Giant George (2 page)

“Your menu, madam?” said a waiter, handing her this big leather-bound tome. “And yours, sir?” he added, giving me mine.

Decided, I put mine on my lap. My hands were getting sweaty, I noticed. Crazy… Christie had already opened her menu and started looking
at it. Then she stopped, and peered over the top of it at me.

“You okay, Dave?” she asked. “You seem really uptight today.”

“That’s because I am,” I said, pretty much bursting with the weight of it. How’d this happen? I was a man nearly in my forties, for goodness’ sake. She frowned then too, and put down her menu as well.

“So,” she said, looking a bit concerned now. “What’s up?”

“Um,” I said,
rummaging in my pocket for the ring box.

Christie blinked at me, waiting, then said, “Well?”

The waiter was approaching, so I guessed our table must be ready. My timing, it seemed, was pretty lousy.

“Um,” I said again (or, to be accurate, “um” was what came out). “Christie, would you like to be my wife?”

“Oh!” she said, blinking some more. “Oh,
now
I get it! For a minute there, you were starting
to have me worried.”

“So is that a yes?” I said, finally wrestling the box from my jacket.

“Your table’s ready now, sir,” said the waiter.

She kept me waiting, of course—right until we were seated at the table, when she finally put me out of my misery by leaning across and mouthing the word “yes.” The ring was the right size, and lunch was pretty good too.

We were married in September 2005.

Getting away from LA and back to my hometown seemed a natural extension to our starting our new life together. And, for Christie at least, getting a dog was part of this. So while I searched for the perfect house for us, she searched for a perfect
pet. She’d started poring over the small ads in the papers even before we’d begun packing up.

She had her heart set on getting something big. There
were numerous breeds on her short list initially, including Rhodesian Ridgebacks and Labrador retrievers, but there was something about Great Danes and Weimaraners we both liked, so the choice narrowed down pretty quickly. She’d done plenty of research on the Internet too, and eventually we settled on a Dane. Apparently, if it was a large breed you were after, a Great Dane was the best dog to go
for. They fit the bill perfectly as family pets, being quiet, shambling dogs who didn’t bark a lot and weren’t prone to tearing a house apart. They also, and I was particularly pleased to hear this, didn’t have a tendency to chew up your prized possessions or shed hair all over the furniture. But, like many breeds of pedigree dog, they were also pretty hard to track down. Even with the amount of time
she’d committed to doing so, by the time we’d moved to Tucson, Christie still hadn’t found a puppy.

I wasn’t too stressed about this myself. We’d moved into an apartment while we were searching for a house—a small two-bedroom, two-bathroom place, where I could set up the second bedroom as an office. It was pretty, with half the rooms looking out over a small courtyard, but it was also a bit cramped,
and it seemed sensible to me to wait until we’d found a house to get our puppy. Quite apart from the unsuitability of keeping a dog in an apartment, there was also the small matter of the terms of our lease—we were not
allowed
to keep a dog in our apartment.

Christie, however, had other ideas, and dismissed my natural concerns about this little detail. She wanted to get her pet
now—right away—perhaps
because it was just in her nature to be impetuous, or perhaps because she worried that if she left it too long I might mount a rearguard action and change my mind. But there weren’t any Great Dane puppies in Tucson, or in Phoenix. In fact, it didn’t look like there were any in the whole state of Arizona.

One of the reasons for the shortage was timing: you had to find puppies that were old enough
to leave their mothers, and this was clearly not a peak time of year. The other was a product of the pedigree dog business. Many breeders were pretty reluctant—quite rightly, I guess—to let their puppies go without attaching a set of conditions about the people they went to and their background, and what was going to happen next. Because of this, some already had long waiting lists for pups, some
required references about your previous dog history, and some insisted on things such as committing to the show circuit and training your puppy in a very specific way—to walk on your left at all times, as they did in show rings, for example. Some would expect you to commit either to allowing your dog to breed and/or to letting the breeder have first pick of any next-generation pups. It was as
though they retained control of them. But we didn’t want these sorts of strings attached to
our
pup—all we wanted was a family pet.

