The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, March 7th. It is the 34th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On the Warm Wind, and Baseball
We made a new friend yesterday.
Her name’s Fargo.
She’s a dog.
She’s our dog.
We picked her up yesterday morning and brought her back to Texas. I’m writing this because I want to remember all the little things from our first day with her. It was a long day. It was a hard day. It was a great day.
We woke up at 4:45 at a Holiday Inn Express in Springfield, Missouri. I woke up because I needed to finish work before either arriving to get Fargo or getting on the road at 6:15, and I knew not how long the work would take. Emma woke up because I, having gone to bed at 1:30, neglected to turn off the alarm I’d set on my phone when my watch buzzed me out of sleep. I, too tired to be distracted by my anxiety, got the work done before we left. Emma, too tired to be distracted from her anxiety, lay awake until her own alarm sounded. At 6:20, we walked out the doors (impressively on time by our own standards). By 6:45 we’d grabbed breakfast through the drive-through from a pair of peppy-but-easy Starbucks baristas. By seven we were into the Ozarks.
We found the breeder online, just after Christmas. Emma’s wanted a dog her whole life, but her allergies and more significantly those of her sister had always prohibited it. I’ve never had a dog either. I’d prefer cats, if pressed, but I of course do love dogs—they are notoriously difficult to not love. We made the decision to get a dog last winter or spring or summer, whenever it was we made our wedding registry. We would, at a point soon enough that we could say cash gifts were “for the dog,” get a puppy. But Christmas was when we began to look. Due to Emma’s allergies and my own fondness for Bernese mountain dogs, we decided to look for a bernedoodle breeder, and when we found one who seemed responsible and had a puppy available in a January F1b litter (75% poodle, 25% Bernese mountain dog, said to be the most allergy-friendly option), we jumped at the chance. During the search, we’d agreed that we’d go anywhere in the continental United States if we had to. Thankfully, we found Fargo in south central Missouri. Not quite a full day’s drive away.
Fargo’s name in her earliest weeks, at the breeder’s, was Chloe, and so it was Chloe and the breeder—a kind, warm woman on the back end of middle-aged—waiting for us at the breeder and her husband’s vintage shop when we pulled up after a pit stop at Casey’s. For forty minutes, we talked to the breeder about Fargo/Chloe—about her mother, who doesn’t chew shoes but does like to organize them; about the breeder’s history with bernedoodles, which began a bit more than half a decade ago; about the first time the breeder handed over a puppy, and how she cried when the puppy didn’t give her a parting lick. All the while, Fargo/Chloe explored the shop. It was her first time there, and between the mirrors and the nooks and all of the crannies, there was a lot to see. She was confident. She was spunky. She liked to hop around, and she carried her pink elephant proudly, even if she couldn’t find its squeaker without a lot of help. The breeder told us she’d gone to the bathroom that morning. She shared her veterinary records. She asked if she could take our picture with the dog. And then, we got in the car, and it was no longer Chloe. It was Fargo, and she was ours.
Immediately, of course, Fargo began to whimper. Having been separated from her mother for good three days prior, she was confident enough on her own, but a car ride with two new people and none of her siblings was a lot. Her breeder had suggested picking up pee pads to avoid areas other dogs had used, with Fargo only half-vaccinated, being only eight and a half weeks old, so as we passed back through Springfield we made a stop at Petsmart. Fargo wouldn’t use the pee pad there in the space next to the car, but she was accepting of pets, even from a stranger slightly more a stranger than us, who left her German shepherd with her husband and approached us asking to pet the little thing.
Fargo’s a striking creature. She’s a merle, all gray and black and copper, and at fifteen pounds—she was the biggest pup in her litter—her long snout comes out from a round little body. Her coat is fluffy, with the poodle genes creating fur even more downy than one expects from a pup, and it’s wavy enough that you have to look hard, at times, to see her eyes.
