"Happiness starts with a wet nose and ends with a tail."

Maizey came to live with us on her first birthday.  A 48 pound Labrador with a stripe down her back the color of summer corn. Before I go any further, I need to clear up two things. One, although Maizey shares the house with Jack and I, our dog and two cats, she belongs to my son, John (aka Johnny, Johnson, or GPaw). Put another way, Maizey believes she owns the place and gives the humans permission to live here too.  

The second clarification is that even though the Craig’s List ad stated Maizey was a yellow lab, when she arrived she brought her DNA analysis with her. Technically speaking Maizey is mostly yellow lab as her coloring indicates. However, like the ancestry.com commercials where a simple mouth swab informs a women that she is mostly Native American, not of European descent,  Maizey’s ancestry is a hodgepodge of Labrador, American Bulldog, Bull Mastiff, and Corgi. She may look like a Lab, but her personality is all Bulldog. We would discover this soon enough.

According to  www.petmd.com the American Bulldog is “gentle, friendly, confident, dominant, loyal, assertive and energetic.”  The Bull Mastiff is “courageous, calm, powerful, devoted and protective.”  The Corgi is “friendly, protective, tenacious, bold, and outgoing.” The Labrador, is “trusting, agile, even-tempered, outgoing, intelligent, gentle, and kind.” Combine all those traits, with skin and food allergies, OCD, and fear of “boom booms” (which she can hear from miles away) and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what our Maizey is like. At any given moment she can demonstrate one or all of these possibilities, a veritable canine mulagatoni. 

On her first day here, Maizey jumped into the pool and had to be rescued (which told her new owner that with a little training she’d make a great “water” dog) dove from a two story window and took a self-walk through her new neighborhood, and bent the sides of her crate in an effort to let John know exactly who was boss.  It was a match made in heaven. Not without some head butting, leash pulling, owner cussing and ear piercing barks from the ownee. 

It’s been five years since Crazy Maizey moved into our home and hearts. I should have been writing about her that whole time. Sadly it’s taken the onset of Grade 3 osteo sarcoma in Maizey’s right shoulder for me to begin to document the love story between a man and his dog. The doctors tell us Maizey might have three months left. So far, except for an occasional limp and a lot of sleeping (which could be caused by pain medication), it’s hard to believe she’s even sick. This story will not have a happy ending. But it will be one that makes me smile thinking about how this big white dog came into our lives and rocked our world one bark at a time.