The Royal Treatment pt 1: Dog Dreams become Dog Realities

I think it’s time for us to begin talking about this.

Royal Olives-Yeo

Long before our dog was even born, his name and breed had already been selected. I’ll admit, at first, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of a Golden Retriever, simply based on aesthetics. All the Goldens I’d seen in my life had seemed somewhat unkempt. In my misguided viewpoint, they looked so plain and ordinary to me. Nic, on the other hand, was convinced that a Golden was the dog for us. After some back and forth, I relented, inevitably realizing that I’d fall in love any dog…..except maybe a poodle.

So the search “began.” Quotes employed because we were living in San Francisco at the time and although we really wanted a dog, we knew that we wouldn’t really have the living space for a medium-to-large size dog that Golden’s tend to be.

About a year before our dog was born, his name (and sex, obviously) were decided. Nic and I love the film the Royal Tenenbaums and Nic suggested that we give our imaginary Golden the name of the Patriarch character played by Gene Hackman. Again, I should be forthright in admitting that I was neither excited about getting a boy dog (I’d always had girls) or the name of Royal. However, daydreaming about the invisible male Golden Retrieve we were yet to own, day in and day out, broke me down and I was ready to be in his presence.

The question then became, how do we get him? At this point in the story, we had moved out of the city to Santa Cruz, to ten acres of land, where it would be easy for us to raise a dog. Taunting us was a ready-to-be-reused dog pin, right outside of the unit we were living in where my sister had kept her two beautiful malamutes, Koyuk and Starr, some years earlier. If felt like owning a dog without actually having a dog. And it was a bit torturous.

Our searches online (Puppy finder, Puppy search, Doglist, Craigslist, whatever) returned very disappointing results. We weren’t trying to be cheapskates, but we also didn’t want to spend $2,000 on a dog (which is what most places were asking). We also wanted a puppy and there were no golden puppies up for adoption. Those of you who vehemently disapprove of breeders, and are angered by those who do not adopt are most likely fuming right now. You’ve every right to be upset, but like I said, we’d already had this imaginary dog in our minds for over a year, and it was hard to settle for anything else…not the greatest excuse, I know, but it’s true.

Nic worked with a woman who has a beautiful golden named Sunny. She had gotten Sunny through a breeder that she just happened to be friends with and who lived down the street from her in Sonoma. She mentioned to us in passing while we were still living in SF that they were going to be breeding their dog soon and that a litter would be ready in about 9 months. Well, at the time, 9 months seemed like an eternity and we thought we wouldn’t be able to wait. So we didn’t really consider that to be an option and continued on with our lives. Months went by, we moved, we were trying to acclimate to our new environment in Santa Cruz (still are), struggled with jobs, struggled with family, and all but forgot about Kate’s proposition. Then one day, the litter was born and Kate got in touch with us to see if we were still interested. The answer, of course, was yes. I contacted the breeders, put down a reservation deposit for one male golden puppy, sight-unseen and it was done. All that waiting, and hoping, and wishing and all of the sudden, we were about to be parents. The only rub was that we needed to wait until he was 8 weeks old before we could get him and we still had about a month to go.

Kate became our inside source, our on-the-scene reporter, if you will, who monitored the puppies progress. People who were calling or stopping by to see the puppies were already picking out the ones they wanted to take home with them, once they were of age, and since we were too far to select the puppy we wanted, we gave Kate the ok to be our official puppy selector. Our only requirements: Mellow. With that, we started getting daily photos of the ones she thought we’d like best. They were all cute, but the presses stopped when she sent us the picture of this one particular puppy they had temporarily named “Doc.” We immediately called Kate and said; “That’s the one!” and from that point on, he was no longer called “Doc.”

And so it was, on April 23rd, 2010, we climbed in the car, stopped in Oakland to get our friend and godfather-to-be, Ryan, and headed north to Sonoma to bring our son Royal home. When we arrived, Kate was in the yard holding him…and he quite literally, was perfect. It’s been six months now since that day we first met him and it’s hard for us to imagine him not in our lives at this point.