Eventually our sights drifted farther afield—back to California, and to an ad Christie spotted that had been placed online in the
LA Times
. It was early January by now, and it had been placed by a breeder based in Oregon.

“Phone them,” instructed Christie, when
she left for work that morning. “I have a good feeling about this one. And we must be quick, or else we’ll miss the boat again.”

As we still didn’t have even a sniff of a suitable house, I wasn’t worried about missing any boats, of course. But I also knew better than
not
to call the woman, not when Christie had that telltale gleam in her eye.

“The parents are real big,” the woman told me, once
I’d got through and told her I was interested. “The mom is one hundred and sixty pounds, and the dad is two hundred.”

And in an incredible feat of not really listening to what she was telling me (Why did that even matter? Great Danes were big dogs, weren’t they?), I took this in and then completely forgot about it, as I was more interested in jotting down all the other stuff she was telling me
about which of the pups were still available for sale.

“Tell you what,” she said, “why don’t I e-mail you a picture of them all, then you and your wife can decide which one might be suitable for you?”

Christie was understandably excited when she came home from work, particularly when she learned that the puppies were ready to leave their mother (they’d been born on November 17), and even more
so when she looked at the picture. It was a real sight—a chaotic jumble of paws and snouts and tails. There were thirteen in the litter altogether. Twelve of these were entangled with one another, as young puppies tend to be, but our eyes were immediately drawn to one pup who was
standing apart from the rest. He seemed the runt of the siblings, the outsider in the family, and that endeared him
to Christie immediately.

He was also the perfect color. Pedigree Great Danes come in a number of shades and patterns, and the different types of marking make a real difference in the show world. There are harlequins and brindles, merles and mantles, and then the pure colors, like black and fawn and blue. If your Great Dane is a pure color, there must be no other color fur on it anywhere. None
of this mattered to me in the least. A puppy was a puppy was a puppy to my mind. But to Christie, being a girl (though I wasn’t stupid enough to say that), color did matter. She had her heart set on a blue one.

Happily, our little outsider was just that. In fact, he was blue as blue could be. His fur was almost the exact same steely blue as his eyes, and he had no white on him at all, which was
very rare.

“Oh, Dave,” she cooed. “Look at that one! That one’s
sooo
cute! Let’s see if she can send a bigger picture.”

The woman kindly obliged, sending a whole stream of photos, and she confirmed that the one we’d picked, which she called “the cute runt,” was one of the six puppies left for sale. It seemed like an omen and we made arrangements right away for her to ship the puppy from Oregon
to Phoenix by air.

On the road trip up from Tucson to Phoenix—a journey of some two hours—Christie was pretty excited, and I knew, despite my initial reluctance to become a dog owner, that this had been the right thing to do. The only nagging doubt was
about the timing, as I also knew that, because of our respective jobs, the day-to-day business of looking after our new pet would be a burden
that would mostly fall on me.

Christie worked as a sales executive for a big medical equipment company, which meant she spent a lot of time on the road, visiting clients. It wasn’t the sort of situation that worked well with a puppy, since there was no way she could take him along with her. I, on the other hand, worked for myself. I was a real estate agent, buying and fixing up houses for rental,
which meant I was my own boss and could do what I liked—well, at least within
reason
I could do what I liked. I knew Christie figured that me taking a puppy to work came under the banner of “hey, no big deal.” Personally, I wasn’t so sure about that, but this was the plan we’d agreed on, this puppy, and I knew my wife couldn’t wait to meet him. It would be just fine, I told myself, as we made
our way north to pick up the newest member of our little family.

“So,” said Christie, as we headed up the interstate. “What are we going to name this pup of ours?”

What to name him wasn’t something I’d given a whole lot of thought to. I was much more concerned with what we were going to
do
with him than with naming him. But she was excited and I knew I had to make an effort to be too. “I dunno,”
I said, trying to think on the hoof. “How about something like… um… Biggie?”

She laughed out loud at this—real loud. “
Biggie?
” she spluttered. “What kind of a mad name is
that
?” She shook her head. She seemed to find my suggestion funny.