We got to know Fargo well over the ten-hour drive home, plus the four and a half hours spent at various stops. We learned she was happy to ride in our laps. We learned she likes to rest her chin on things, especially the center console when in a moving automobile. We learned she can be welcoming to children, accepting a hug from a six-year-old in a Panera parking lot in Tulsa. We learned she sits on her people’s feet when she’s scared. We learned she’s so very clumsy, and so very carefree, laying her whole round belly on top of her travel water bowl at a rest stop and nearly falling into the cupholders in front of the console time and time again throughout the drive. We learned she’s trusting—trusting enough to sleep between us, her head in my elbow and her back half in Emma’s lap, like she had her arms around us for a photo except it was the whole of her body, not her arms, and it was our arms, and not the wholes of our bodies, and there was no photo, but instead just a long drive down I-35, a drive on which she stopped whimpering and became, even to her, our dog.
And we learned about ourselves, of course, as well. We learned that, when sleep-deprived and stressed, it’s easier for me to drive than it is to make sure a puppy doesn’t faceplant into the back seat. We learned that, when sleep-deprived and stressed, it’s easier for Emma to make sure a puppy doesn’t faceplant into the back seat than it is to drive. We learned how exciting it can be to see a dog play with us for the first time, and go number two with us for the first time, and lick our faces for the first time. We learned how to navigate eating supper in shifts in inexplicably-but-miraculously barricaded parking spaces in a crowded Fort Worth shopping center just after sunset while Fargo bravely stared down her shadow, projected on a pickup truck’s undercarriage by the headlights of an SUV. We learned that, on the last stretch of the drive, past Fort Worth and into the heart of central Texas, playing music to keep ourselves awake falls into listening to Amy Shark and fussing over our puppy every time the lyrics could vaguely apply to a newly-acquired canine.
It was a long day, and it will be a long-remembered day. I’ll remember the sunrise filtering through barren trees and the intermittent fog of the Missouri hills. I’ll remember Fargo giving Emma’s masked face the most thorough of sniffs in the shop. I’ll remember coming out of the rest stop right before the toll booth between Joplin and Tulsa and seeing Emma waving excitedly next to the puddle that was Fargo’s first pee with us. I’ll remember the stop at the other end of the Oklahoma leg of the journey, in Marietta, behind the Shell station off the interstate, Fargo running back and forth between us, yet-to-be-grown-into ears somehow flopping more than her whole bouncing body, silhouetted from my side against the burning Oklahoma sunset. I’ll remember moments later, when she pooped for us for the first time, and the smiles of the three guys in the truck who waited for her to finish before pulling past. I’ll remember how much she twitched in her sleep.
It was funny, towards the end, how joyous the last leg became. The stop in Fort Worth had been grueling—beyond just finding a place to physically eat our supper (and try to feed Fargo some of hers), we’d been stuck in gridlock on 35W, then caught in chaotic, aggressive lane changes as we tried to get off 35W and over on 30 to where we’d ordered our takeout. We were both beyond exhausted—Emma having dealt with a crisis at work on Thursday, me cashing the checks written over a couple dozen short-sleep nights these last six weeks, a combined product of work’s busy season, Texas’s snowy disaster, and this trip. Every few minutes, we’d pass some landmark, and I’d wonder inside how it had only been the day beforehand when we’d passed it on the way up: The HEB in Waco where we’d used the bathroom on Friday at midday. The Starbucks by Emma’s office in Round Rock, where we’d grabbed coffees to kickstart us on Friday on our way out of town. The northern reaches of Austin, where half an hour can be so much time or so little and it was so little on Friday and somehow, last night, both.
Yesterday was just the first day of a dog’s lifetime of memories we will get with our now-little, soon-big girl Fargo. She’ll be there for change upon change in our lives. She’ll be there, God willing, when we bring each of our first children home from the hospital. She’ll be their dog, too. She’ll be there, barring surprise, when we eventually leave this wonderful city for some new wonderful place. She’ll be our dog there, too. She’ll predate some of our lives’ best friendships. She’ll likely outlive this blog.
And at so many moments throughout this stage of our journey—the one for which she has joined our family—we’ll read these words, and we’ll remember yesterday. And we’ll laugh, and we’ll smile, and depending on circumstance we’ll cry a little or a lot, but we will be so happy to have had yesterday—as happy as we were yesterday to have it.
Because yesterday, Fargo became our dog.
Next week’s essay: On The Barking Crow
