Lucy is my daughter’s year old Great Dane, and I met her for the first time last weekend. She is as tall as a Shetland pony, but where ponies are round, Lucy is long and lean like a supermodel. Her coloring is jersey cow black and white, and she has a velvety soft coat that turns pink towards her feet where the hair is so fine it’s translucent. Although their skin color is different, when I saw Lucy standing next to my daughter all I could think of was how they could be in the opening scene of the original animated 101 Dalmatians, when a parade of people and their doppelganger dogs walk under Pongo’s window.
It was hard to stay angry with my daughter for getting Lucy once I met her, a fact I’m certain my daughter had counted on. She already owned a three-year-old German Shepherd named Nash, who was more than a handful. I knew wrangling two oversized dogs while she was preparing to go to medical school would add even more challenges to an already challenging life path, but Lucy arrived like a baby unplanned (to me anyway) from a plane in Miami one very late night. Not even twelve weeks old at the time, Lucy had wiggled out of the air crate and planted a feces covered paw on my younger daughter’s chest (who was visiting her sister), leaving a baptismal print the size of a butter plate on her white T-shirt.
A year later, Lucy still hasn’t grown into her paws. When we took the dogs to run on the beach in Barbados, the tracks she left in the sand looked as big as a lion’s. Watching her play she seemed out of context, as exotic looking as a zebra at the seashore. The few people we passed stopped dead in their tracks when they saw us coming, frozen in shock and fear as they took in the two giant beasts galloping towards them. My daughter’s cry of “They’re friendly!” came too late for the onslaught of Lucy’s chest-high slobber and terror elicited by Nash’s guard dog looks.
Even in my daughter’s apartment, Lucy has no concept of personal space. She followed me to the bathroom, unconcernedly squeezing herself in through the door that I tried to shut on her, and curled up on the bathmat as if she were the size of a Yorkshire Terrier instead of five feet long from nose to tail. When I was reading in the hammock she laid her cow-sized head on my chest, and if I petted her even a tiny bit she would try and crawl in with me. At night she came to my bedside, her face level with mine, melting blue eyes asking permission to climb in. When I told her no she circled a time or two and laid down with a sigh of disappointment, her body stretching out against the entire length of the bed frame.
Although I have been apprehensive about the effect Lucy would have on my daughter’s situation, she is a part of her life now and thus a part of mine. Meeting her was like meeting a new family member, and when are we ever ready for new family members? But if Lucy is any indication of my future, I think I’ll be okay.
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