From my worst day to my best. This is how I got there.
Saying goodbye
I became a shiba daddy in 2016, but the road there started earlier — and worse than I’d like to think about.
At the beginning of that year, my bestie of 6 years Bullet was diagnosed with cancer. When my sister and I spoke on Valentine’s Day, she told me she might have cancer. The next morning, her husband called and said she’d passed in her sleep. I was in shock. The very next day, Bullet took a turn for the worse, and I had to make the terrible decision all pet lovers dread. You know what I’m talking about. I came home from the vet’s alone.
The search
I already knew what I wanted. A brother and a sister, in honor of my sister. And named Luke and Leia, because I am a huge Star Wars fan and the symmetry was too perfect to ignore.
But what breed? I love all dogs — they were created to love man. But shibas — they kept the wolf in them. A wolf’s howl goes right to my core. It’s primal. I knew this was what I needed.
I searched everywhere. There were no shiba puppies in any of the shelters. I came across so many shady characters and obvious puppy mills charging ridiculous prices that I started taking it personally. I found a lovely young woman locally with a litter on the way and put my name in. The litter was stillborn. She was devastated. So was I. I persevered.
The day the clouds parted
Then one day I was trolling Craigslist and found an ad. A nice lady named Kim answered the phone and said she had a bonded pair that had just had a litter of four. She still had a boy and a girl left. Her asking price was reasonable. I hung up, went to the ATM, and drove to Ocala, setting a new land-speed record on the way.
When I arrived I was relieved to find she lived in a little caretaker’s cabin on a horse farm. The parents — Ziva and Zipper — were playing out front. Again, relief. This was good, this felt right. I could feel my life changing in the moment. She took me around back, and there they were: Luke and Leia, playing with each other, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
As I cuddled these tiny little treasures in the palms of my hands, I swear I felt my heart grow three sizes that day. We played together for a bit and I handed over my deposit eagerly. It would be another three weeks before I could pick them up. I think it was the longest three weeks of my life.
Gotcha day
When gotcha day came, my friend Kate practically begged to come along. It was the most beautiful day — even the sun seemed to shine a bit brighter. When we got there, I played with Ziva and Zipper for a bit, and I thanked them for the gift they were about to give me. Luke and Leia became mine that day. They settled into Kate’s lap for the ride home and didn’t move the whole way.
Life with shibas
Young shibas are escape artists, and we learned the hard way to put a gate on every door. I still think about the morning I found myself running down the middle of a Tampa street in flip-flops, in traffic, chasing Luke for ten blocks, terrified of the worst. When he finally let me grab him, I sat on the sidewalk with him — exhausted, heart hammering — and he looked up at me with bright eyes and a flapping tongue, not a care in the world. This was playtime, to him.
Leia, ironically, has the deeper instinct of the two. We have a fenced yard and a dog door — total freedom, run of the kingdom — and yet, more nights than I can count, I’ve been dragged out of bed at 3 a.m. to silence her howling at whatever was moving on the other side of the fence. I think shiba screams are cute. I doubt my neighbors agreed at three in the morning.
This is shibas in a nutshell.
Their names turned out to be spot on. Princess Leia is strong-willed, fiercely intelligent, and deeply compassionate — three traits you don’t often see in the same dog. She runs the household with quiet authority, and Luke, for all his bluster, knows better than to argue with her. Luke is untamed, impatient, and a little reckless — a small chaos engine who charges first and thinks later, if at all. Littermates, with personalities that could not be more different. The Star Wars symmetry turned out to be more than a cute idea — they really are a Leia and a Luke.
Now
Life for us has been pretty normal. Walks. Treats. Lots of kisses. One big happy family — minus a few teeth, plus a few more quirks, and about nineteen nervous breakdowns. I’m not the same person I was the day I drove home from Ocala. The past ten years have been filled with violent swings between elation and terror.
I wouldn’t trade a moment of it for all the biscuits in the world.
I finally know what love is.