I didn’t think I’d ever fully understand women and their foibles. What the hell was wrong with Biggie for a dog? “It’s a good name!” I countered, though, in
truth, it really wasn’t. I imagined calling it in a park: “C’mon, Biggie! Biggie, here!” Nope. Biggie sucked.

“He’ll be big,” I added anyway. “You know. He’s gonna be a big dog. So we call him Biggie. What’s wrong with that? It’s logical, isn’t it? C’mon. It
is
! Or, I don’t know, Fido, or Pluto? Or… hell, I don’t
know
!”

She laughed again. “
Pluto?
Come
on,
hon. No. I think he should have a man’s
name. I like dogs with men’s names.”

She’d clearly decided already, I realized. “What?” I asked her. “You mean something like Richard?”

She pulled a face. “
No
, stupid. Something more… you know. More…” She paused. “I know!” she said finally. “How about George?”

“George?”

“Yes. George is a cool name. You like George?”

I tried the park-calling thing again. It worked way, way better. “George!
C’mon here, George!” Yep, I thought. George I could do. “Okay,” I said. “Suits me. We’ll name him George, then, shall we?”

“Yes,” agreed Christie. “I think George is perfect—as long as he
looks
like a George when we see him.”

I wasn’t sure quite what set of features would indicate this, but I knew better than to waste time trying to figure it out. “Fine,” I said. “If he looks like a George,
then that’s what we’ll name him.”

And at no point did either of us think—hand on heart—about how easily you could prefix that with Giant…

We’d been given a bunch of instructions for what we had to do when we arrived at the airport in Phoenix. We had to go and pick him up, apparently, from some special zone where they offload and deal with all the freight.

Once we’d found the right desk and
explained what we’d come for, we were escorted through many doors and along several corridors, heading right into the bowels of the airport, to a strange silent area we’d never seen before. It was here, along with a woman who was picking up a cat, that we waited for the luggage cart to arrive that would be carrying the seven-week-old puppy.

The woman explained to us that she was waiting for her
new pet, who was being flown in from LA, and that cats were also a big part of her working life.

“I own a pet modeling agency in Phoenix,” she told us, “so I tend to be down here quite a lot.”

“Wow,” Christie said. “That sounds like an interesting occupation. What kinds of animals do you represent?”

“Oh, all sorts… dogs, cats, the odd reptile here and there… What are you two picking up today?
A cat too?”

Christie shook her head. “Our new puppy,” she answered. “A Great Dane.”

“Oh, good choice. I’ve got a couple on my books. Magnificent animals. And if he ever fancies strutting his stuff at any
time, here—” She plucked a small card from her bag. “And, oh, here they are!” she added, looking beyond us. “Arrived safe and sound. Aww… so cute!”

Her crate was handed over first, with ours
right behind it, but all we could see at first was a stuffed animal, a rubber bone and two dishes, one of food and one of water. But then, behind all that, cowering on a crumpled gray blanket, was the puppy we’d decided to make ours. Christie opened the crate door and reached in to lift him out. He was just seventeen pounds and clearly terrified. What a journey it must have been for such a tiny
animal! How must it have been for him, not only to have left his mother but then to be stuffed into a crate and put in the hold of an aircraft? We figured they must have heat—at that altitude, the animals would surely die if they didn’t—but even so, it must have been one hell of an ordeal for him, all alone up there, probably in the dark.

He was no more than a tiny trembling ball of peach-fuzz
blue fur, with four comically large paws at each corner. It must have been almost like a second birth, of sorts. Blinking in the harsh glare of the fluorescent airport lighting, he teetered to a standing position on our outstretched hands and moved his head slowly from side to side, taking in the wonder of it all. Then, finally, as if having weighed us up and finding us okay, he tentatively snouted
forward and gave Christie her first lick. We agreed he was the cutest little thing either of us had ever seen.

And he was ours now. “So,” I asked Christie, as she cooed
at him and petted him, “what’s the verdict? Does he look like a George?”