Fate Brought Us Together

After we received the tickets from Honolulu to San Fransisco from the Coast Guard, I bought our tickets from San Fran to Portland to Eugene. All was set...

And then, the CG informed us that our flight information was changing. Instead of leaving in a month, we were leaving in 2 weeks. Of course, I thought this was the worst luck ever. Half the time to prepare to move over an ocean. Lots to do, and even plane tickets to change. The CG took care of changing our flight to California, but we had to take care of changing our flight to Oregon. I was so upset about the sudden change in plans; I wondered what we had done to deserve the Karma. (Now that I've been a Coastie wife a bit longer now, I have learned to roll with the punches when plans change.)

We worked our butts off getting everything ready to go. And the day before leaving, I saw a posting on craigslist that a family in the Eugene area were moving and couldn't take their chihuahua. They were looking for a good home for their dog and weren't asking for a fee. The dog was female, young, and potty trained. I immediately emailed the people and told them our situation. That we were going to be in Oregon temporarily and that we were also moving but could take a dog.

The day of the flight I was so anxious for our first stop so I could check my email to see if I got a reply back from the people regarding the chihuahua. We spent the night at the San Fransisco airport in the USO and I got an email back about the pup. They stated they wanted to view the new home that their dog was to be living in, but that was not an option for us. I emailed them back and told them we were just stopping in Oregon for a visit before our move to California. I gave them my phone number to call me.

The next morning, I checked my email once more before we had to get on our flight. Nothing; so we finished our trip to Eugene. As soon as we landed I checked my voice mail, but no phone calls. I didn't know what to do. We really had our hearts set on the dog, but they weren't contacting us and we wanted a dog as soon as we could. Our time home was packed with things to do, so it was going to be hard to schedule to get a dog.

The Eugene airport is quite close to the animal shelter, Greenhill Humane Society, so we decided to just visit the shelter to be around dogs. We had already checked the website and there were no dogs that we were interested in adopting, but we went anyway.

I saw a dog that had been on the website for weeks and I saw that she finally had an adoption sign on her cage. That warmed my heart. Her name was Nevaeh and she was a Husky/Border Collie mix. I asked if I could take her outside to exercise her, and they let me. The dog was very pretty, but not very people social. She wasn't really interested in getting attention from me. When I finished, I brought Nevaeh back in. I was ready to find Jeremy and leave, but he had passed  by a shelter worker who had a little cocker spaniel in his arms. Jeremy asked the guy what the story was on the pooch, and the guy said he had no idea because the dog had just arrived; all he knew was that the dog was fairly young. He asked if we could play with her, so he took us to the puppy room where the little dog called Ginger stole our hearts. I didn't know what to think because a part of me still wanted the little white and tan chihuahua, but the owners still had not contacted us.

The more we talked to the people at Greenhill during that short hour, the more we learned about Ginger. She had been surrendered by her previous owner. She was about 5 months old, and the owners could no longer care for her. We threw a little toy and she went and got it! She cowered around us, but showed interest in wanting attention. She came when we beckoned. She didn't wag her little nub tail much, but she was pretty scared. The price for her was much steeper than we had hoped. At $300, I was skeptical. Jeremy's mom offered to help pay as an early Christmas gift to us. The reason she was priced so high, they described it to us, is because she was a young highly desired breed. Someone would adopt her quick if not us, and there are other dogs in the facility who aren't so lucky - older dogs, larger dogs, specific breeds, etc. They are priced very low, and the shelter needs to make up for it somehow. They called her a rescue dog. The fees paid for her would help them keep the other dogs around longer. Jeremy and I discussed it and I think we decided we were in love with her the moment I called her Delilah instead of Ginger. I don't know what happened. It just came out of my mouth. She looked exactly like the cocker we had planned on having when we were much much much older. Here she was.

We would have taken her home that day if we could have, but the staff needed to vaccinate her, give her a health check, spay, and microchip her before we were able to take her home. The most we were able to do was put a $20 deposit down to hold her. If we decided not to take her, we'd be out the $20, but if we did want her, the $20 would go towards her $300 adoption fee. So we put a hold on her, and it's a good thing we did because when we went back in the kennel area to say goodbye to her, there was a couple looking at her saying how cute she was, but they moved on as soon as they saw a hold sign on her kennel door.

We were back to visit her every chance we got. I think she started recognizing our faces, too. One of the times we went to visit, she was paired up in a kennel with a little black terrier type dog. The other dog was yapping and barking at us, but Ginger sat there with her nose peeking through the wires of the kennel door. I swear she got annoyed at the other dog because as it was barking for our attention, she kept looking over at it - more of a glare, I swear - and then all of a sudden, she sat up on her back legs and slapped down on the other dog as if to say, "SHUT UP ALREADY, GEESH!" It was the cutest thing in the world.

The day we brought her home was very happy. The last thing the staff said to us before we walked our new dog out the door was, "She's going to follow you guys everywhere."

Ginger...now starting a new life as Delilah, wasn't so sure about the situation. She cuddled and burrowed into Jeremy's arms the whole drive. She even piddled a little bit. Maybe she had a bad experience in a car, maybe a crash, or maybe she just thought we were taking her somewhere to abandon her, like her previous owners did. She is a very submissive and affectionate dog. She was probably super attached to whoever owned her before us. Then for them to drop her off in a place with lots of dogs barking and lots of commotion, it probably traumatized her.

But now, she's in her forever family, and though we may move from place to place, she will always come with us. She is now a Coastie Dog.

I now say it was truly God that brought us together. The series of little events that led up to us being the first people to see her as she arrived at the shelter, fall in love, and adopt her. It's crazy going back and realizing that if the Coast Guard hadn't changed our flight information - which seemed like such a bad thing at the time, if the family with the Chihuahua had called us back sooner, if we had decided not to visit Greenhill Humane Society, if I had not seen Nevaeh online and played with her in the dog run for a while, then Ginger...Delilah would have been adopted by someone else.

Welcome, Delilah, to our little family. November, 2008