Lori Hubbard and Jim Esposito are not used to asking for help. But when they did — on behalf of their 15-year-old son, Jimmy, who has a balance disorder, hearing loss, speech delays, and other conditions — the community answered.
Realizing Jimmy would benefit from having a service dog, Ms. Hubbard created a Facebook fund-raiser, hoping to come up with $8,000 toward the $40,000 it would cost to get a dog from 4 Paws for Ability, an Ohio organization that trains mobility dogs for children worldwide.
She put the appeal online on Oct. 19. Within two days, it surpassed $13,000 and was closed.
“We are so humbled and grateful for this support,” Ms. Hubbard said this week. “People I don’t even know were donating. People who were friends of friends. It was just unbelievable. I tried to thank every person.”
Gonzo, the family’s 12-year-old golden retriever, helps her wake Jimmy up for school in the morning. He’s a mood-changer, Ms. Hubbard said.
But she first thought to find a service dog in the summer of 2018, when, at a local beach, Jimmy met another golden retriever, belonging to a kind stranger. The boy and the dog played in the water together for more than an hour.
Jimmy’s future service dog will be either a golden or a Labrador retriever, but it won’t join the family for, at most, another year. The dog must be identified and trained before they can pick it up in Ohio and spend 10 days with its trainers learning how to handle it.
All their son will know, his mother said, is that he’ll have a new best friend. He doesn’t know he’s different from other kids. He loves to ride his adaptive tricycle and sit on benches in downtown Montauk to watch people and cars go by. He’s a happy kid, Ms. Hubbard said, who’s “living his best life.”
“I think a dog is going to open his world so much and bring more people to him,” she said. “Sometimes people don’t know how to talk to Jimmy or to anyone with special needs, but I think everyone can speak ‘dog.’ ”
Jimmy is “a Montauk kid,” she said, but a lot of people don’t know him in Montauk because he goes to school at the Westhampton Beach Learning Center, a Board of Cooperative Educational Services regional school.
“It’s just so uplifting to see all of this support,” Ms. Hubbard said. “This was just such a show of love for Jimmy.”