Before I proposed to my girlfriend, we had already discussed getting a dog. But what kind? We debated it constantly. We loved Great Danes, but they never seem to live long enough. We loved Newfoundlands, but their back legs go too fast. We loved golden retrievers, but my father had two and we didn't want to copy him. We loved the thought of rescuing a mutt, but we worried about getting one with "I hate kids" DNA, and we wanted to have kids.
The decision ultimately didn't matter. Unwilling to raise a puppy on the concrete streets of Boston, we decided to wait until we moved ... somewhere. By this time, it was the summer of 2002. I was thinking of taking a job writing for a television show. As part of the deal, we had to move to Los Angeles and leave everyone behind: Our friends, our family, my teams, the things we loved, everything. I needed a change. If you write for a living, it's good to keep moving. Keeps you fresh. My fiancée wasn't as crazy about leaving.
"We can get a dog," I kept telling her. "We can take her to the beach. We can take her hiking. It will be 75 degrees every day. The dog will have a good life."
That swung her vote. I moved to California on Nov. 16, 2002. She joined me eight weeks later. As she was packing and settling everything back home, she was frantically searching for a puppy. She wanted one immediately. When I rented an apartment next to a house with a young golden retriever named Simmon. we thought that was a sign. We were getting a golden.
At the beach, The Dooze's non-stop desire for that tennis ball could tire out anyone's arm.
We had our new roommate within two weeks: an 8-week-old puppy named Daisy, or as we ended up calling her, "The Dooze." Her obsession with tennis balls started as soon as she could cram one in her mouth. And, yeah, I know goldens stereotypically love tennis balls ... but The Dooze took it to another level. Within a few months, she could repeatedly bounce them off the ground and catch them like she was dribbling a basketball. Our first apartment had high ceilings, so we'd watch TV and bounce balls off every inch of the wall for her. That's how I spent the 2004 Red Sox season -- sweating out games and dinging balls off that 10-foot wall. Soon she was chasing down ricochets like a four-legged Ozzie Smith. On walks, she sniffed out any stray ball within a 100-yard vicinity, dragged us over to the ball's precise location, somehow locating it even if it was buried inside some 6-foot bush. There was one hill a few blocks away -- the front lawn of someone's house -- that she would race atop, then drop the ball so it would roll down. She loved the way it rolled. We'd throw it back up, she'd chase it down like Jim Edmonds, then she'd drop it back down and watch it roll. She never wanted to leave. Soon we were making trips to Target every few weeks just for more tennis balls.
