Random blogs, updates and songs from critically-acclaimed author and musician Lee Harrington

On Being a Female Lead Singer in a (Very) Male Band

2011-12-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

Hello Fellow OSers and Who fans,

To those who don't know me: I am a writer by day (with Random House), and a musician at night, and I happened to sing lead in a band that sings mostly Who songs (with a bit of Led Zeppelin, Stones, U2 etc thrown in...and songs by a solo artist you may have heard of named Pete Townshend). Nothing brings me more joy that singing songs by Pete and The Who. I am sure you can all relate.

Friends and editors have been asking me for a while to start blogging about my experiences singing in a Who tribute band--especially as a woman putting forth and interpreting very male songs. But I held off, thinking there is only so much one can say about interpreting male lyrics and delivering them in a more female way. [ And please note that sometimes I do not even attempt to mimic Roger stylistically and/or note-by-note in certain songs, because in my mind the only woman who can really pull off Roger-at-his-most-Rogeresque (or Robert Plant for that matter) is Janis Joplin, and my voice is quite different from hers. So what I usually do, when I sing the Who at least, is study Pete's demo versions and infuse some of the emotion of those versions into my vocals.]

With Led Zeppelin, I simply stay away from certain songs that would sound preposterous coming from a woman (ie: squeeze my lemon 'til the juice runs down my leg)

And I should mention that my band rocks full-force no matter what. And there's always plenty of sexual energy to channel!

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to share some of my experiences with you. I certainly would welcome your input as to how you personally interpret certain Who songs. And I'd be curious to know how Roger or Pete have varied their vocals in live shows.

I want to honor the band I am serving when I am up there on stage. (And by that I mean I want to honor my own fellow musicians and I want to honor and serve The Who. Because the Who have given so much to me--to us--throughout the years.

I look forward to corresponding with all of you.

Bright Blessings,

Lee

Doggie Halloween Contests - how far will we go to win?

2011-10-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

In honor of my appearance—as a “celebrity judge” at the 17th Annual Tompkins Square Park Halloween Dog Parade in New York City tomorrow (10/22), I thought I would re-post a chronicle of my own experiences forcing my poor dog to wear a costume, and how I became a psycho-stage mother in my desperation to win the contest.

Rex and the City: The Curse of the Three-Headed Dog

There’s nothing like Halloween in New York City. New York is home to some of the most artistic and creative people on the planet, most of whom will jump at any opportunity to put on a show. Consider the city’s eight hundred thousand drag queens, who, just to take a trip out to the deli, will put on seven-inch platforms, a sequined butterfly shawl and a two-foot wig. In the weeks before Halloween, the whole city began to fill with a fizzy, randy excitement. Shop windows were crammed with bondage gear, feather boas, broquaded undies and outrageous wigs, and the window boxes of the West Village overflowed with chrysanthemums and pumpkins and squash—all in their final bursts of color before the decay of the winter set in. And all those flamboyant colors; all those sequins, feathers and rubber masks started to bring out everyone’s inner drag queen. And it was no different for the dog people. There are more that thirty dog runs in the city, and therefore more than thirty annual doggie costume parades.

At that point in time (1998) we had just started taking Wallace to the Tompkins Square Park dog run. Each run in the city has its own flavor and “First Run” as it was called (because it was the first in NYC) was known for 1) the youth of its doggie parents (most were East Village kids in their twenties); 2) the number of pit-bull mixes (most of the young doggie parents adopted pits from the ASCPA in the East 90’s, or found them on the streets); 3) the number of dog-brawls that occurred daily (it was a transient neighborhood, with a lot of new dogs); and 4) The legendary First Run Annual Halloween Costume Contest, which drew the likes of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

When I first saw the sign for this Halloween contest in early October, I felt my entire universe expand. Dogs in costume! At the thought of this, something latent was awakened in me—something ancient and profound. I told my then-husband Ted in no uncertain terms that we had to go to this contest.

“Are you thinking of dressing Wallace in a costume?” Ted asked.

“Absolutely.”

“He’ll hate it.”

“No he won’t.”

Most conversations I had with Ted went like this: yes, no, yes, no, why, because, no, yes, I said no, yes, no, FUCK YOU!

In the case of whether to dress up our dog in a silly costume, I ultimately won. I can’t remember how, actually. Perhaps I had to promise some sort of sexual favor, but it’s hard to say....I’ve blocked it all out.

Anyway, I managed to convince Ted that Wallace wouldn’t mind having to wear a costume. I can’t remember how we came up with the idea, but we had decided to dress him up like a little hiker. I think it all started with this brown wool hippy hat that used to belong to a stoner friend of Ted’s from high school. The hat was handmade in Peru, and slightly pointy on top, and had two strings that you could tie under your chin. Ted had asked me once if I wanted it, but I am much too serious a person to wear silly Peruvian hats. (The hats I wear cost $550 and I never even wear those, because I always buy them on a whim, and they are really only appropriate at English garden weddings, and I have not yet to date been invited to any weddings in the UK.) So anyway, I suggested we put the Peruvian hat on Wallace, just for kicks.

