In May 2005, I received a phone call from someone who had found my phone number on the Greyhounds of Fairhaven website. The caller said she knew of a Greyhound whose owners were going to have her put down if someone didn’t take her immediately as she had reportedly bitten one of their children. According to the caller, the people had gotten PJ, the Greyhound, from someone who’d had her as a pet for a while, but her former owner didn’t want her back. This person had received PJ from yet a different person or maybe a couple - her history got a bit fuzzy at this point.

When you adopt a Greyhound from an adoption group, you sign a contract that says you will return the dog to the adoption agency if you ever have to get rid of it, so the agency can find a new home for the dog. This is done because the agencies want to make sure that Greyhounds go to good homes, ones that are educated about the needs and idiosyncrasies of Greyhounds (prey drive, sensitivity to anesthesia, etc.)  If PJ had originally come from an adoption agency, her original owners had broken their contract by giving her away, and it was likely that she had been in at least two homes (possibly more) that knew nothing about Greyhounds.

Greyhounds of Fairhaven is not a rescue group (we promote Greyhound adoption), but I figured I would get PJ out of peril and then get her to an adoption group that could find a home for her. I wouldn’t be able to keep her because we already had four Greyhounds and we didn’t want another dog. Besides, since we do so much work with the public through Greyhounds of Fairhaven, we couldn’t have a dog that wasn’t good with children.

I contacted PJ’s owners and told them I was on my way to pick her up. When I arrived, the poor girl was locked outside in an unlandscaped backyard (just plain dirt - no trees or bushes or grass) in 103-degree heat. The owners opened the back door and in crept a beautiful, shy, white-faced brindle girl. She let me pet her while I talked to the owners about what had happened between her and the child. PJ had been given to the family by an acquaintance. They knew nothing about Greyhounds and, apparently, not much about dogs in general. They thought it was perfectly all right to leave their two young children unsupervised with PJ. One of the children had fallen on her while she was asleep, startling her. She came up snapping and scratched the child’s cheek. Not exactly a “bite” after all.

I explained to the owners that Greyhounds live their racing lives in crates; they are not used to being touched when they are sleeping, so PJ’s reaction was hardly surprising. In fact, any breed of dog might do the same thing if startled awake by someone falling on them. The owners acknowledged that they’d been mistaken in leaving their children alone with PJ, but they still wanted her gone because she clearly couldn’t be trusted around children any longer. Okay. If they said so…

I loaded PJ into my van and headed home. On the way, I had to stop at a friend’s house. He had several Greyhounds, so I brought PJ in to meet them. She was scared and wouldn’t go anywhere near them. I was not reassured by this reaction - what was she going to do when I got her home to my four Greys? As it turned out, she was scared of them, too, but I took my time and introduced them slowly, and PJ finally relaxed enough to let them check her out. She was still very leery of them, but at least I didn’t need to keep them separated.

PJ had a microchip tag on her collar, so I called the number on the tag and was told that her chip was registered to Arizona Adopt a Greyhound (AAGI). I called AAGI and found out that PJ, whose racing name was PJ’s Jackie Why, had been adopted out in late 1999, just after she’d turned three years old. AAGI hadn’t heard anything about her in the ensuing five-and-a-half years, but they would be happy to take her back and find a good home for her. Unfortunately, they had no foster home openings at the time. Could I keep her for a week or so?

“Of course!” says I, secure in the knowledge that this would be a short-term thing since there was no way we could keep such a shy girl. All of our dogs had to be friendly and outgoing, and get along with people and other Greyhounds due to all of our promotional work.

And then, three days later, something amazing happened. Shy PJ turned into friendly, loving, outgoing PJ. Not only that, but she displaced BJ, the alpha dog of our pack. BJ happily let PJ have the position; BJ had never really wanted it anyway, having been left top dog when our former alpha, Ebony, died two years earlier. BJ had no trouble being the alpha’s lieutenant, but she’d never been comfortable as the boss.

Here are a few pictures we took of PJ a few days after I “rescued” her and she came out of her shell:

Relaxing with a rawhide

PJ, aka “Ears”

PJ in her favorite position - the dead cockroach

So PJ was no longer afraid of our dogs or shy around us, and (of course) we were falling in love with her. Maybe we could  keep her after all. But we still needed to find out if she’d be all right with the public and with other dogs.

As luck would have it, my parents were coming to visit, and they would be staying at a campground in the mountains. We decided to take PJ with us when we visited them to see how she reacted with them, their dog, and anyone we met at the campground.

Of course, she did wonderfully - with my parents, with their dog, with all of the strangers she met, even with a couple of Greyhounds that were camping with their people.

We figure that during whatever happened in the six years between PJ’s initial adoption and the day I picked her up, she forgot she was a Greyhound, and she needed some time with other Greyhounds to remember.

PJ at the campground

PJ cuddled in my lap. (It was cold in the mountains, thus the coat.)

PJ, too adorable for words

Well, that clinched it. We were going to keep PJ, but we still needed to change one thing about her: Her name. Having a BJ and a PJ was way too confusing. Since BJ was here first, she got to keep her name. Thus PJ became Peaches, one of the Greyhounds of Fairhaven, promoting Greyhound adoption at Renaissance faires throughout the southwest United States.

Peaches “roaching” at the San Diego Renaissance Faire

Peaches, the vicious child-biter

Peaches: “Hey, why is everything upside-down?”

Today, 04 Dec 2008, is Peaches’ twelfth birthday. But that’s not the really important thing; after all, there are quite a few twelve year old Greyhounds.

What’s really special about Peaches is that last Friday (28 Nov 2008) was her one-year post-amputation anniversary. You see, in November 2007, Peaches was diagnosed with osteosarcoma - bone cancer. Osteosarcoma has no real cure; the only way to fight it is to remove the affected limb and, if one chooses, follow the amputation with chemotherapy.

On 28 Nov 2007, Peaches had her rear right leg amputated. Sometime that night, when the night-duty vet techs were supposed to be watching her, Peaches fell and broke her tail about five inches from the base. No one noticed the break until the techs took her out of her cage the following morning and returned her to the vet. It was a very bad compound fracture and there was no way to save the tail. So, on 29 Nov 2007, Peaches had her tail amputated to a five-inch-long stub. Poor girl.

Back home after her amputations - not feeling very good.

A few days later, feeling better.

The funny thing is, Peaches was more upset about losing her tail than she was about losing her leg. More than once we caught her glaring at her tail stub, yet she never seemed upset about her leg.

Despite missing her tail, Peaches bounced back fast from her surgeries, and breezed through six chemotherapy sessions.

A missing leg and tail doesn’t interfere with snoozing…

…or with Peaches’ favorite position.

The missing leg and tail also hasn’t interfered with Peaches’ status as the alpha dog of the pack, a position she took back as soon as she got home.

Peaches and BJ, her “lieutenant”

BJ and Peaches

BJ and Peaches

Peaches and BJ

Missing a leg also hasn’t stopped Peaches from having fun with her pack - particularly our two crazy play-boys, Captain Jack Sparrow (white ticked Greyhound) and Sergei (the Borzoi).

Playing with Jack, Sergei, and visitor Mija, the hairless PIO.

During her convalescence, Peaches learned that she could bark if she needed help with something. Since then, she has perfected her barking technique and uses it to get pets or simply get us to talk to her. At Renaissance faires, if someone pets her for a long time and then stops, she barks at them. Quite often, she manages to get people who have left her side to come back and pet her more.

A cute little Peachy bark

A serious Peaches bark

Barking at the Arizona Renaissance Festival

Of course, having only three legs gets Peaches a lot of extra attention at Renaissance faires, since everyone feels sorry for her. We keep warning all of the children that she’s a vicious child-eater, but no one seems to believe us. I wonder why that is…

Peaches, the Easter Greyhound

Peaches: “Hmm, this one looks tasty.”

A kiss from Queen Beatrice

Licking her lips in preparation for eating a couple of small children.

Peaches: “Nice pets. Maybe I won’t eat this one.”

A kiss from “the one that got away.”

As you can see, Peaches is completely unreliable around children and needs constant supervision. No, really. She’s a vicious killer. She eats several small children a day…

…and she really needs to learn how to relax.

Happy birthday, Peaches! Here’s to many more years of beating osteosarcoma.

Sunday we made it to the Renaissance festival in Plantersville Texas.

Much fun was had and much food was consumed. The day was really quite beautiful, it was not hot and it was not cold. There was a light breeze and it was just comfortable with little humidity (well little as far as Houston is concerened).

Kate and the Flowers

Kate loved eating smelling the flowers and dancing around like a monkey child. We watched a group do a little jig and dance a fling and Kate danced right along with them.

Dancing Kate

I dressed the kids up in tie dye as you can see because if Ren Faire isnt the time to let your freak flag fly then when can you? Calvin was also wearing lime green baby legs and yellow socks. He has more colors on than Superman.

