There's no accounting for taste. Some people and some things just get your attention. Is it her smile? Is it chemistry? Is it, maybe, his hair?
"I looked into his eyes and I fell in love," said Kim Harris, who travels a great deal to buy clothing and gifts for her Key West shop, From The Ruins, on lower Whitehead Street.
"I had been traveling in Indonesia for more than a month, and when I'm away from home that long, I always miss my pets."
You guessed it; Ms. Harris fell in love with a dog. Another dog, that is, for she already had three dogs at home, and thus we begin the saga of "Torn Between Two Lovers", a story of how to assimilate two males into your life, if not your household.
"If having two lovers is anything like having two male dogs, I don't know where people get the time," said Harris. "I have to get up at 5 a.m. to run Job— who lives at the shop— then get back home to walk the others; and I know Oz knows I'm meeting another man."
Oz is a 13-year old Australian Sheppard, the solo male in Harris' 3-dog household for most of those years and he's been around the block a few times. He doesn't at all like the hot young hunk, Job (pronounced Hope), a 2-year old, black and white longhair who Harris flew from Amsterdam to Key West last September after his former master, a Dutch captain, was committed't need another dog, but when I met Jobbie, my heart jumped inside," she said. "Job wasn't being well cared for after his mastern left, and when friends said he was going to be put down, I flew him first class to Miami."
Problem is, at 2 p.m. on the day he was supposed to arrive, Job didn't get off that airplane in Miami.
"I was distraught. This animal group was supposed to be one of the best in the world at transporting live animals— but they didn't even have a representative talk to me until three hours after the plane hit the tarmac. At first, they told me Job never left Holland, but I knew that was wrong. I was afraid they killed him," Harris said.
But Job was alive, and well, maybe he wasn't exactly enjoying a cocktail in his first class seat, or the convenience of the private facilities for upfront customers. Seems he was still in his cage in his first class seat needing desperately to be walked and watered because, well, airplane people are used to getting dogs out of cargo, and when the plane continued on itscheduled route to Costa Rica, so did Jobbie.
He arrived back in Miami at midnight, but then, the real trouble began. Harris