Retrieving Isaac & Jason

By Elliott Flies Foster

In this heartwarming tale, Kai the Minnesota-born yellow Labrador Retriever recounts how she and her two dads adopted her human brothers. With a unique canine perspective, we learn about the arrival of Isaac in 1999 and then Jason in 2002. Relying on her innate ability to see things through the eyes of obedient devotion known only to a young yellow lab dog, Kai delivers a gift of love through her words and stories that will make readers laugh and cry as they follow Kai's amazing journey to create her own pack. Proceeds from this book will go to The Sharing Foundation, a non-profit organization which empowers young lives in Southeast Asian orphanages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elliott Flies Foster
• Release date: Mar 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9780985489724

Elliott Flies Foster

Elliott is a writer with a passion for stories connected to the people and places of the upper Midwest. He grew up in the Twin Cities but spent his summer vacations camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, visiting his cousins in the hill country in the southeast corner of the state, and as often as possible at the family cabin in the Chippewa National Forest. These are the settings that have inspired many of his works. In addition to "Retrieving Isaac & Jason," Elliott's debut novel "Whispering Pines - Tales From a Northwoods Cabin" was published by Wise Ink Press in 2015. He has also written numerous short stories and essays, including works published in The Huffington Post, Plainview News, and in Southern California's Daily Journal. He is is currently working on a new novel, "In the Heart of Everett Falls," a coming of age story set in far northern Minnesota near the Superior National Forest. He lives in St. Paul with his family, traveling often to the varied, far reaches of the upper Midwest, always in search of the next story worth telling.

Book preview

A boy and his dog make a glorious pair

No better friendship is found anywhere,

For they talk and they walk and they run and they play

And they have their secrets for many a day;

And that boy has a comrade, who thinks and who feels

Who walks down the road with a dog at his heels.

He may go where he will and the dog will be there

May revel in mud and his dog will not care,

Faithful he’ll stay for the slightest command

And bark with delight at the touch of his hand;

Oh, he owns a treasure which nobody steals

Who walks down the road with a dog at his heels.

No other can lure him away from his side

He’s proof against riches and station and pride,

Fine dress does not charm him and flattery’s breath

Is lost on the dog, for he’s faithful to death;

He sees the great soul that the body conceals

Oh, it’s great to be young with a dog at your heels.

—Edgar Guest

prodogue

My name is Kai, or so I’m called. Officially, with the American Kennel Association, my full name is Kai (pronounced like hi), Waters of the Sea. I really had no choice in the matter, come to think of it. They just showed up one day at the little kennel next to the big white house where I was born, asked a lot of personal questions about my lineage, and peered at me and my siblings like some sort of governmental inspectors. Being the boldest of the brood, I decided to go check them out first. Bounding across the yard, I bumped right into the blonde one before I could really stop. A mere six weeks old, I wasn’t fully up to speed on all of my important functions quite yet. I sniffed them thoroughly and determined that they weren’t from around here. They had no fine country odor or farm-fresh scent. I fixed that pretty quickly by peeing in the dark-haired one’s lap.

Despite their big city smell, I decided right then and there to adopt these two wayward souls and form our own new pack, or family as they call it. These dads obviously needed mentoring on the important things in life, such as digging up flowers in the garden, chasing pesky felines, and cuddling up with a fresh rawhide chew next to a roaring fire. My first challenge was finding us a place to live. My mom’s kennel was certainly too crowded, what with my seven brothers and sisters constantly yelping and falling over each other in their collective effort to get fed. Luckily, after a rather long car ride, we found a nice house in the town of Minneapolis. We retrievers are good hunters, as you may know, whether it be for waterfowl or a good place to call home.

I immediately set about re-initiating the house into a proper canine dwelling. I set up several comfortable sleeping places—on the cool basement floor for hot and sultry summer days, in the upstairs bedroom surrounded by mounds of blankets for those chilly winter nights, and in a strategic living room location where I keep constant watch over the front and back doorways. There was much more space in this house than I was used to. Quite a bit of territory for a six-week-old puppy like myself to guard.

I also undertook the Herculean task of training my two dads to let me outside at the right moment before my yet-to-mature bladder let loose on the kitchen floor. These two proved quite trainable. After not too many accidents, they learned to let me outside as soon as I would head toward the back door and whimper. Who says you can’t teach old humans new tricks?

That was several years ago now and much has changed. I’ve grown quite a bit, trained my dads well, and live a pretty comfortable life here along the banks of a great river. They call it the Mrs. Ippi, or something like that. I think it’s named after that snooty woman with the ugly poodle-schnauzer mix up on 36th Street.

