Tag Archives: Iona

IONA DEBT OF GRATITUDE

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Jack and I went to the shelter to adopt a dog. We walked into the cages, and first on the right was a medium black lab mix. She was not jumping, unlike the blue heeler next to her and the big boxer across the aisle. The one marked “Good with cats.”

Our life required a good-with-cats dog. We are a feeding station for a trap-neuter-release team working on a colony in our neighborhood. Our two house cats have a catio, but outside our back and side yards are little kitty highways with rest stops and diners.

Jack fell in love with the black lab stray, brought in with another dog already adopted. The pair had been running down a groundhog and eating it, and they were covered in ticks and fleas to the point that our girl’s neck was raw with removal and treatment.

We took her for a walk. We walked her around the cat shelter area, including letting her sniff a kitten in the arms of another volunteer. She licked the kitten. My misgivings went away and Jack smiled. He was deeply in love.

So we put in the adoption papers.  Under “any reason you would return the dog” we checked “aggressed or harmed another pet or human at our house,” after a bit of discussion with the two people at the shelter on whether this would slow adopting.

On Monday we waited to hear. Tuesday morning, we drove to the shelter and found our application had disappeared. But the lady working there remembered us. The shelter director had said since we checked that box, he didn’t want to adopt to us.

Well, okay, but….. the lady at the shelter said she was willing to call our references. I dialed both and handed the phone to her, and she gave me something between a bemused and baleful look. She had meant, “I will call them and let you know” but we wanted to take the dog home.

After talking to the references, the shelter worker said, “I’m gonna go with my gut and trust you. Obviously we don’t want you to bring her back.”

Home we went with the dog. In the yard, she moved so fast chasing a cat walking by that she slid out of her collar and leash.

Okay then….. a prey drive is activated by running. We recalculated a few ways to keep our kitty friends safe and made the adjustments. A height extension to the fence—which she jumped the first day. Keeping her on a leash in the house until our cats were accustomed to her, which worked. Keeping her on a leash in the yard until we were sure no cats or chickens were loose in it; we keep our chickens in a pen, but the neighborhood has two ferals who fly in occasionally. Checking the yard worked until Iona jumped up, ricocheted off a shed wall, and knocked a feral chicken down from her roost in a tree some eight feet up.

When I went in the house, Jack was distraught. “We can’t do this.”

The reckoning followed. Jack wanted to blame himself for choosing her. I wanted to delicately yet firmly factor in that Jack is 82. Our beloved previous dog, Bruce, a docile and adorable 70-pound hunk of “I live to please you” in a pit bull’s body, had pulled him over walking because a squirrel made Bruce lose his mind for a second. “Heel” kicked in because we had worked with him, but Jack came home muddy and annoyed, and once, bleeding.

At 50 pounds of livewire, Iona was going to pull Jack over multiple times before we could get her trained. And the training would have to be done by both of us, every day, for about a year. I have what could be described as a demanding job, involving a fair bit of travel. Also Iona was still in the puppy energy phase, yet old enough to have some habits, the worst of both training worlds. Kill to eat. Chase what runs. Jump on the humans and grab their wrists in her mouth to greet them—and she hadn’t learned to regulate bite strength yet.

None of it was her fault. The situation was our fault. Accustomed to having ample resources to take care of dogs (five-year-old Bruce required surgery when he came to us) we never considered that the resources of time, youth, and strength would be most important in training a younger dog.

We should have selected the six-year-old boxer marked as good with cats at the shelter. But we took Iona, confident in our abilities, not realizing that they had dissipated over the last six years as Bruce aged and left us, placid, docile, and cosseted.

So we had to face the reckoning: take Iona back to the shelter and say “you trusted us and you were wrong.” With the additional difficulty of Iona having killed a chicken hanging over her head. We would mark “not good with livestock, will chase cats” and Iona would die in the overcrowded shelter.

Nope.

Plan B: get online and admit failure and ask for help and accept that we would be yelled at for what we already knew was our mistake. We did Plan B.