Tie dye baby

My two favorite things on earth. Food and hot men babywearing. As a side note : You dont not realize how wonderful a father a man is until you are driving back, tired and weary from being out all day long and the baby starts crying. Then the man in question busts out in a harmony with you of “The Lion sleeps tonight” to try and calm the baby down a bit, and then when the song is over start singing about how we are exiting the freeway just for the him and to not cry because we are going to get him out. There are fewer things on earth that are sweeter and more heartwarming than this.

Real men wear their babies.

Days like yesterday, with the perfect weather… the sunlight and the ren freaks… are days that I love living in Texas. With its big cities and small towns. WIth the little feed stores and big trucks. With its multitude of faires and get togethers that are just excuses for people to get together and be merry. This weekend was a weekend where I loved Texas.

Country feed store

My WMA instructors are a husband and wife team, Paul and Melissa, who own and operate Fearless Fitness. I arrive after work, and Melissa (or a member of her team) makes me sweat profusely for an hour.  We jump, run, do a multitude of ab, arm and leg strengthening exercises, and we learn to kick and punch.  After Melissa has worn me to an absolute frazzle, I pick up a wooden sword called a waster (longswords on Mondays, sideswords on Thursdays) and Paul tries his best to teach me the how to not kill myself with the steel kind.  He also throws in a couple of lessons in Italian and German languages, so with any luck I won’t sound like a complete idiot when I talk about swords in the world of sword enthusiasts.

Then I go home and take more ibuprofin.

Paul and Melissa are also the honored leaders of the Guild of St. Dismas, which is active in the local Renaissance Faire circuit. Several members of the guild are also my fellow students at Fearless.  Along with the various theatrical demonstrations normally associated with a Ren Faire guild, they also own and operate a trebouchet, largely for the purpose of disposing of surplus pumpkins after Halloween.

I have seen a couple of small scale trebouchets in action during SCA wars, but they only launch soft, safe projectiles short distances. (They are, after all, being launched towards human targets.)  Watching a larger scale trebouchet launch pumpkins to their doom tickled our fancy. Paul and Melissa invited us join them, so we loaded up with our SCA gear and drove to Fresno, California, where the St. Dismas trebouchet lives, to watch it in action.

While we have been to many Ren Faires in the past, we have never seen the “behind-the-scenes” workings before, and this experience really drove home some of the differences between the cultures of the SCA and Ren Faire.

The differences come down to this: The SCA attempts to create an internally consistent medieval universe for its own benefit.  The actors are also the audience.  The Ren Faire is theatre, put on primarily for the public, which pays an often usurious entry fee to see it, who then pay inflated prices for the crafts.

In the SCA, participants change from “mundane” clothing into SCA garb as soon as they arrive at an event, often Friday afternoon, and don’t change back into mundanes until they leave Sunday night.  Therefore, we were taken by complete surprise when the members of St. Dismas changed back into denizens of the 21st Century mere minutes after the Faire closed to the public.  It was like somebody had flipped a switch.  Quote one of the members, “Hey! After hours is after hours!”

This is not to say that one is better than the other, and certainly there’s a lot of overlap of participants between the two kinds of events.  Optimally, one should enjoy each kind of event for its own sake, and we had a great time. Though not so much for the event, but for the people.

Autumn is a wonderful time for country fairs.  And in the mid-Atlantic region, where I live, the season kicks off in August with the Renaissance Faire held in Crownsville Maryland, which lasts through mid-October.

The organizers go to great lengths to make you feel that you are in a country village in 1540s England, and King Henry VIII (the one with the 6 wives) is coming to visit.  And so you wander down dusty paths past cottages where people are selling everything from pies to feathers, from pastries to magnificent court gowns.  You see people dressed up in 16^th century costume, and realize with a pang, how much better the average human form looks decked out in doublet and hose, or gown and headdress, than poured into a pair of jeans.  Along with the places selling food, clothes, leather items, swords and daggers, are the numerous places of entertainment.  You see jugglers, acrobats and actors from a variety of venues, all engaged in old-fashioned entertainment with audience participation.  Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Faire is the jousting.  It is really good.  Not only do these people dress up in 16^th century armor and wield a lance, but they actually do all that while riding on horseback.  My friend who rides told me that their riding was superb and that they were able to control the horse mainly by leaning forward or back in the saddle.

If you have not been and you are in the area next year between August and October, I suggest you go.  It is great for families, great for couples, and great for those who like to sample the past. 

For more information click here.

–Cynthia Haggard writes short stories, novels and poetry.  During the day, she is a medical writer and has recently opened her own business.  For more on her creative writing, go to spunstories.  For more about her medical writing services, go to clarifyingconcepts.  (c) 2008. All rights reserved.