Don’t believe in destiny? Then don’t read this – it might change your mind.
What would you do if you spotted a big dog wandering alone in a busy traffic intersection? That’s the dilemma Mia Ramos faced as she waited for the bus at McGuinness Boulevard in Brooklyn, on her way to a job interview in Manhattan.
“It was around noon, and I saw this huge, strawberry-blond dog loping around in the street,” the Greenpoint resident recalls, “so I looked around for a person running after the dog, and I saw no person. I was sure he’d get hit by my bus.”
Although she had no experience with dogs, having never lived with one before, Ramos, 28, acted quickly and did the right thing. “I said, ‘Come here, puppy,’ and he came.
“I have to say,” adds the petite, 5-foot-3 brunette, “I was a little afraid when he started running toward me. He looked like he weighed 200 pounds!” It turned out he weighed only 100.
“Needless to say,” Ramos adds with a laugh, “I missed the bus.”
She stopped in a nearby car-rental agency to ask for help. “The dog had on a collar with ID tags from North Shore Animal League,” Ramos explains. A phone call to the Long Island animal shelter revealed that the pooch, a St. Bernard-Chow Chow mix, was named Jojo – and that his owners’ telephone number had been disconnected.
“North Shore said the earliest they could come pick him up was the next day,” she recalls – so she left Jojo with the manager while she ran to the apartment she shares with four roommates, returning a few minutes later with an extension cord to use as a makeshift leash.
After giving Jojo an opportunity to do his business, Ramos prepared to leave for her rescheduled job interview. Not knowing how the dog would respond to her roommates’ two cats, she sequestered him in her bedroom with the door shut tight.
“I got back around 4 o’clock,” she remembers, “and he was really excited to see me.” Ramos spent the rest of the evening walking Jojo around her neighborhood, stopping in stores and asking passersby whether anyone recognized him.
“I figured, if he were my dog, I’d be going stir-crazy looking for him,” she says, but nobody did. “And I’m saying to myself, I hope no one claims him, because I think I’m falling in love with him. I was already thinking about how my housemates and I could make it work with the cats.”
By the next morning, she was completely in love. “He’d spent the night with me in my room, and he was so good and sweet,” she says. “He tried to get in bed with me, but I told him no. And I’m thinking, you know, I didn’t see any ‘Lost Dog’ signs up – what if he gets stuck at the pound and no one comes for him, or somebody else takes him?”
It was too late. At 11 a.m., the buzzer sounded; North Shore’s vehicle was downstairs. “Jojo did not want to get in that car,” Ramos recalls. “So the driver told me to get in, and Jojo jumped right in after me. Then the guy told me to get out of the car. I did, but I felt horrible; I was crying right there. I said, ‘Bye. I’m sorry.’ They slammed the hatch shut, and Jojo stared at me the whole block down. I ran upstairs and cried for an hour.”
Did she regret her decision? “Totally,” Ramos admits. “I thought about him every day, nonstop. I was heartbroken.”
About a month later, Ramos had Jojo on the brain as she walked to the subway to meet friends in Manhattan. “I remember thinking I shouldn’t have let him go,” she says. “I got to the end of the block, and there he was at the corner. I really thought for a second that I was dreaming – or I’d lost my mind. It was really crazy … North Shore is in Long Island. How did he get back here?”
Jojo followed her home without a leash. When she called the shelter, Ramos was told he’d been reunited with his owner. She decided to keep the dog – who, by the way, gets along fine with her housemates’ cats.
One morning about a week later, Ramos was out walking Jojo when a man pulled up in a car. “He said, ‘Excuse me, did you find that dog?'” she recalls. “And I must’ve looked like I was going to bolt for it, because then he said, ‘It’s OK, I just want to talk to you.'”
It turns out Jojo had been abandoned on North Shore’s doorstep four years ago, in the middle of the night. Later, he was adopted by the father of the man in the car. Explains Ramos, “The old man became ill and couldn’t take care of the dog anymore. So his son kept Jojo at his auto-body shop, and he escaped twice.” Of course, that last part she knew already.
“When I said I wanted to keep Jojo, the man offered to give me the dog food he still had at his shop,” Ramos adds. She politely declined the free Alpo. Jojo was, understandably, already addicted to his new diet: Eukanuba kibble mixed with Korean-style sautéed beef, prepared by one of Ramos’ roommates (who nicknamed Jojo “Sun Bear,” after the composite beast of Korean legend that’s part bear and part lion).
Jojo has found his forever home, says Ramos. Immediately after the dog’s former owner drove away, she called up North Shore to notify them of the change of ownership.
“I wasn’t taking any chances, so I made it official,” she says. “Jojo is mine! He’s really reinforced my belief in faith and loyalty and, yes, fate,” she concludes. “I’ve never experienced this kind of unconditional love.”