And got the sweetest surprise of our lives.

Jack and I have rescued cats for about 15 years. All our dogs since our marriage have been rescues, in Scotland and in the States. So when we put our “we need to rehome Iona” message up, people inside rescues began sharing it. And saying things like “these people are smart and kind and wouldn’t rehome this dog unless they had to.” “These are two of the nicest people ever and they recognize the lab energy of this dog will not fit their homestead.” Etc.

We got 4x-removed shares from friends who shared on our behalf. And people were so kind. They identified the problem: these naïve well-meaning people got a lab. They can’t deal with a lab. They are committed to the lab getting a good home this time. They won’t take the lab back to the shelter.

And we got a text message from Barbara, musician and manager with the band IONA. (So maybe she felt a vested interest.) About a decade before, IONA had been featured at the Celtic Festival Jack and I organized in Big Stone Gap, where we ran a bookstore. At the after-party in our shop, their bass player Chuck adopted one of our kittens. He watched the dominant bully cat cuff the little orange butterball off a perch twice, and admired his pluck. Then the kitten walked across a sea of legs to sit on Chuck’s shoe. He had been selected.

The other band members rearranged their instruments and the tubby orange kitten (now named Dylan) went home with the band. Chuck and his wife Brenda (who had been consulted by phone during the afterparty) loved Dylan for years, until Chuck passed from cancer. Brenda continues to love Dylan.

And was prepared to love Iona, we were told by Barbara, and given Brenda’s contact details. A phone call later, we were convinced her fenced yard, loving heart, experience with dog training, and understanding of Iona’s loving heart and lab energy had landed our girl on her four feet.

We arranged for Brenda to come meet the dog, and if all went well, take her home. Enter the shelter. The woman who had believed in us told us we had to bring the dog back to the shelter. We understood: the pattern had a bad optic, someone adopting and almost immediately rehoming a dog. Not a good look.

But she was again gracious enough to listen to our explanation, to understand that we wanted to keep the dog out of the shelter as it was now crowded, and we wanted Iona to never have another chance to endanger her own life by going after livestock. She was going to be a pampered pet in a suburb with a high fence around her very own backyard, free from other animals. Dylan was a couch potato house cat and in no danger from her. It was, in a word, perfect.

For the second time, the shelter lady showed her commitment to animal welfare with flexibility.

Iona has a spay appointment and a thousand chew toys, and a mom who works from home. Brenda has joy in her voice as she describes adopting a dog named Iona from the people who gave her husband such joy with Dylan. (She told us the sweetest story about Dylan climbing onto Chuck’s chest during his final two weeks, comforting him when he felt poorly.)

Jack and I have learned our lesson. Lifelong animal lovers, we recognize the limits—not of our love, but our abilities. We’re gonna give ourselves a month to rest up, and then we will look again, with more discernment, for a dog to match our lifestyle: sedentary, spoiling-ready, small enough to not pull Jack over, with a big bark and a bigger heart.

It is a happy ending. With many options for a newer, smarter beginning.

Day 7: Alan Spills Tea on Iona

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Everyone was looking forward to Iona. For those who don’t know the history of it, Iona is where St. Colomba came and established Christianity, including a monastery, in the early 600s. People have been drawing and photographing Iona since the prehistoric era, so explore their website later for more photos.

Besides the abbey and the ruined church, there are about 100 houses on the island, and about 3 times as many sheep as people. Since the island has a lot of hills on it, and since the rooves of the houses are often thatch, it is common to see sheep and goats atop the houses, munching or playing. I would estimate the number of touristic pictures of sheep atop houses at 1 per minute throughout the summer.

Iona is one of those places that makes me wish I could paint. The colors are amazing: yellow sand, white foam, turquoise breakers, green-blue sea, green mountains, blue sky, pink-white clouds. It’s layer on layer of color in its coves. It also has one of my favorite caution signs ever:

Alan and I found each other walking to the same cove we remembered, about a mile from the ferry drop-off point. Neither of us cared to tour the abbey, me because I’d taken many people to it when we lived in Scotland, and Alan because…. Well, there’s a story.

