You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (10 page)

Paul and I are partners and best friends, and every other cliché about a happily married couple, but every time an opportunity with one of these dogs reared its head I would let him know and then wait. I never wanted to push or insist we take a dog. I was willing to do the extra work and bear the bulk of the responsibility but I needed his support to do it. And every time I’d be newly gobsmacked when he said yes. Sometimes I’d be looking at the rescue website and I’d forward him a posting; other times I’d just leave the posting open on my computer. He might not say anything at all, but a day or two later he’d ask, “Did they find anyone to take ‘poor old Travis’?”

“I don’t think so,” I’d say benignly.

And I’d see him wrestling with the idea. He was every bit as much of a softie as I was or more so. The dogs would always win him over.

It was all the more gratifying because Paul hadn’t been a dog person when he met me. My first meeting with Paul was when he was interviewing me for a job on the TV show he produced. At the end of the interview, when he asked me if I had any questions, I said, “Can I bring my dog to work?”

“No!” he said.

“You don’t like dogs?” I asked, trying to figure out where he was going to land in my book of people.

“It’s not that I don’t like them,” he said unconvincingly. “I just don’t think they belong in an office where people are trying to work.”

“Oh.”

Later when we started dating, I told him how I felt about Otto and then I got a sense that he didn’t love dogs. I was sure, though, that given time, he’d come around to love Otto.

Paul remembers that on our first date he brought a little dog ball as a gift for Otto and I dismissed it, saying that wasn’t the kind he liked to play with. After that I felt Paul’s resentment toward Otto. He didn’t like how I rushed out of work to get home to Otto when he wanted to go have dinner with me. We almost broke up over it, and I’m not exaggerating. I think, then, Paul didn’t like Otto. By virtue of being my Otto he was simply in the way. To Paul, I clearly chose Otto’s happiness over his own. Maybe I did. I always felt a greater responsibility to Otto because he depended on me for everything. Or maybe it was just my way of expressing what I needed, giving myself space. Working full-time with someone you’re dating is pretty intense. Still, I wanted Otto and Paul to like each other. My Zen-like method was to let them both find their way to each other. I wouldn’t push it.

Shortly after Paul and I moved in together, he suggested, without malice, that perhaps he (Paul) would sleep on our sofa bed. Otto just took up too much room in the queen-size bed, where he liked to sleep between us with his four stick-straight legs jutting into Paul’s back. Then it finally hit me that I wasn’t being fair. This was Paul’s home and bed, too, and so like my mother did for the dolls that used to crowd my bed at home, I re-created a small version of my bed for Otto right beside me on the floor. His new plush bed came complete with Ralph Lauren comforter. It worked until Paul started to miss Otto and begged him to come back. Otto, in typical magnanimous fashion, humbly relented.

In time, Paul did come around and ended up loving Otto every bit as much as I did. Over the next four years Otto became like our son. Together we came up with dozens of songs about him and no less than forty nicknames of endearment for him. Maybe one or two of them actually came from somewhere, the rest made no sense, but they all meant
“We love you, Otto! You’re #1!”
I believe Otto found most of them undignified but tolerable.

Neither of us ever wanted to be away from him. When our wedding was planned in an indoor facility, it was clear Otto wouldn’t be there. It was Paul’s idea to sculpt a six-inch Otto for the top of the wedding cake. The caterers did a big dramatic unveiling of the dessert table complete with sparklers blazing and the band blaring the cheesy theme to
St. Elmo’s Fire
. There in the center of it all atop four tiers of white ganache and several dendrobium orchids perched the clay Otto with a perfect “You’ve got to be kidding with this” face. Our boy. The guests applauded and cheered. Otto was a hit and he wasn’t even there. In my brother Matt’s speech, he said, “At one point in about 1996 at the end of a date with a guy who wore a toupee and a fedora, who bowed to Julie while saying good night because he knew he never stood a chance, it was around then that I think she began seeing a face in her mind of a person who she could love.” He said, “Before she even met him she knew who this man was, and then she found him, and gave him the name that she’d dreamed of, and that name was Otto.”

It once again made me believe that people could change. We both did, because I also tried very hard to stop acting like it was a given that Otto came first.

 

 

 

 

ON THE WAY
to get Rascal, Violet came along when she found out the rendezvous point was a Toys “R” Us, and Bea came along, too, because she loved a car ride. We had just come out of the store, Violet with a new Dora backpack and candy necklace and ring, when we saw the truck pull up with Rascal in the front seat.

I’d done this many times. The dog would jump out, run over, jump up on me, run back, run over to the grass, pee, and eventually would happily hop in the car. Not this time. Rascal, who was so not a Rascal, shook like no dog I had ever seen. Like Scooby-Doo in a haunted house. Though he didn’t know the woman who brought him well at all, he Velcroed himself to her leg while she was greeting tiny, perfect Beatrice.

Rascal was twice Bea’s size and his markings were all wrong according to breed standard, but he was so, so cute. It was really hard to get him to come over to me, especially with Bea jumping and barking and running around like a lunatic. I finally just took the leash and dragged him into Mattie’s car. I held him on my lap; he was just terrified. There is a certain breath I notice my dogs get when they’re scared, almost chemical-like, and I smelled it strongly coming from him. At some point in the trip, he relaxed a little and started to release some tension. It was like he let himself get heavier.

The first couple of days I e-mailed with the board, I was of the conviction that this Rascal was irreparably damaged. Sheryl told me what I had told other people: “Imagine how he feels. Give him time.”

But it was difficult to have this stricken little fellow who trembled almost constantly and sometimes, like in the elevator, seemed close to passing out from fear. I felt so sorry for him and hated that I just could not get through to him and calm him down.

While Violet was in school I sat with him and talked to him and told him no one would be scaring him anymore. He was safe and loved. After spending some time with him one morning I told Paul I felt strongly that we must change his name. He didn’t respond at all to Rascal, and it was just so totally unsuited to him. He was such a serious guy. He struck me more as a Gandhi. I e-mailed Sheryl to say that I would be changing his name, and she said fine as long as I didn’t name him Buddy or Buster because the database was overflowing with them. But she should know,
I still wasn’t keeping him.

“What’s your name?” I asked him, scratching him behind his ears. He put his muzzle on my lap and from somewhere out in the naming ether it came to me. Moses.

I swear that once he had a new name, his personality changed to go with it. He was a little less nervous, he would let you pet him longer, and wherever I went, he was right there with me. Beatrice was a bit of a loner, so when we were in the apartment she’d be off in our room tucked away in her bed, and Moses mostly had me to himself.

I worried a lot about him. The first two days he did not go to the bathroom at all. I’d call Sheryl while I walked him. “Eventually he will go,” she said. “He’ll have to.” She was right. Finally the third day he peed, one long, long,
long
pee. I didn’t know who was more relieved, he or I. I found myself talking about him all the time. A new foster moving in is always dramatic, but he was also so enigmatic. He didn’t gobble down food or go crazy when he heard a noise. He was a somber, earnest boy. I reread the original post about how he spent all of his time hiding under the couch, and I planted my lips on the top of his very flat head. While doing the dishes one day, I looked down at him. He was staring up at me and I think from that moment on, his eyes never left me.

He started to come into his own—or as much of his own as he could—at about the one-month mark. I noticed that he didn’t shake anymore, and he was absolutely smitten with me. I have to say the feeling was mutual. I would pick him up and put his front legs over my shoulder, his big head right at my face, looking into my eyes, breathing his breath. I would start slow dancing, singing, “Heaven, I’m in heaven ...” Then I’d dip him. Paul would yell, “Get a room!”

We laughed a lot with Moses. He reminded us of Buster Keaton, all deadpan and black-and-white. And he just blossomed like a sunflower. He got a little skip in his step and just the tiniest amount of moxie. He started to bark at other dogs and wag his tail and chase squirrels and even have a little swagger. The feeling we had of taking this dog from under the couch in the trailer and restoring him to the top of the bed was pretty breathtaking. We were very proud of what he was able to accomplish.

Occasionally, ever so slightly, he bit people. Like when my brother came to visit. Matt strode into our apartment and came to give me a hug and Moses jumped up and bit him on the ass. Matt told me later that the only cure for this type of behavior was euthanasia. I told him I didn’t want to make him feel any worse, but I think I’d sooner euthanize him than Mosie. I did have to keep him on a little tighter lead, though. We just had to be extra careful.

So Moses burrowed his way into my heart. I just loved him and it was different from the other dogs. He became my little boy, my fur kid, as Oprah says. He always wanted to be near me. When I worked at the computer, he sat his big body on my lap and put his head on the keyboard. It was okay, I could always use another space in between words. Plus, it represented how far he had come. He had a minor set-back when I took him to get neutered. All the shaking came back. But the vet’s office was absolutely in love with him, and when I came to pick him up the entire staff came out to say good-bye. About a day later he was okay again.

I loved him to the moon and back. I wouldn’t want to compare any other dog, but I did think he was the first dog who came close to being what Otto was to me. I never thought it was possible that once I had an adoring spouse and loving little child, I would still feel the dog love in the same way I did when I was single. But with Moses I began to understand that “dog” was its own category of “love.” Sometimes you just need to hold and kiss a member of the dog species. Even when humans are available.

And with that growing connection, Violet started to turn on him. Just four at the time, she asked with increasing regularity if Moses could go live with Paul’s uncle Dan, who had often talked to us about getting a dog. And then she stopped asking
if
he could go, and she started pointing at days on the calendar that would be good for him to leave. It reminded me of when my friend Mae had a baby girl. Her son often asked if they could send her back to the sky.

“Mom, Moses isn’t going to live here anymore, he’s moving away,” Violet would announce. “We don’t want him here anymore.”

“Your Jedi mind tricks won’t work with me, kid,” I told her. But I tried to make things better. Moses wanted to be the closest one to me. In the evening, Paul and I would read books to Violet before she went to sleep. We would lie on our bed with Violet in the middle of us, but now Moses would jump up and get between her and me. And she’d be shoving him and pushing him and grunting at him to move. He would suction himself to the bed and stare straight ahead as if he were deaf. She grew more frustrated, and he remained stubborn. I wasn’t happy that Violet was having difficulty, but I did think that the simulated sibling conflict might not be a bad thing in the end.

Our schedules had gotten busier. Paul’s workday was longer now and I was doing all of the household, child, and dog chores. I started to feel like walking the dogs punctuated every moment of my life. It sort of reminded me of breast-feeding, in that I was either doing it or heading toward doing it or just finishing doing it. So we hired a dog walker to do one of the shifts. In the evenings, she came in and sat on the floor leashing up the dogs and talking to them in her funny dog voice. “What is this lady doing to me?” she squeaked, as though she were one of them. “I was just fine sitting here minding my own business. I don’t want to put my leg through there! Oh, lady!”

For the sheer fact that she wasn’t me or Paul, Moses didn’t want to go with her. It was always a struggle. She came in one night upset and said Moses had wiggled out of his harness, but she’d been able to grab him before he went into traffic. I’d never had that problem with him before but we tightened up the harness so it wouldn’t happen again.

It was a very chaotic time in our home. I was getting ready for a book publication that involved a tour of eight cities in eleven days. I would also be leaving Violet for the first time in her life, and I’d never even taken an overnight trip away from her. My mother would come to stay with her and Paul and then he’d come out and meet me on the West Coast. We talked about it a lot. I would call all the time, I’d always have my phone with me, and she could have whatever she wanted while I was away. When Paul came to meet me, my mother would take Violet and the dogs up to her house in Vermont, which was near my last tour stop so I’d come and pick her up there. It was so stressful. Not my first book or this development in my life, but abandoning my child. My therapist suggested that this was a good thing for Violet, that she’d probably thrive and would feel very good about herself afterward. It was all being planned and then my dad said no to bringing the dogs up. We’d come there briefly with Moses and Bea at Christmas, and Moses had started fights with my parents’ dogs. He just had no good social experience. Bea had taken on being the alpha at home, but elsewhere, to Moses, it was still up for grabs. I understood my father’s feelings, that they were going to have to deal with little Violet and maybe that was enough. So I decided on the dog walker coming to our apartment to dog-sit. In a distant second place to my concerns for Violet was my fretting for Moses. How would he take our leaving? Would he think we were gone forever? Would he bond more with the dog walker or totally freak out? Clearly, if there’s a more anxious person than me, they are probably sitting in a hospital somewhere. When I finish worrying about one thing, I can go to the list and take my pick of the next.