This opened up a can of worms, of course, that determined much of Wallace’s future. For I quickly realized that I got a true and unadulterated pleasure from dressing up my dog. “He looks so cute,” I shouted. “Oh my God. Get the camera.”

“The poor boy,” Ted said. “How humiliating.” But still Ted got the camera.

The rest of Wallace’s Halloween costume quickly fell into place. Wallace already had his own little backpack, for camping trips, and Ted agreed to donate a pair of ratty hiking shorts he’d had for years. He started to have regrets, however, when I spent $30 on a little wool sweater and cut strategic holes in his cherished shorts to accommodate Wallace’s tail and privates, but by then it was too late. The contest was only one day away.

“You’re going overboard,” he said the next morning as I gussied up Wallace. “Everyone else will probably show up with their dogs in cat ears and witch hats.”

“So what?” I said. “This is fun. Plus, we’ll win.” For a final touch, I put a Catskills trail guide in the pocket of Wallace’s backpack, so that there would be no doubt that he was a hiker.

The day itself was one of those perfect fall days you read about: crisp, cool, clear, with the scent of autumn leaves and hot cider donuts lingering in the air. I insisted on dressing up Wallace at the apartment and couldn’t contain my excitement at the cuteness of it all. I started to have visions of Wallace being in the movies, of starring in dog food commercials, of his face gracing millions of cutesy-dog greeting cards. And a photographer from the Times would definitely be at the contest—one came every year. So maybe finally I’d get my picture in that paper. With my award-winning dog.

“Oh my god, he’s so cute!” I said for the millionth time. (If I couldn’t have my own time in the spotlight, then, by God, Wallace was going to have his.) “Will you take a picture of him before we leave? It’s his first party, in his first party suit.”

“Let’s not prolong the torture,” Ted said. “The poor boy.” Admittedly, Wallace did look downtrodden, as if he wished he had nothing to do with the human world. He kept lifting his eyelids, and twisting his head left to right, trying to figure out what was on top of his head. He also tried to pull off the backpack with his mouth, but he couldn’t quite reach.

“Let’s just go!” Ted said.

I enjoyed all the attention we got on our twenty-minute walk to the dog run. “Look at that dog!” people on the sidewalks shouted. “He’s so cute!” All around us, people laughed and pointed and smiled. I basked in their praise; I loved being in the spotlight, even indirectly.

But Ted seemed pained. “He’s such a dignified dog,” he kept saying as we walked through the East Village. “This isn’t right. You’re humiliating him. He’s going to grow up to be a pansy. He’s going to be like Hemingway, who was all screwed up because his grandmother dressed him in girlie clothes.”

“No, he’s not,” I said, undaunted. I stopped to talk to strangers and told everyone cute little anecdotes about Wallace. “He used to be a shelter dog,” I would begin. “And he used to hate us. And he would never let us touch his head. And now look at him with his little hat….”

“Wallace come,” Ted would say, pulling on the leash.

“Wallace was enjoying himself,” I said to Ted when I caught up to him.

“That’s because that woman petting him has a hot dog.”

“No it’s not. It’s because she told him he was cute.”

On and on this went, all the way to the park. It wasn’t until a horde of pretty girls in go-go boots ran up to Ted to ask what kind of dog Wallace was, that the tight, slightly pained look left Ted’s face.

When we reached the grassy area within Tompkins Square Park, Wallace went immediately went into hunting mode. His steps slowed, his torso sank lower to the ground, and his nose twitched with the precision of a sonograph as he picked up subtle scents. You could tell he had forgotten he had a little ski cap on, and a backpack, and a toddler’s sweater and silly shorts. “Look at him stalking those squirrels!” the girls in the go-go boots shouted.

“Poor Wallace,” Ted muttered. “The poor emasculated boy.” But this hadn’t stopped him from bringing along his video camera. He followed Wallace along, zooming in for close-ups, as Wallace crept slowly toward a squirrel.

When we finally reached the dog run, I was astounded at what I saw. You’re always going to find, at every Halloween contest across the country, a lab in Christmas antlers, and one or two Dog-zillas, and a golden retriever in a store-bought Yankees cap. But try to picture a Harlequin Great Dane dressed up as a giant sunflower. Or a matted grey Shitzhu dressed as a mop and accompanied by a short gay man dressed as a frumpy housewife. The costumes were spectacular. There was a shepherd mix in a curly black wig and Gene Simmons makeup, and a tiny leather jacket embossed with the logo: Kiss. There was a couple dressed up like farmers, carrying baskets of produce, and tucked within the vegetables was a tiny Chihuahua in a pea pod costume, shivering nervously the way Chihuahuas do. There were Pit Bulls sporting cow udders, and six Dachshunds spray-painted yellow to look like a bunch of bananas, accompanied by a giant man in a gorilla suit.

“Wow,” Ted said. “I’m impressed.”

“I’m depressed,” I said. One of the great, but also one of the rotten, things about New York City is that no matter how creative you are, no matter how talented or clever or smart, there’s always going to be someone out there who’s smarter and more talented and more creative than you. Every second of every day.

