Sweet Georgia on my mind: The beginning

As I've mentioned before, we have a friend who seems to stumble onto pit bulls in need all of the time. We appreciate the good intentions and we certainly appreciate anyone who's advocating on behalf of pit bulls, particularly in such a hands-on way, so we try to be supportive.... And by "be supportive," we initially intended that to mean, "Yay you, friend! You did a great thing here for this dog! You saved it's life! Let us buy you a pint!"


It turns out that our support was required in a much more active manner. We were sitting in a restaurant one Saturday afternoon waiting for our lunch when Chris' phone rang: "Okay, you're where? You have the dog? We're in Andersonville.... Uh, okay sure. Call us when you get closer." Our well-intentioned friend lives in a decidedly non-pet building. Apparently we were her back-up plan...or possibly her Plan A. It's hard to know for sure.


Fast-forward 20 minutes. Our lunch was in our car in to-go boxes. Rescues-of-choice one and two had already responded that they were full-up. We were definitely in brainstorming mode, though not quite in panic mode. At least T2 were at sleepover camp for the night since we had a party to co-host that evening—that gave us one less pair of things to worry about.


Our friend pulled up and rushed around the car to open the door. I couldn't even see a dog from where I was standing four feet away. When Chris reached in to lift out the petite bag of bones that was curled up on the seat, I felt my heart break a little on her behalf. Sweet, sweet girl with no meat on her, no understanding of what was going on, no idea whether we were good people or bad people—and still her little tail gave the teeniest hopeful beat and her tongue flicked out in the most hesitant way toward Chris' chin to show that she came in friendship. 

And then the smell hit me. It's entirely possible that 50 percent of her body weight that day was the accumulation of every bit of dirt and stench that she had ever come across.

This photo is not from the day we took her home (though the woeful expression captures the moment we met her). She came to us as naked and tagless as the day she was born. Of course.

We got the back story: Someone had stopped our friend on the street because he had seen her walking a neighborhood pit bull. There was a dog in his building who had been kicked out of the apartment her "family" lived in and she was now living in the hallway. He had checked with the owners; they wanted nothing to do with her. Did our friend have any interest in taking the pit bull with her? Hell yes, she did! 

As she handed us the bag of dog treats she had picked up at a convenience store, she asked what our plan was. We were forced to admit that we would have to get back to her on that, but not to worry—we would figure something out. And then Smelly* and I snuggled up together in the backseat of the car, Chris got behind the wheel and off we went.

I say Georgia
Georgia
A song of you
Comes as sweet and clear
As moonlight through the pines

* Smelly was not the name we gave her, just for the record. But at this point, it was the only moniker that suited her.