I decided to record the events of the past few years because they have been so strange. I should have known something was up when my dads began spending long evenings filling out endless forms relating to their finances, health, and fitness to raise a child. adoption, they called it, whatever that meant. I’ve since learned that adoption is a process by which families of destiny find each other, kind of like when I adopted my two dads back in 1997. We were also visited on a few occasions by some lady they called a social worker. She was nice and all, but kind of nosy about some pretty personal details, if you ask me. I guess all of these strange goings-on related in some way to the arrival of a tiny new person to our house (and later, another one). Believe you me, it has really shaken up the normal routines of my life in many ways.

And so I am sharing with you this intimate diary of the events leading up to the separate arrivals of two little boys, my brothers. Lord knows my dad has no time to write anymore, what with all that diaper changing and baby rocking. So it is up to me, as usual, to take upon myself another important task. I’ve already cornered the market in our house on chasing squirrels, barking at phantom noises, and chewing the excess paper off of that funny looking roll next to the giant water bowls they call toilets. How much can they expect a dog to do and still get 16 hours of daily sleep?

So please bear with me as I try to recall what has transpired before my own eyes and to re-tell the things I did not witness but which were told to me in excruciating detail. All in all, it has been an amazing journey. Aside from a few bumps and bruises from some rather intense stick chasing and ball retrieving that I endured last summer, these were the years that I adopted my third and fourth persons and, as I have come to find out, my best friends. I have done my doggoned darndest to tell a fair and impartial story, but you can expect that my version of these important events might be flavored with a bias towards the more important things in life: a good morning run, two regular feedings per day, and plenty of naps. After all, this really is a dog’s life, and my dads and little brothers are lucky to share in it.

1

retrieving isaac

1

an auspicious beginning

My tale begins in March, 1999 when two seemingly independent events, half a world apart, took place almost simultaneously. One of these events was nothing less than tragic, the other purely coincidental. My granddad refers to this confluence as ironic while I prefer to label it fate.

There is a small village named Kandal, in a faraway place they call Cambodia, a beautiful place, full of lush vegetation and legions of my fellow creatures: bears, elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers, wild oxen, and leopards. Cambodia’s inhabitants enjoy their days among vast rice paddies, thinly forested plains, and large hills called the Elephant Mountains. There is also a great river flowing through Cambodia near the village of Kandal. The Mekong is an immense source of fish and a life-sustaining force for the people along its banks. My canine encyclopedia revealed that there are twice as many people in Cambodia than there are here in Minnesota. Unfortunately, there were no statistics on the number of Labrador Retrievers there.

It struck me from my research that life for the people of Cambodia is a bit tougher than here in Minnesota, surviving upon the essentials of life and struggling to overcome widespread poverty. A stunning result of that poverty and the difficulty of life there is the fact that one in five Cambodian children do not live past the age of five. On the other hand, I learned about the rich history of the Cambodian people. The Khmer culture is thousands of years old. They created spectacular structures of unique architecture. We have a painting of one of those structures in our house in Minneapolis. It’s called Angkor Wat and is one of the largest temples in the world covering several square miles. At top speed, I’m sure that I could cover the whole place in less than ten minutes.

My canine encyclopedia also says that most people in this country are very polite, friendly, and modest, other than a group of ruthless people they call the Khmer Rouge that ruled Cambodia during the early 1970’s. Cambodians greet each other much more respectfully than I’ve ever seen done here. The Khmers press their hands together as if in prayer, then bow to greet one another, and always remove their shoes before entering each other’s homes. My dads are already keen on that custom in our house. They make me wipe my feet off thoroughly whenever I return from a walk through a particularly fresh and perfectly wet mud puddle.

On March 18, 1999, a woman from the Kandal village, whom I’ve never met, gave birth to beautiful twin boys, one of them named Kosal. They tell me the name means clever or magical in the Khmer language. I would later learn that the name bestowed upon this child was a perfect fit. Life in rural Cambodia, albeit beautiful, is difficult. There are none of the modern social conveniences or resources that my dads have always known, such as fast-food restaurants, public transportation, and hospitals. Tragically, due to complications during childbirth and the lack of immediate medical care, the mother and one of the twin boys died.