Back on the bus, I got Alan to tell everyone what he’d told me as we walked. Remember, Alan is a successful musician who founded and lead Battlefield Band, one of Scotland’s best-know bands. But back in his school-leaving days, as he kicked about for a job, maybe even a career, Alan went off to Glasgow (aka The Big City) and took a job dishwashing in a fast-paced high-end restaurant. At the end of his first week, the owner paid him off and said, “Son, the hospitality industry is not for you. Try something else.”

Reluctant to head home with his remaining pay, Alan instead hitchhiked over to Mull and talked his way aboard the ferry to Iona, where he asked at the abbey could he bed down in the sanctuary until he found a job.

The guard for the abbey said, “No, son, we don’t want to encourage hippies coming to Iona. We get a lot of that already.” (In his defense, this was the sixties.)

Alan found a farmer who offered barn-for-baling accommodation and within a week or two decided farming was also not his calling. But for the rest of the tour we called Alan “the hippie.” Behind his back, of course, being polite Southerners well brought up by our mothers.

In addition to rejecting Alan, Iona had one other thing to dis-recommend it. Well, two. First, as we walked past the ancient church (not to be confused with the abbey; the church is a ruin housing a very old graveyard) a girl was busking outside with a karaoke machine and one of those ipad music stands that shows you the lyrics. It was…. Incongruous. About 200 feet on, when the shops that sell summer goods made mostly on the island (but check your tags) line up in a row, another person was busking—with electronic bagpipes.

Call me old-fashioned, but if you’re gonna busk on an island that dates back to prehistoric civilization and bans cars unless you live there, get into the folk scene and don’t sing covers of Pink. Oh, and get off the lawn.

The other thing was—and this is deeply personal—they charged 9 pounds 99 pence for a gin miniature made on the island. And it isn’t made on the island. Iona gin is made on Mull, because where ya gonna put a distillery on an island that’s 1.5 miles wide by 3 miles long without the neighbors complaining? Most gin miniatures in Scotland are between 4.50 and 7.99, so I left without an Iona gin—and bought one back on Mull for 6.99. Well, the islanders have to make a living somehow, I guess.

But that was not the last extortion we would see that day. Off to Oban we went to stay the night in an inn right down by the harbor. We arrived in time to explore the shops – sadly just one small charity shop hardly worth mentioning. But you could buy every weird and tacky thing known to humanity representing Scotland – the hat, the plush nessie, the gin miniatures…. We had fun.

And supper was delicious. So casually replete with a good day, Jack and I retired to our room. I opened the curtains to get the harbor view, and a charming little sea gull was tucked in the gutter between the window and the gable of the hotel roof below our window.

I gave it a piece of stale oatcake that had fallen out into my bag that day.

A minute later there were three gulls. Jack split a second oatcake between them.

A minute later there were six seagulls.

Jack looked at me, shrugged, and poured the rest of the open package on the roof. Instantly the air was full of wings and battle cries as gulls dove from everywhere. They battled for what pieces fell, but I saw one snatch an oatcake piece from the air.

A gull started through the window, falling backwards as it aimed for a piece in the gutter. Jack slammed the glass shut, pressing bird butt in inglorious relief against the glass. The gull threw an annoyed look over its shoulder and said something in squawk that would definitely have translated as rudeness. We watched in amazement as birds covered every corner of the gable and gutter. Then we drew the curtains because the birds were watching us, eyes demanding, beaks open.

“Will the glass hold?” I asked, trying not to think of Tippi Hedren covered in blood.

Jack shrugged and poured himself a double whiskey.  We listened as the insistent cries slowly died down over the next hour. I expected the concierge to call any minute.

When I looked again, just before we went to bed, the original small gull was back in place. He fixed me with a beady yellow eye.

“No,” I said. Before I pulled the curtain shut again, I swear the bird flipped me off with one wing.

And that was day 7, from the sublime to the ridiculous.