“Look at that costume!” Ted said. And there I beheld my nemesis. Across the run, wearing Gucci sunglasses and surrounded by adoring fans, was a man and his golden retriever, whom he had fashioned into a Three Headed Dog. From a distance the two extra heads looked life-like, and they continued to look life like even as we got close. “How did you do that?” someone asked, through a crowd that was three-people deep. “With Styrofoam,” he explained. “I’m a set designer.” And he went on to describe how he had begun constructing the heads back in August, how he had required his dog, Butterscotch, to pose for an hour each evening as he painted her likeness on the busts, and how it had taken him three weeks to find the best “suspension mechanisms” to attach the heads to Butterscotch’s collar. Then of course he had to go out and find the perfect cape to conceal the suspension mechanisms. And the cape had come from Shanghai Tang ( a high-end Asian boutique on Madison Avenue).

“That shawl had to have cost six hundred dollars,” I said to Ted as we slunk away. “And did you see that they eyes on the Styrofoam heads actually blinked?”

“I’m blown away,” Ted said.

“If I had known people were going to spend six months on their costumes, I would have put more effort into Wallace’s.” I stared at the three-headed dog’s magnificent cape. “I don’t even have socks from Shanghai Tang.”

“But look our puppy, he’s adorable,” Ted said. “And he’s being such a good boy.” Wallace always stayed by our side at the dog run, because he was still intimidated by the presence of so many dogs. “Come on,” Ted said. “Let’s go sign him in.”

When we got to the registration desk, we found out we had to have a name for Wallace’s costume. I hadn’t thought of a name. I thought the costume spoke for itself. To me, Wallace looked like a little hippie kid, a Bates student, a Trustafarian going off on a hike. “How about Happy Camper?” I said to Ted.

And don’t they always say First Thought, Best Thought? Because then, for some reason, I decided that I had needed to have a more literary name. Something more clever and tongue-in-cheek. I thought then of Jon Krakauer, the author of Into The Wild.

“No one is going to know what you’re talking about,” Ted said.

But I reasoned that we were in the East Village, a neighborhood full of artists and writers and tortured souls. Any of the above would certainly have read Into the Wild, which was the “it” book of the moment.

So we—or rather, I—registered Wallace as “Jon Krakauer” and we took our place in line for the parade to begin. Ted gave me one of his looks—one I liked to call “The Crow.”

The contest began by everyone parading their dogs around the perimeter of the run as a group, and then each of the contestants was called one by one. The whole dog run was lined with was lined with giddy onlookers. As each contestant was called forth they hooted and clapped and cheered. The sound of so much applause was uplifting, and I laughing along, but then Wallace’s name was called. The MC said: “And here’s Wallace the English Setter, and he’s posing as, as, um, Jonathan Kra……Jon Cracker?” The crowd, who had just been cheering madly for the Mastiff-as-ballerina before us, now grew silent.

In this void, I told Wallace to heel and we promenaded along. I smiled nervously and fakely, like a beauty contestant finalist who has just found out she was eliminated after just the first round. I tried to make eye contact with Ted, who was out there somewhere with the onlookers, but I couldn’t find him in such a crowd. Then our moment was over. Wallace and I returned to our place in line, and then some other dog’s name was called. “That was our fifteen minutes of fame,” I whispered to the dog. “And it sucked!”

The Three-Headed Dog won of course, soon the dog and his costume designer were mobbed by photographers and fans. Dejectedly, I took off Wallace’s short and backpack, so that he could go and happily hump the ballerina and bite other dog’s necks. “I should have just called him the Happy Camper,” I said to Ted as I stuffed Wallace’s little hiking shorts into my bag. Across the run, I watched people congratulate the set designer. He seemed a bit too proud of his achievements; a bit too smug.

Ted thought the whole thing was hilarious. “Jon Krakauer,” he said over and over again. “Into the Wild!” He trained his video camera onto me and said, “This is Lee pouting because Wallace didn’t win the Halloween contest.”

When he saw that I wasn’t laughing, he said. “Let’s go to Veselka’s and get some lunch.” Ted, like all good city boyfriends, knew that certain restaurants could always cheer certain mopey women up. For me, it was Veselka’s: pirogues (steamed, and stuffed with potatoes, cheese and broccoli), French fries, and a cold Pilsner Urquell on tap.

We leashed up Wallace and headed off. As we were leaving the park, a nice young woman ran up and touched my shoulder. “I thought yours was the best costume.”

“Really?” I turned to her and smiled.

“He should have won first place.”

“Thanks.”

This is one of the wonderful things about New York: for every stranger who has the capacity to ruin your day—whether deliberately or not—there are always two or three more strangers who will extend to you a fresh, pure act of kindness.

“See?” I said to Ted at Veselka’s. “Someone got it. I wasn’t totally out of line.”

“Yes, Lee,” he said. “One in twelve hundred people gets you.” He touched my hand. “Make that two.”

Wallace, as if he understood us, turned around at that moment and looked at us with what we call his “treat face.”

“Make that three,” Ted said.

This is not where the story ends, however, because from that day forward, for the next two years I tried to devise schemes to out-do the Three Headed Dog and his set designer man.