Because the rural village of Kandal was so far from a commercial center where the father could purchase baby formula and because even this clever child would soon become malnourished or even starve without his mother’s breast milk or an appropriate substitute, the father had to make an incredible and completely unselfish decision. He began a long walk from Southern Cambodia, making his way north to the city of Phnom Penh. There, he found the Cham Chou orphanage and a lovely, caring woman named Nalie. She warmly welcomed the grieving father, a strong yet broken man who had just lost the love of his life as well as a newborn son and who was about to relinquish his surviving baby boy to those who could care for the child best. Nalie gently received young Kosal in her arms and vowed that he would grow to become a great man someday with the help of another family who would love and care for him as much as his first.

* * *

That same day on the other side of the globe I was getting pretty anxious. I distinctly overheard one of my dads say the word walk and I knew, this being a Saturday and all, that we were likely headed for our favorite hiking place, Kinnickinic State Park just across the river in Wisconsin. For some reason, though, our departure was inexplicably delayed. No one gathered the requisite gear: leash, tennis ball for me to fetch, and a bowl of drinking water. Boy, these dads sure know how to frustrate a girl dog. I did my best conveying my desire to go, whining incessantly near the blonde one. I call him the leader because he is clearly the master of our house, me being a close second.

In response to my whining, I got the expected reaction. The leader barked something sharp to me and said that we could depart in half an hour, when the dark-haired one finished writing. So I went in search of the writer, as I call him, checking out the exact time on the kitchen clock and making a mental note that if we were not in the car and park-bound within thirty minutes, I would justifiably chew some holes in the leader’s new slippers. I found the writer in his basement office, clicking away furiously at his keyboard and stopping only momentarily to give me a patronizing pat on the head. As usual, I responded with a patronizing lick of the hand before resuming some necessary whining. Dads are so easy to manipulate. Though it can be rather pathetic, most of the time I just get a good chuckle out of it.

I hopped onto the big lazy chair next to the writer’s desk and pretended to take forty winks while I kept one eye open monitoring his composition. And here is where the fate, or irony if you will, arose. It was March 20, 1999 and my dad wrote the following entry in his infrequently kept diary:

Today is the first day of Spring, a time of renewal and hope, a time of sheer excitement for good things to come—warmer weather, longer daylight hours, and beautiful flowers. And there’s much more. This story is the most anticipated and exciting tale I can imagine because it is the story about creating a unique family. I am writing to record and retell for my son how his fathers and dog (Kai) began our search for him, to create a single family unit of love, support, and commitment.

We have talked for a couple of years now about the idea of having a child. Being a same-sex couple sort of makes that a challenge, biologically speaking. We are so excited at the idea of adoption, of creating a family. Though we have few preconceptions about what our child will be like, both Randy and I agreed that a boy suits us best. After all, what do we know about girls and how on Earth would we teach them about all the things unique to becoming young women?

We’ve focused our search on the five countries where single men are allowed to adopt. Yes, one of us will have to adopt as a single man, before bringing our son home to re-adopt him together as a couple, since no country outside of the U.S. will allow a same-sex duo to adopt a child. The five countries include: Russia, the Ukraine, Guatemala, Vietnam and Cambodia.

We only briefly entertained the idea of a domestic U.S. adoption, before deciding that we didn’t want to endure the associated uncertainties. As explained to us by various adoption counselors, adopting a baby domestically would entail assembling a profile of ourselves and then hoping that a woman would choose us as the parents for her yet-to-be-born baby. For whatever reason, we simply felt called all along to look abroad for the baby who would become our child.

There is much to tell and yet so much more to discover in the coming months. Yet, I will endeavor to record for my son, whom I am so longing to meet, the story of our coming together as a chosen family.

Thank God he didn’t write the entire book right then and there. Instead, he mercifully halted typing, turned off the computer, and began gathering our hiking gear. Irony, my paw. This was clear and simple fate. We were a family of destiny and it was just a matter of time. We would all discover in six months that his inspiration for starting this story occurred on the very same day that little Kosal was being lovingly carried to the Cham Chou orphanage by his birth father.

Kai walk? To the Park? In the woods? he asked me repeatedly, with an excitement in his voice so endearing that I simply responded with a bevy of non-verbal Yippies. What is with these dads when they speak to dogs anyway? Do they forget how to form complete sentences? Where do all the verbs go?

We were soon driving east, out of Minnesota and across the beautiful St. Croix River Valley into Western Wisconsin. The leader pointed out several antique stores and whined whenever the writer said that he must wait until the ride home to do any browsing. We arrived at the state park and proceeded to hike and run through the woods with abandon. About halfway through our adventure, as I was unearthing a particularly aromatic tree branch, it occurred to me that I didn’t fully comprehend what the writer had composed earlier in the day. A son? Who exactly was that? I am a girl and there are no other creatures living in our house. I made another mental note to do some research when we returned home and to continue monitoring his computer entries and secretive blue notebook in order to uncover whatever the writer was up to. The leader would surely reward me with whatever scheme my investigative nose might uncover.

 * * *

I really enjoy Sundays. It is the one day of the week that my dads seem to partake in the sleeping-in ritual. No alarm clocks, no one bounding out of bed at an undogly hour to commence Saturday morning projects. Instead, Sundays seem to be the day around this house for dozing a little later than normal, awakening only in time for a quick bite to eat before my dads leave for a place called church. Their Sunday morning trips without me provide a good opportunity for a bit more sleep before we head out for our afternoon walk along the banks of Mrs. Ippi’s river.

Upon returning home this particular Sunday, the writer immediately changed clothes and headed to his basement office. Oh, brother. Just as the sun shone warmly through the master bedroom window onto the bed and my fully outstretched body, I picked myself up, and snuck down to the easy chair in the den to monitor what he was writing this time. My careful investigation was indeed a hassle, but certainly worth the plethora of treats I would undoubtedly receive from the leader once the story broke wide open. He wrote:

Today in church we shared with some of our fellow church members the good news of our plans to adopt a baby boy. All were very excited and eager to hear more. After moving here from California, we began searching more earnestly for a church to call home. We found a warm and inviting place with people of all ages, including many children. It is also an open and affirming church where gay and lesbian members and their families are as welcome as anyone. We hope this proves to be a nurturing, positive place for our child to grow as a young, spiritual person. We are already confident that this church is a good place for Randy and me to come together with others who love God to have fellowship and serve Jesus Christ.

Religion, spirituality, and faith are so very important to us and we will do everything in our power to support our son in his own unique spiritual journey through life. Lord knows we have each traveled many rocky miles on our own respective journeys. Without imposing our own spiritual choices on our son, we will do our best to be moral, upstanding, and spiritually open-minded parents.

Oh great. In addition to this mysterious son whom they intend to love and bring into our home, they’re also planning to love and serve two guys named God and Jesus Christ as well? Good Lord, where are all of these people going to sleep? If they think that I am going to share my lambswool covered bed with strangers, they had better think again. As a Labrador, my demeanor is pretty welcoming and friendly, but a girl has her limits.

2

the arrival of pooh, tigger, and a rabbit named bugs

The first significant evidence of change occurred the very next day. Monday, March 23, 1999. Following an arduous day guarding the house and catching up on sleep from a weekend full of walks, the leader and writer arrived home from work earlier than usual and frantically began cleaning the house. Now, you must understand that these two are generally tidy individuals. This particular day, however, brought some serious, deep cleaning. Floors were scrubbed, shelves dusted, carpets vacuumed and, to my utter disgust, my little lambswool-covered bed was laundered and shaken clean. Do you know how long it takes to accumulate a hearty dog-scent back into that kind of fabric?

They even moved an often-used wine rack down to the darkest corner of the basement. I figured that the church’s Pastor must be coming over for dinner. At the stroke of 6:30 the doorbell rang and I hurried to greet pastor Dave at the door. To my great surprise, it wasn’t the good preacher, but a friendly young woman who patted me on the head and introduced herself as the social worker with two first names and two last names. I quickly discerned her to be someone of great importance since I had never heard of a human with four names. Two are bad enough. I will never understand the constant human instinct to complicate matters.

My dads seemed to know the young woman, but this was certainly her first visit to our house. The social worker took a brief tour of the house making notes about this and that, a behavior which I deemed rather invasive and impolite. My dads didn’t seem to mind however and even encouraged her to inspect those areas freshly cleaned less than an hour earlier. The tour lasted a short ten minutes and I sensed that the leader was a bit disappointed. She didn’t even want to see the basement where he spent an hour dusting spider webs from the ceiling.

The humans all settled into the living room, each one taking a seat in a chair or the overstuffed sofa. Of course, I am not allowed to sit on this fancy furniture, which is just fine with me. If only they would reciprocally agree to leave my dog bed alone, the arrangement might be a bit more equitable. But, like with most things, I do not complain. I soon gleaned from their conversation that the social worker was conducting some sort of interview. What is their religious background? Who are their role models? How do you intend to discipline your child? What do you do in your spare time? How has your life changed by adopting Kai? What? Me? I then paid closer attention, checking how truthful they would be. All in all, my dads passed the examination with flying colors for the social