For the first eight weeks of our relationship, it was just Oates and I. But there was never a moment where Willie wasn't in the plans.
What changed was the breed.
I was actively looking for a Siberian Husky but one day I was walking down the street and saw my first Shiba Inu. It looked so much like a miniature Husky. I asked the owner what kind of dog it was and immediately began my research.
While the Shiba I met was the most common color: a kind of bright copper, I wanted a cream-colored one. Those are the most rare and considered "off-breed". I finally found the only Shiba breeder in the tri-state area.
She was polite but gruff as I recall. I wanted a boy, and a cream-colored one. There was a litter coming for which I could put my claim. When I asked about the color, I was told I'd be "lucky to get any boy puppy at all". So, while I sat with four-month-old Oates, even more new to my home than I was, I waited for Willie to be born.
A few weeks into Oates' time with me, Willie was born. The breeder, having forgotten my request, asked if I'd still take a boy if he turned out white. I agreed. She said I could pick him up in seven weeks.
His parents were red, so it was unusual for him to be white...did I miss something in 6th grade science class? I liked the idea that he was nothing like his parents. It wasn't the first thing I bonded with him over though.
In that time, as planned, Oates was potty-trained. What were those days like? Full of excitement, friends stopping by. Having a floor through apartment right off the Hudson, I counted on a summer breeze blowing through and not needing air conditioners. Instead, 2002 was one of the hottest New York summers on record. Having Oates and eventually Willie poop and pee through my sweltering house created an eye-watering fever I won't ever forget. It was a strange backdrop to the joy and wonder and crazy energy of two puppies running through the house at blinding speed.
When it came time to pick Willie up, chaos reigned. My college friend new to the city had a car and instead on driving me. Then, at the last minute she took a weekend vacation and stranded me, as no rental cars were available in Manhattan on the Saturday of an August weekend.
I ended taking some sort of limousine driver through rural New Jersey over two hours away to pick up Willie. It was a ludicrous but somehow appropriate entry for picking up my little prince.
At seven weeks, he was probably way too young to be given to me, but it was almost like the breeder was eager to give him away. I do remember her telling me, with the implication of breeder instinct, to be careful with him, because he was especially sensitive.
We drove back together and he was balled up in my hands, only a fraction of the size of my four-month-old pug. He, like now, kept a gaze with me for an unusually long time.
It's fuzzy to me exactly what happened when I brought him home to Oates on 11th St. I was pretty much alone, I'm sure, but with them.
Willie already had his crate next to Oates. Those first few nights he cried so much. I think the breeder truthfully explained that he cried because he missed his mother. That maybe he left too soon. That cut my heart in half, how tiny and vulnerable he was and how he was trying to communicate that.
It was only years later that I realized that my sympathy was really sublimated empathy. Because I was once young and small and vulnerable I was also taken from my mom and then never to see her again until I was long past being a boy. I never cried about that specifically as a kid but it was not the first time that Willie's precious heart brought tears to my eyes.
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