Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (42 page)

Of eight puppies, he was the worst in the class.

Where did I go wrong?

We were supposed to learn to Sit, but all Little Tony would do was Jump Up. We were supposed to learn Watch Me, but all he did was Watch Everybody Else. When it came to Take It, as in, wait until the command to eat his treat, he skipped the waiting part and went straight to That Tasted Great, Gimme More.

I should have known it would go bad from the beginning, at playtime. How can you flunk playtime? All puppies do is play, chew, and fart.

And he’s very good at two of those things.

But at playtime, while all the puppies chased each other in a circle, nosed tennis balls around, or tugged pull toys, Little Tony sat shaking under my chair, his brown eyes round as marbles. If he was learning Look Terrified, he would have gotten an A plus.

The teacher tells me this will get better, but I’m hard pressed to understand a dog who acts terrified in public and, at home, morphs into Little Tony Soprano.

Oh wait.

Maybe that’s human, after all.

It got me thinking that it would be useful if we could send people to puppy kindergarten. How great would it be to have your toddler Sit and Stay For Just Five Minutes?

And everybody wants a husband who can Watch Me. Too many husbands are only good at Watch Basketball. And too many wives are only good at Watch Out.

All most people want is a little attention. If we could just get people to Watch Me, then all manner of acting out could be eliminated. Lindsay Lohan would vanish from the tabloids. Paula Abdul would spontaneously combust.

I’d love to expand the curriculum, too. I wouldn’t mind a guy who obeyed Listen To Me. Or better yet, Tell Me I’m Thin. And I’m sure that men can think of a number of commands they’d like women to obey, but I’m guessing that they’re unprintable.

Also the teacher at the obedience school told us that it follows the principles of Nothing in Life is Free. They mean this literally. Nothing-in-life-is-free even has its own website,
NILIF.com
, and ironically you can go visit it, for free.

I grew up hearing that nothing in life is free, but that turned out not to be true. Plenty in life is free. Going for a walk is free. Hugging is free. Money is free, if you’re AIG.

Anyway, the bottom line of nothing-in-life-is-free for dogs is that you have to figure out what your puppy loves, and every time before you give it to him, you have to make him do something you want, like sit, stay, or please God stop having accidents all over the rug.

It seems kind of hardcore, for a puppy whose black-and-tan coat makes him look like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup with legs.

So I tried nothing-in-life-is-free on Little Tony, because
we’re supposed to practice. One of Little Tony’s favorite things, after anything edible, is sitting on my lap on the couch. Every night after dinner, the puppy will actually run to the couch, plop his tush on the floor, and wag his tail like a windshield wiper.

Adorable.

Except that I work a lot, so if I’m sitting, I’m writing a book on a laptop, with the TV on. Now I have a puppy who’s a laptop, but it’s fun to type over a puppy head and my lap is warm at all times. Okay, maybe the space bar gets hit a thousand extra times, and my chase scenes are way too mellow, but it’s a small price to pay.

I may switch to greeting cards.

Anyway, I tried to get Tony to obey Watch Me so we could sit on the couch, but no luck. He watched the other dogs, the cats, and even
Dancing With The Stars
. I tried for half an hour, then gave up. Meantime, he collapsed into an exhausted sleep, spreading out like melted chocolate, and I got no work done. My lap stayed cold, and I even missed
Castle,
a TV show about the exciting life of a bestselling writer.

Castle doesn’t have a dog.

Poor thing.

So I’m in New York, visiting daughter Francesca for the weekend, which is just the thing to remind you that your child is more adult than you.

She drinks stronger coffee, wears high heels with style, and could put on liquid eyeliner, blind. Me, I’d blind myself with liquid eyeliner.

We tool around the bustling streets, talking and walking with our two puppies in tow, Pip and Little Tony. We pick up after them, which is a change for me, because at home I let them go in the backyard and call it compost.

Little Tony, unaccustomed to life in the big city, alternates between barking and cowering. His threat detector is topsyturvy, so he growls at passing mastiffs while pigeons send him scurrying in terror to my feet. I try to not to reward fearful behavior, but it’s nice to still have something left to protect.

My daughter is on her own.

And it’s a good thing, but surprising.

All the things I used to do for her over the years, she now does for herself. I know it sounds obvious but it’s still miraculous to me, if only because I can remember her first step. Now she does her own laundry, cooking, vacuuming, clothes to the dry cleaner, hanging up pictures, bed-making, getting prescriptions
filled, and all of it, in the toughest, and most glorious, city on the planet.

New York doesn’t intimidate her, even though the first week she was there, she witnessed a violent mugging on her street, a purse-snatching during which the woman’s jaw was broken. A TV news crew arrived on the scene and interviewed Francesca, and she sent me the videotape from the station’s website. Great.

Welcome to New York.

And it’s time to let go. Again.

I’ve written before about how parenting is watching your child take a series of baby steps, all of them away from you, which is as it should be. It’s both the happiest and saddest moments in the life of any mother and father. And it only gets harder, by which I mean, if you think letting them go to college was hard, try letting them move to New York, where it’s not always easy for the puppies to tell the pigeons from the mastiffs.

Last night before bed, Francesca showed me a video game she plays on her BlackBerry, in which you make as many words as you can in thirty seconds, and as you get better, you advance through different seasons while the screen changes from winter to summer and back again. I normally hate video games, but I couldn’t resist cuddling up with my big little girl, watching the seasons change in our hands.

My high score was 45. Hers was 4350.

For once, I’m not exaggerating.

I think we moms and dads play a sort of parental video game, where we complete one year to advance to the next, and all the time the years get harder and the little video rewards of fake-gold treasure chests or kelly-green shamrocks flash on the screen only to evaporate instantly, too fast to see. And so we tend to appreciate them in retrospect only, when the game is over and we play I Remember.

I remember your first word. Your first step. Your college graduation.

I remember because when we were making the memories, we were too busy to see, much less savor, the moment.

That’s how we know we were good parents. Because we were too busy doing the laundry, cooking, vacuuming, clothes to the dry cleaner, hanging up pictures, bed-making, getting prescriptions filled, and, well, you get the idea.

People ask me where I get the ideas for my columns and books, and the answer is that they all come from my heart. I even wrote an entire book,
Look Again,
about the letting go of a child. In the book, a mother gets a missing child flyer in the mail, and the photo looks exactly like her adopted son. She has to answer the question—does her son really belong to another family, and if he does, should she keep him or give him up?

Oh, and by the way, she writes for a living.

I write what I know.

And what you know, too.

I am on tour for my new book, so I asked daughter Francesca to help me out, as she explains below: