Vlasta, Boomer and Midnight
Volume 49, Issue 6
By Grace Corradino

You are either a cat lover or a dog lover, generally not both. We happen to love dogs.

When my children were young, a dear friend of ours who happened to be an ex-patriot from Czechoslovakia, bought my son and daughter a charming yellow Labrador puppy. He purchased the dog at an auction. The proceeds of the auction were to be used to protect the fly ways of migrating waterfowl and these puppies were expected to grow in to great hunters. Labs are known for loving the water, an affinity for hunting, and for their gentle disposition. This puppy, who we named Vlasta in honor of our friend, was in our lives for seventeen years. That is a long time to own one pet.

She occupied a prominent place in our family but at no time was she more or less what she was, a well loved pet. In fact, visitors to our home were always astonished to see how Vlasta never stepped foot out of the kitchen. We trained her to stay in the kitchen so as not to fill the entire house with her endless shedding. And shed, she did. But the kitchen was always filled with kids, cooks and all of us, so she was never really alone, except for when she slept. She was probably gratified to have a bit of peace.

When Vlasta was about three, we decided to breed her. We arranged to have an overnight with a friend’s black lab, Boomer. As far as we could tell, over the course of the weekend courtship, neither Boomer nor Vlasta seemed terribly enamored of each other. We decided that a subsequent date was in order and Boomer came to visit not only the following weekend but the weekend after that as well. No coupling was sighted so we had to wait to learn if the mating took place.

And of course, it did.

One evening, many weeks later, I was watching TV late in to the night. I heard an unfamiliar noise coming from the kitchen, Vlasta’s abode. There in the corner, lay Vlasta and the first of her puppies. Typical for our gentle dog, she barely made a sound despite whatever discomfort the birthing caused her.

Animal dunces that we are, we mistakenly assumed that Vlasta and Boomer had mated on the third date. This led to a miscalculation of the date for the birth of the puppies. There is the whole process of providing a whelping area for the mother and her pups which we had at the ready. However, because of the miscalculation we were only going to put the whelping blankets and towels down the following week.

Our docile and noble Vlasta was quietly birthing her pups without a towel for comfort and I did not know what to do first.

I grabbed what ever was close at hand, offered it gently to her and then I ran to get my kids. Although it was after midnight and there was school the next day, I knew that this was a night no one would forget.

That night Vlasta birthed seven puppies, five black and two chocolate labs. It was absolutely thrilling to see the puppies being born. I always thought they would be born without fur. In fact, the fur on each and every one of the puppies was magnificent. Vlasta cleaned each one, laid each down gently and went back to the natural business of birthing the next one and the next one.

Each puppy was given a name; Little Foot, Midnight, Ila and Max; those are the only names I remember. When you have a litter of puppies you do not want to separate the pups from their mother for about ten weeks. By week number six, the night time howling and the mess generated by seven healthy puppies gets to be a lot. By week 10, we knew we needed to start finding homes for them.

We gave a chocolate lab, Ila, to my brother and the other chocolate to a friend. Four of the blacks we sold and when each one left the house I was sure my children were going too. We tried to be certain that they were going to good homes, where there were yards to run in, and a place to swim.

In tribute to Vlasta and in deference to my children’s’ unrelenting pleas, we kept the black who was quite honestly, the pick of the litter, “ Midnight.” As he grew, Midnight became the most handsome black lab I have ever seen. His head was majestic, he was tall and strong. He would swim in the ocean for hours on end, biting at the water, playing with it and in it.

Those dogs went with us everywhere. It was no small feat to transport two 100 pound animals, but we did. Back and forth to the beach they never stayed behind. It was joyful to bring them to the beach and watch them frolic in the waves with the kids. They happily retrieved whatever we threw in the ocean. These dogs were in the foreground of the snapshots of my children’s summers.

Over the years, the dogs learned to look after my kids, my son especially. If anyone other than Kyle would walk Midnight on a leash, they would be pulled along like a wagon. There was never a time that Midnight didn’t walk apace with Kyle even as Kyle’s ability to walk diminished.

These were extraordinary dogs–you would have thought so too. They just happened to have been ours.

Grace Corradino is a year-round resident of Saltaire. She is a NYS licensed real estate broker and the owner of Fire Island Living Real Estate.