It was now the year 2000 and, much to my disappointment, the world had not ended as everyone kept insisting it would. Thus, I had to continue living my drudgery of a life. I started thinking about Wallace’s costume in early August. Ted and I would be walking along the beach at Fire Island, or hiking in the Hudson Valley, swatting away flies, and I’d say things like, “What do you think of Tommy Hilsetter?”

“What?” Ted would say. “What are you talking about?” He was a serious hiker, who always kept his eyes on the trails, and therefore never really listened to me while he was hiking. Perhaps—and I am seriously just realizing this now, as I write: perhaps this is why he liked hiking so much. It was the only time he could legitimately tune me out.

“For Halloween,” I said. “We could put a little skull cap on him, and really baggy jeans that hang low off his butt. He could be a little ghetto dog.”

“I think that might be offensive,” Ted said. “A lot of kids from the projects play basketball in that park.”

“Well then how about Brittany Spears? We could get Wallace some of those big plastic tits and a shiny pink thong.”

“That’s not very original,” Ted said. “Everyone with a Brittany Spaniel has probably thought of that. Plus, Wallace doesn’t even look like enough of a Brittany to pass as one.”

Up ahead, we could hear that Wallace had flushed out a wild turkey. He let out a war cry and took off through the brush.

“It would be hard to keep a thong on him anyway,” I said.

Eventually—I don’t remember how—I came up with the idea of Dogatella Versace. It was the year Jennifer Lopez had worn that infamous, diaphanous, one-button dress to the Grammys. (And if you don’t know what dress I’m talking about, I can’t help you).

I like to think that the idea came to me in one great creative burst; a flash in which I saw the complete outfit: Wallace in a mini J. Lo dress, with a long blonde Donatella wig, and his white fur tinted to Versace’s creepy shade of tan.

Eureka! My heart began to pound and the area behind my neck began to tingle, as it always does when I have tapped into The Universal Source.

There were two obstacles to expressing my creative inspiration, however. One was convincing Ted that his son needed to be swathed in Versace, and the other was finding someone to make the dress. Fortunately, we lived in New York City, the land of oddball specialists, so the latter was a piece of cake. At any given moment, you could open up the Yellow Pages and find someone to sing opera to your geraniums while you traveled to Reykjavik; you could hire someone to sew mink to the straps of your seatbelts so that you wouldn’t chafe your chest. And you could find a handful of talented, expensive seamstresses who would custom make a dress for your dog. I found my doggie dressmaker, by providence really, on Manhattan Dog Chat. She just appeared one day in early September, answering a post from someone who had some extra upholstery fabric and wanted to make a little jacket for her “hard to fit” Maltese.

Immediately I called this woman and told her about my Dogatella Versace idea. “How big is your dog?” she asked me. And when I told her Wallace weighed seventy pounds she said, “Well, I usually only work with little dogs.” I felt myself getting defensive, and reverting into that hateful “Us and Them” mentality that, as a Buddhist, I try to not maintain: Us being big dog people (they are real dogs, after all) and little dog people.

Meanwhile, she was probably thinking I was insane for wanting a Versace dress for a 70-pound spaniel. A male spaniel with no effeminate qualities whatsoever. But because I was the customer, and because I offered to pay her a hundred bucks, we agreed that she would pick out some J. Lo-looking fabric and meet me at my apartment for a fitting the following week. “He’s really cute,” I said added at the end of our conversation, because Little Dog People love to use the word cute.

Ted wanted nothing to do with this. He tried to list all the reasons why I should not dress our dog in drag (i.e.: you’re humiliating him, you have better things to do with your time) but in the end he saw how excited I was about the project and how unwilling I was to back off. “When is she coming?” he finally said in resignation.

“Next Saturday. At three.”

“Well, I’ll just make sure I’m not around Saturday at three,” he said.

When Sheila, the dressmaker, arrived at the appointed hour, we were both relieved to find that we liked each other immediately. You never know with the Internet. She was a theater person, a costume designer, who made clothes for dogs on the side, because it was profitable, and because she loved dogs. “I used to have one,” she said, “but now I travel way too much.” As she talked, she measured Wallace’s ankles, and the length of his legs, and the distance from his neck to his tail. “Now, this will be the challenge,” she said, pointing at his privates. “We have to have the plunging neckline to mimic the dress, but it will have to fasten in front of his wee-wee. I’m just not sure it will hang right though.” She stared at Wallace thoughtfully, considering how his body would handle the complicated drapes of cloth, and I was glad Ted wasn’t here to witness this. The “wee-wee” comment would have sent him through the roof.

Wallace was a perfect fit model. I fed him liver treats throughout the whole process, so that he would stay still, and he didn’t try to lunge at Sheila when she leaned in too close to his head. I was so proud of his behavior, and of his progress as a formerly abused dog, that I started to get teary-eyed. “You’re like the mother of the groom,” Sheila said. “Or the bride, as it were.”

“It’s just that,” I said, wiping my eyes, “he’s a shelter dog, and he was abused, and whenever I see him interact tenderly with new strangers I am just so grateful.”

“Now you tell me,” Sheila said. “But he doesn’t seem threatening. It’s usually the little dogs you have to watch out for.”

I agreed. “They’re assholes.”

“Would you like me to take a picture of the two of you when I come back to fit the actual dress?” she said.

We hugged when she showed me the material she’d selected. It was perfect: sheer, green, bold, in a tropical pattern that mimicked the actual dress. Then I showed her the wig I’d bought, which was made of human hair and had cost me $50. “We mustn’t mention costs to my husband,” I said.

“My lips are sealed,” she said.

Then I told her about the Three Headed Dog Man.

“We’ll kick his ass,” she said.

I gave her cash and we arranged to meet for a final fitting in two weeks’ time.

In the meantime, I got a call from one of my mother-in-laws, who said she was going to be coming to New York for a visit. I absolutely love visits from my mother-in-laws (I happened to be blessed with not one but two dynamite mother-in-laws, who liked me despite the fact that I never cooked for their son/step-son, never wrote or called, never produced any grandchildren, and talked non-stop about my dog). But this visit was scheduled for the weekend of Halloween. I faced a true conflict. My manners, upbringing, and sense of general decency suggested that I should scrap the Halloween contest and act like a proper hostess. My mother-in-law was a sharp, sophisticated woman who, when she visits the city, likes to spend her time good restaurants and sample sales. But I’d already invested all that money into Wallace’s dress, and I couldn’t get the smug face of the Three-Headed-Dog man out of my head. “Do you think I could talk you into going with me to a doggie Halloween contest?” I asked her on the telephone. “It might be fun.”

“Sure,” she said. “We can do anything you want.”

Her graciousness did not put me entirely at ease, however. I worried that I was taking a risk with my reputation with that half of the family. In fact, years later, when Ted and I got divorced, I wondered if that particular weekend continued to come up in conversation, when the family sat around the dinner table discussing “signs.” As in, “we always knew that marriage wouldn’t work out; why, think of the time she forced her dog to enter a Halloween contest….”

Anyway, the big day of the contest arrived and I was nervous. My mother-in-law, had arranged to meet me at Tompkins Square Park so that she could do some shopping beforehand, and Ted had decided not to come at all. “I have to work,” he said, which I noticed was something he had to do whenever I had Wallace in costume.

He had to work on St Patrick’s Day, when Wallace wore a headband with sparkly shamrock antennae. He had to work on Easter (bunny ears) and the Fourth of July (flag hat). He was a hard worker, Ted, and that morning he apologized to Wallace for not being able to spend the day with him. “Someone had to pay for all your food,” he said. “And your clothing.

I was busy combing Wallace’s wig out. Then I combed my own hair.

When Wallace and I got to the park, the sky was overcast and the day was humid—an uncommon phenomenon for October. I was wearing a turquoise vinyl jacket to match Wallace’s costume, and the vinyl made me sweat. This for some reason made me cranky, and it was a mood I couldn’t shake. The whole vibe of the contest was off that year. Maybe it was the humidity, maybe it was me, but the dog run seemed less festive; less crowded. “There’s another doggie parade this year over in Chelsea,” someone told me. “All the drag queens are over at that one, I’m sure.” I felt a bit dejected by this—once again something better was happening someplace else, where I was not. And the best place to be is always Where the Drag Queens Are.

But then I got a good look at some of the costumes and felt better again. There was a Corgi transformed into a Hoover. There were two baby cocker spaniels dressed as a bride and groom. Then the Three-Headed Dog man entered the dog run and Butterscotch was dressed up as—get this—Dogzilla. I could hear Ted say, “How unoriginal,” and I couldn’t help but smile. Sure, it was a spectacular costume—he had created a twelve-foot, elaborately airbrushed Styrofoam tail, with spiky fins, savage scales, and moveable parts. But please. Even Aunt Mabel in Idaho could have come up with Dogzilla.

Two years had passed since The Happy Camper had faced the Three-Headed Dog. And Wallace was a completely different dog by this point. He was happier, and better adjusted, and the dog run no longer meant “defend thyself” to him; it meant Play. So the minute I took his leash off inside the dog run, he took off after a Border Collie and the two of them ran like mad. “Wallace!” I shouted. “Your dress! You’re ruining your dress!”

I told him to come but he wouldn’t listen to me. It took fifteen minutes to finally cornered Wallace and put him back on his leash. “Now stay still,” I said to him. “Sit!” His wig had been thoroughly dragged across the ground and was now tangled with woodchips and leaves. I told Wallace he was the worst dog in the world.

My mother-in-law showed up just as I was shouting at my dog about the state of his long blond hair. She waved to me from beyond the fence. Only dogs and their guardians were allowed in the run. I blew her a kiss and smiled. Wallace’s wig kept slipping off, and every time he moved his dress would shift sideways, and he’d step on the hem with his back paws. “Stay still!” I snapped at him. “When I tell you to sit, you sit!” There was irritation in my voice, and I looked around to see if anyone had heard.

The registration was about to begin. Butterscotch and his guardian sat placidly in line, both confident that they would win the contest.

Meanwhile, the Border Collie kept running up to us and biting at Wallace’s wig. “Go away!” I said to her, and to Wallace: “Stay still! When I tell you to sit, you sit!” But poor Wallace wanted to play with the Border Collie. He wanted to stalk squirrels. But I was convinced the whole “effect” of his dress would be ruined if he even lifted his leg to pee. So every time he tried to get up from his sit, I’d apply pressure on his shoulders and push him back down.

Years ago, I’d worked at a children’s fashion magazine and one of my jobs was to assist the art director on photo shoots. Once a month, stage mothers would arrive with their stiffly coiffed sons and daughters. I remember my shock the first time I saw a toddler girl wearing makeup and four-inch heels. Her hair had been curled a la Shirley Temple, and she was unhappy that day—perhaps because of the shoes. But her mother was even unhappier. She kept insisting to me that Kelly normally didn’t act so ornery, that Kelly knew how to be a good girl. “She’s just being very bad today,” the mother kept saying loudly and bitterly “Very bad.”

Now the line of dog-contestants moved, and Wallace stood up without permission and stepped on the hem of his dress. “Sit!” I snapped at him.

Then, suddenly, I saw myself: angry, snappy, perfectionist, dissatisfied.

I had become a stage mother. I had put my own needs before my child’s.

When the beginning of the contest line-up was announced, I couldn’t even look at my mother-in-law. I thought she might see the shame on my face and I didn’t want to see it on her face too.

The crowd roared with laughter when Wallace was introduced as Dogatella Versace, and they cheered madly when, later, he won first prize. Last year first prize had been a six-month supply of California Natural and a CD player; this year it was a $40 gift certificate to a new pet store. When we went up to the stage to take the prize, the judge hung a “Best in Show” medal around Wallace’s neck. It was brass with a red white and blue ribbon that made him look like an Olympian. As the crowd clapped and cheered, a newspaper reporter snapped our photograph, but I refused to tell him my name. I, who for years had told myself I had sought the spotlight, was suddenly ashamed.

As soon as the contest was over I took the medal off Wallace’s neck. Then I took off the dress, and the wig. “You were such a good boy today,” I told him, and then I knelt down and apologized for the beastly way I had behaved. “I’ll never put you through that again,” I told him. “I won’t even make you wear a birthday hat if you don’t want to.”

And so far, my promise has been good.

The medal still hangs on Wallace’s bulletin board, which hangs above his “feeding station.” I’d like to think he notices this medal every time the bowl of ground turkey and boiled potatoes is set down before him, and that he somehow feels wistful, or proud, but mostly he just gobbles his food rapidly. Grateful, perhaps, that he isn’t being forced to wear a wig.

My First Huffington Post Feature!

2011-09-07T05:08:00.001-07:00

I'm thrilled to say that Huffington Post asked me to write for their divorce page after reading my 9/11 pieces here on Open Salon. We get read, fellow bloggers :)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-harrington/falling-man-marriage_b_951381.html

'Falling Man' Helped Me Face My Own Fears
Posted: 9/7/11 03:00 AM ET

Like many unhappily married couples in New York City, I had been pondering the question of whether or not I should get divorced for years before finally making the decision to leave. I won't go into any details as to why I yearned to leave my husband -- let's just say we had certain "core issues" we were trying to "work out." And while it seemed pretty clear to me (and to our marriage counselor) that our differences were irreconcilable, I never had the strength or the courage to actually leave. I was full of fear and self-doubt back then. Plus, I was locked into an unhealthy dynamic in which the very husband I wanted to leave would often tell me that I would "never make it" on my own and that "no one would want me anyway." Part of me believed him. Clearly, I was stuck.

Now, people who are stuck are very good at denial, and people in denial seem to be willing to tolerate a less-than-perfect present because they believe (or rather want to believe) in a better and perfect future. Thus, I always told myself that "one day" my marriage would get better.

Then one day the future stopped. Our city was attacked. The planes hit the towers. Hundreds of people jumped to their deaths. Thousands burned. Thousands more were crushed as the towers collapsed. On the streets, people screamed in terror, fleeing for their lives. Time itself seemed cleaved in half: Before 9/11 and After.

Who can forget the fear on those peoples' faces as they fled? Who can forget the now-iconic photograph of the Falling Man? So much has been already written about the Falling Man at this point; scores of essays and poems and even films have explored what he has come to symbolize on a global level. But I can only speak about how he affected me and my decision to finally take action to change my life -- to not just hope it would change.

You see, it wasn't just that he jumped. It was that he jumped alone.

It is often said that the only thing we humans fear more than death is dying alone. And thus many of us are terrified of being alone ever-- even when we are young and healthy and supposedly immune to death. (The attacks on September 11th, of course, taught us all that none of us are immune, ever). We could die alone, within seconds.

But that week, I realized I already was alone. As soon as my husband heard about the attacks, he left our apartment in Brooklyn and rushed to his office in midtown. He was, and still is, a television news producer -- and an excellent one at that. He left on Monday morning and I did not see him again for several long and lonely and agonizing and traumatic days. And while I do not condemn him for leaving me behind that week -- I respect his work and understand his decision -- I must confess that his choice affected mine. I suppose it's because when we are alone in the midst of crisis, we are forced to really face our true selves. And sometimes it's not pretty.

A friend once mused: "Which is worse: to be unhappy in a relationship, or to be unhappy alone?" Ah, we were young and witty and bitter then. (Plus, we were MFA candidates, which meant that bitterness could work to our advantage in terms of our prose.) I always chose the former -- the unhappy relationships -- because, yes, I was one of those women who was terrified of being alone. But on September 11th, I realized nothing is lonelier than to feel alone in one's own marriage.

I worry that I am now sounding insensitive here -- talking about my own personal concepts of loneliness just a few paragraphs after mentioning the horrors of September 11th and the Falling Man.

But one forced me to look at the other. The "some day" had come. It was finally time to ask myself: Why was I so willing to tolerate dysfunction? And what role did I play in that? Why did I always feel so alone, in a city of eight million; in a world of six billion? And what if there was a third option to this unhappy-alone versus unhappy-with-partner scenario? What if it was actually possible to be just plain happy?

I had to find out. And I believed the only way I could find answers was to leave.

Plus, would it sound weird if I said that, after 9/11, I felt duty-bound to pursue happiness? I felt duty-bound to all those people who had died in pain and terror and fear; to all those who lost their loved ones; to anyone who has ever felt alone.

There I was: a timid woman in her early thirties, lying alone in front of a television on a sofa in Brooklyn, watching the towers fall again and again. I couldn't help but think of all the times I had wanted to leave my husband, but had decided to stay because of fear. I had many valid reasons for wanting to leave, and many invalid ones, but my reason for staying was stronger: I believed his claim that I would "never make it" on my own. Fear thinking.

Yet what was this fear compared to the ones the victims faced, especially the jumpers, who were forced to choose between being burned alive or leaping to their deaths?

No, I decided, the world does not need any more fear. Not even the low-grade fears or doubts or uncertainties I felt in my marriage. The world did not need another second of pain or doubt or loneliness. She needed answers, and courage.

After 9/11, someone began circulating an email attributed to Neale Donald Walsch, which included the sentence: "The time has come for us to demonstrate at the highest level our most extraordinary thoughts about Who We Really Are."

I wanted to know who I really was. And I guess I decided I would not be able to truly know myself if I remained locked in an unhealthy dynamic with my husband.

And please don't think I disliked my husband. I loved him. It seems a lot of couples feel they need to hate their spouses in order to justify divorce. But after 9/11 it occurred to me that leaving him might possibly be the greatest act of love I could offer. We both needed to find ourselves. We both needed to get to the root of our then-unhappiness, and unearth it, and set it free, so that we could each experience the true happiness we both deserved. Every being on this planet deserves happiness, right? And how many lives had been cut short on 9/11 before they attained this?

And so I ventured forth, on my own. There was still the fear that I wouldn't make it on my own. And it was quite possible I would, in the end, still die alone. But I had to try. I had to try to be fearless. Just as the Falling Man had tried.
Was it possible that the Falling Man had a moment of peace and acceptance before he leapt? Did he remember the one he loved and hold her in his heart as he fell? I hope so. Because that's what it means to rise.

The Falling Man and the Rising Balloon--PTSD in NYC after 9/11

2011-09-06T10:48:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone! I am going to repost a few of my September 11th related essays this week. A lot of people are already getting re-traumatized by the old images that are reappearing everywhere, on this tenth anniversary. So I hope these essays will provide a soothing counterbalance to those horrific memories.

Below is an essay I wrote in the winter of 2002, when I was still numb from all the 9/11 horror. You can tell by the prose alone just how numb I was. I was so numb I didn't realize I was numb, know what I mean?

All Rise
In the first few months following the attacks of September 11th, I refused to leave New York City. Like a child who has lost one parent, I found myself clinging needily to the surviving parent, and in this metaphoric case, that other parent was Rudolph Giuliani. He was the man who guided us New Yorkers through that horrible first week. He was the man who told us to stay strong, to help one another, and even to grieve. He was the one who attended countless funeral services for fallen firemen; he was the one who escorted that now-fatherless bride down the aisle; he was the one who gave daily press briefings, delivering his updates in a composed and eloquent manner. How could I leave a man like that? I felt I owed it to him to stay in New York—to help him hold our city together.

Thus I began canceling plans. First I cancelled a scheduled trip to New Orleans for Halloween (I wanted and needed to see the Village parade, whose theme that year was “Phoenix Rising from the Ashes”). Then I cancelled our Thanksgiving plans—a trip to gorgeous Santa Fe to visit Ed’s parents). Then I cancelled our Christmas trip—to New Hampshire and Massachusetts to visit my family. Honestly, I was too depressed to get off the sofa, and I could not tear myself away from the television set—the thing which bore the news that depressed me. I also did not want to miss anything Giuliani did or said.

He had become my symbol of hope and strength, my higher power, and I probably would have licked the sidewalks in the fish market section of Chinatown if he had asked me. I needed to give back to him—to someone. So much had been lost.

So when Giuliani started urging us New Yorkers—via televised announcements-- to “get on with life” and “spend money” I had no choice but to listen. He started appearing on those tear-jerking, I Love New York tourism commercials encouraging us to fly, get away, participate once again in the world of commerce. The airlines needed the money, he reminded us. Which of course made us all think of the planes that had been hijacked, and the people who had died. How could we let them down?

