prove his pessimistic doctors wrong). After months of recovery, he was finally able to go back to his IT management position at a dot-com in White Plains, but he was overwhelmed by the amount of work he had to catch up on, exhausted and in pain most of the time as he struggled to come to terms with all the changes that came with a potentially life-threatening disease. The stress and trauma of it all made my usually fun-loving husband annoyed and irritable, but I was holding onto faith that I'd have my old husband back soon.

After a summer of all of this, a bouncy, playful, energetic puppy was not something either of us envisioned in our lives, not to mention that I had no time for taking care of a new dog. In addition to teaching dog-training classes part time, I commuted several days a week to my office job in New York City, where I managed a couple of literary agencies and tried in vain to sell a manuscript or two. Not only was it a morally defeating job, but it also meant that for three or four days a week, a new puppy would be on his own, confined to a crate, with no one to take care of him or take him out for midday walks (a dog walker in Putnam County was unheard of in those days). There was also the fact that we had a pretty full house of pets as it was, between the cats Merlin and Tara, the black-and-white border collie mix Atticus and our shepherd-Doberman Dante.

A new puppy was the last thing we needed right now. Yet, Atticus was ten, and a puppy might bring him some youthful energy; Dante could always use another playmate; and after the summer we'd had, perhaps a puppy was just what we really needed.

I knew I was rationalizing, but something told me this puppy needed to come home with me. On some level, I related to this little baby dog, and I couldn't bear to let him suffer if I had any control over it.

Of course, I'd never been abandoned in a cardboard box in a strip mall between a pizza parlor and a liquor store, but I knew what it felt like to be bullied. I also knew what it felt like to be abandoned, to be abused by the very people I should have...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harlequin Nonfiction
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 037389256X
• ISBN 13: 9780373892563
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland