Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings (6 page)

During the months and months I underwent cancer treatments, I went to work as often as I could. When I was home, Rich tried to take time from his work, too, and we took long walks in nearby Carl Schurz Park. Being outside always made me feel better, no matter what the weather was like. It also gave us plenty of opportunity to dog watch and get a sense of different breeds.

Carl Schurz Park, home to Gracie Mansion, where New York City’s mayors usually live, is up against the East River. It is one of New York’s hidden treasures. The park is small, with an active corps of volunteers who hold a neighborhood tree lighting and caroling event at Christmastime and tend to its bright yellow daffodils and purple irises in the spring and its cosmos and black-eyed Susans in summer. Just when the heat is beginning to feel as though it has run its course, volunteers erect a giant movie screen on the roller hockey rink for a crowd overflowing onto the basketball court and, as night falls, show classic movies, like
Annie Hall
and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
. All kinds of people show up: babies asleep in their carriages and their exhausted parents, older people in need of company, teens looking for a night out, and dog owners who arrive with their dogs.

In fact, the park is seemingly always filled with people walking dogs along the promenade that runs next to the river. By fall, Rich and I were stopping people who had dogs of a certain type at the end of the leash—ones with moxie or that seemed especially sweet or playful.

Rich was by now so enthusiastic about getting a dog for Michael that he didn’t hesitate to approach strangers to ask about their dogs. We developed a list: beagles, Cotons, Labradoodles, spaniels, Westies, cockapoos. They were all under consideration.

In this endless parade of dogs, it was hard to miss how well cared for they were, and how beloved they were to their owners. The dogs we met in the park were just as likely to be companions for people living alone, widows, and widowers, as they were for bustling families with children. We met a number of young couples yet unable to commit to each other but who nonetheless, together, had committed to a dog. Some dogs sat right up on the benches alongside their owners watching the boats go by on the river.

Rich and I would go home and tell Michael and Caroline about the wonderful dogs we had just met.

I thought surely Michael would want a Westie. But, in the end, the decision was easy. He told us he wanted a toy poodle, just like Rocket, the neighbor’s dog he had fallen in love with years ago and who still lived three floors above.

We dreamed of and talked animatedly and incessantly about the puppy that would join our family after the long slog of treatments for stage II breast cancer came to an end. We window-shopped in our neighborhood’s many pet supply stores; Michael planned the spot in his room where his dog would sleep.

Despite my enthusiasm, a couple of times when I felt exhausted from the treatments, I started to second-guess myself about the dog. But a friend and colleague, Connie Hays, who was suffering from a form of cancer far deadlier than mine, urged me on. She had three kids and made caring for and walking a dog sound as time-consuming as taking out the trash. Knowing more about life than I, she wisely said: “You won’t regret doing it. But you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t.”

Connie was one of those women who was able to balance it all—work, children, a husband, and charity work. She skied. She cooked. She knit. She ran a marathon not long before she was diagnosed with cancer. She had even managed to write a book about the history of Coca-Cola based on her experience covering the company for
The Times
. She was tireless.

As she lay dying, she made her husband, John, buy me a book:
The Art of Raising a Puppy
, by the Monks of New Skete, a group of monks who live in a monastery in upstate New York where they breed German shepherds. From the quiet of their lives, they have created an all-consuming method of training puppies that is best characterized as firm and loving with no yelling. It is not unlike books on parenting.

I read the book cover to cover in one sitting. It left me less interested in raising a puppy than in going to live the monastic life in the mountains where time stretched eternally and patience was an instinct. The lessons in the book seemed unreachable for me. The whole process seemed to require reservoirs of time and patience, two things in very short supply in my life. Even the chapter on city dogs didn’t seem to consider the frenetic pace of city life. Our life was anything but placid. There must be other books.

Sometime in late October, with just a few weeks of radiation treatments to go, I called Lisa Cannarozzo, a breeder of toy poodles in Florida and the same breeder from whom the Simons had gotten Rocket. Serendipity played its hand. “I only have one little red boy right now,” Lisa said. As it turned out, he was Rocket’s half brother. It was meant to be. Rich would have to accept that we were going to have a little red dog, not a black one.

“He’s so affectionate,” she said. “He was born on July 5, so he’s still very much a puppy, and he’s just wonderful.” My own birthday is July 6.

Lisa sounded more like a proud parent than a breeder trying to sell me a dog. “He’s so smart, he can already hold it in all night,” she said. Then came the sell: “We thought he’d be one of our show dogs, but his ears are too big, which just makes him cuter, really. I’m not sure, though; I promised him to a family in Chicago. If you think you really want him, tell me right away and I’ll see about the other family.”

Lisa didn’t know that she didn’t have to sell me on his good looks. Being a show dog was of no interest to me one way or the other. For all I cared, he could have had no ears. It was the part about being so affectionate that mattered to me. I just wanted to be sure Michael was getting a dog who would love him back. By the time Lisa and I got off the phone, the Chicago family had been put off. “I’m not sure they were all that serious,” Lisa said. “You can have him.”

Kismet. It was meant to be. The conversation with Lisa had a fated quality to it. This was our dog. This was the dog of our fantasies, the dog who had gotten my son through the scare of seeing me go through cancer treatments. I couldn’t wait to meet him.

From the time we told Michael he was getting a dog, he had been considering all sorts of names, discussing his list with his friends. He considered naming our dog Chip, after Chip Cody, the surgeon who had removed the cancerous tumor from me. He thought about “Spunky Overboard,” the delighted words of unknown origin he squealed when as a very little boy he sent Matchbox cars careening down a four-foot plastic mountain. “Gacky,” another possibility, was Michael’s imaginary friend who lived in the Central Park carousel when Michael was three. There was Zeus (the suggestion of Michael’s friend Jack), Kayak, Cisco, Skippy, Guacamole, and Tuck.

But once we saw our puppy on the Calisa Poodles’ website, Michael had no doubt that the sweet, doe-eyed, adorable, seemingly mischievous, auburn-colored puppy was “Huck,” a seeker of adventure, like Mark Twain’s immortal character. The whole family was in love.

In preparation for Huck’s arrival, which was to be over the Thanksgiving weekend, just days after my last radiation treatment, Lisa and I spoke endlessly. I soon realized that she and her husband, Joe, were themselves in love with our soon-to-be Huck and were having a tough time letting go of him. Lisa kept referring to him as her “love bug,” and I began feeling bad about taking him away.

I kept picturing Lisa and Joe in their home in Florida, surrounded by little red poodles, talking to them the way some people speak to toddlers. “Now let Daddy alone.” I started wondering what it was like to actually breed dogs. I think I had read too many of Michael’s picture books when he was a little boy. I assumed the dogs lived in a barnlike structure and Lisa and Joe lived in a house. Lisa straightened me out. “Oh no, we’re all here as one big happy family in the same house,” she said. “That little love bug watches TV with Joe every night.”

I sent Lisa a check; she sent me a long list of dog paraphernalia to buy in advance of Huck’s arrival—shampoo, dog nail clippers, chicken and rice puppy food, ear cleaner, doggie toothbrush, Pepto-Bismol, nutra-cal tube food, and a water bottle. At the bottom of the list of instructions, in capital letters and underlined in red marker, was the message:

ALWAYS HOLD FIRMLY! NEVER ALLOW
OFF LEASH IN AN UNFENCED AREA!

Lisa and Joe were caring, devoted breeders. I felt lucky we had found our way to them. It was only after all of the arrangements had been made that I learned of the world of rescue dogs from a friend. We probably would have adopted a dog instead of buying one from a breeder if I had realized it sooner. But still, I was confident fate had brought us to Huck.

We counted down the months, the weeks, and finally the days until Huck’s arrival. A couple of weeks before he was to join our family, on a bright day in early November, Rich, Michael, and I went out to visit Auntie Babs and her family in Ramsey, New Jersey. On our way, we stopped at The Dog Boutique in nearby Allendale to buy everything on Lisa’s list and then some. Michael picked out a bed for Huck, toys, several brightly colored leashes, bowls, and a sweater for the cold. He found a mat to put underneath the bowls that said “I love my dog.” His face aglow, his smile from ear to ear, his dimples seemingly more pronounced than usual, he showed me the mat and said: “Isn’t this just perfect, Mom?” Michael was elated. So were Rich and I.

The day after Thanksgiving, Lisa put Huck in a crate and onto a plane bound for Newark airport. We had mailed her one of Michael’s socks to put in the crate, so he could get used to Michael’s scent, and to be a comfort on the plane ride.

Huck was scheduled to arrive at Continental’s Terminal C in the QUIKPAK office. Lisa warned us to resist temptation and not open the crate until we were safely home, lest Huck bolt from the crate and out of the airport. “They’re like little jackrabbits,” she laughed. “You gotta watch ’em.”

Flight 1410 left Sarasota at 11:05 in the morning. We left our apartment even earlier. Under normal circumstances, it is about an hour’s drive to Newark airport, but we were worried about the crush of Thanksgiving travelers.

To our surprise, there was little traffic, and we were at the QUIKPAK office with hours to spare. For Michael, all of the longing of his young life, the craving to hold and to hug his own dog, was about to be satisfied by a five-pound puppy with big ears and a disposition nearly as sweet as his own. We paced. We squirmed in the stiff, plastic, unforgiving seats in the terminal, just outside the office. We tried to think of games to play to speed the wait. We played Geography and then I’m Going on a Picnic.

I started. “I’m going on a picnic and I am bringing chocolate chip cookies.”

Then Michael picked it up. “I’m going on a picnic and I am bringing chocolate chip cookies for us and a dog treat for Huck.”

Then Rich. “I am going on a picnic and I am bringing chocolate chip cookies, a dog treat for Huck, and watermelon.”

Back to me. “I am going on a picnic and I am bringing chocolate chip cookies and watermelon and um, uh, um …”

“A treat for Huck, Mom. You forgot Huck,” Michael admonished.

I don’t know if it was the excitement or the chemotherapy fog, but I was already losing I’m Going on a Picnic, and there wasn’t much in the basket.

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there was a lot of activity in the QUIKPAK area. Rich turned to Michael and said, “Mikey, I think Huck is here.”

The three of us dashed into the small office. There, on the floor, was a red crate, plastered with stickers that said
LIVE ANIMAL
. And a handwritten one:

PLEASE DO NOT OPEN. I AM QUICK
.

Michael fell to his knees, looked inside and started talking to Huck through the wire door. “Hello, Huckie,” Michael said softly.

Michael looked up at Rich and me with a smile as he said, “He’s so cute.”

I tried not to cry.

Rich said: “He’s yours, son.”