It was December by then. Perhaps it was time to acknowledge that I no longer had a valid excuse to sit glued to NY1 and the New York Times' "Portraits of Grief” section. These things only made me cry. I had to obey Giuliani.

So at the end of December my husband I booked a last-minute flight to Acapulco, where some friends of ours had rented a bungalow for the week.

Normally when I travel, I make it a point not to pack anything that will peg me as a tourist. Sometimes I even go out of my way to not look like an American (especially when I go to my second home, France). This meant no t-shirts, or Nike Air Max running shoes, no camera-about-neck, no mom-jeans.

But this post-9/11 trip to Mexico was different. The entire world had changed, and I was a refugee from a proud, fallen city.

Thus, I packed a Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt, an NYPD T-shirt, a baby blue, baby tee emblazoned with our famous area code: "212." As I packed these New York items, I was reminded of my summers during college, when I waitressed on Cape Cod. I remembered how my fellow waitresses and I—all Bostonians—recoiled every time we saw a car with the Empire State license plate pulling into our restaurant's parking lot. "Oh no!" we would say, truly aghast. "New Yorkers!" To us on the Cape, New Yorkers meant rude, obstinate, pushy people. Those “New Yorkers” seemed to have a huge and obnoxious sense of entitlement that had no place in our conventional New England world. I remember I used to cringe every time “one of them” was seated at my title.

I also actually used to recoil at the sight—or the mere mention—of Mayor Giuliani. Before September 11th, we loathed him: he was arrogant, intolerant, and bombastic. He hated artists and sidewalk-sellers of books. To us artists, he was the Enemy.
And now, as I zipped up my suitcase to leave New York City and our hero/father/mayor, I found myself getting teary-eyed.

"What's wrong?" my husband said when he came into the room.

"We're going to miss Giuliani at the ball-drop on New Year's Eve next week," I said with a quivering frown. "We're going to miss the ringing of the memorial bells for the 3600 fallen at six o’clock."

"In all the years we've lived here you've never once wanted to go to Times Square on New Years Eve," Ed said.

"I know," I said, holding back more tears. "But it’s Giuliani’s last public appearance as the mayor and I'm not going to get to see it."

"It's twenty-five degrees out there on New Year’s Eve in Times Square,” Ed reminded me.

"I know, but, it’s just cold. People died on September 11th. People burned to death. Surely we can take a few hours of being cold."

"We're going to have a great time on this trip” Ed said. “We're going to have sunshine and beaches--"

"I know, but—"

"We're going to have a great time,” Ed said again. “And we haven't left the city since August. It will be good for us to get away."

I turned and looked at him. Ed was a television news producer at one of the major networks. He had witnessed gruesome things in the weeks after September 11th, and had witnessed them first hand. I at least had had the buffer (the slightly unreal buffer) of witnessing the horrors via the television set. Ed was the type of me who held his emotions in check, but I realized he was probably completely traumatized.

"You're right," I finally said. "We've been needing a vacation for a long time." I hugged him and tried not to cry. I pulled an “I LOVE NY” ski cap over my head, put on my coat, and said I was ready to go.

And soon, we found ourselves having been transported to Acapulco; indeed, to another world: one of aquamarine water and sand the texture of talcum powder, one of freshly caught fish and creamy piña coladas and non-traumatized friends. (Meaning, people who were not in NYC on the day the towers well.)

As soon as we landed we drove to a beach-front café. And as we sat there, enjoying our drinks and the sunshine, and the naked, foreign feeling of wearing tank tops and shorts, I realized that here was a place I could actually not think about the World Trade Center. I felt hopeful and almost ready to start life anew.

Winter, in the Northeast at least, makes you close in on yourself, seek refuge inside small apartments and sterile office buildings, and encase yourself constantly in a giant tortoise shell of North Face down. Here in Mexico, though, I felt myself opening up again like a blossoming flower. Sunlight warmed our skin; a breeze tossed the palm fronds of the thatched roof above; and rum, glorious rum, ebbed and flowed through our veins like the tide a few yards away from us, rum that loosed our muscles and unclenched our city jaws.

"Isn't this heavenly?" I said to our friends. They are a fun-loving, easy-going couple who live in California and travel like pros. They agreed that it was heavenly, and we ordered another round of drinks. Feeling relaxed, I leaned back into my chair and gazed at the bluer-than-blue sky.

It was then that I saw a parasailer, gliding noiselessly above the bay.
I flinched and gasped.

The sight horrified me. Even though he was attached to a rainbow colored parachute, he looked like a person falling from the sky. Suspended in the air like that, he had the same rag-doll, caught-in-a-moment look as the people who jumped from the towers—the ones we had seen in countless horrible photographs.

"Are you alright?" my friends asked. I tried to explain my reaction—how I had momentarily believed that the parasailer was falling, just like the Falling Man—and I got teary-eyed as I spoke. My friends remained silent. I don’t think they knew what to say. I don’t think they could relate to my distorted thinking.

And what could they say to a comment like that? Equating a parasailer with a burning mid-air body is not an association most people would make. Unless one is exceptionally morbid. Or a New Yorker. Suffering, I realized years later, from PTSD.

In the ensuing silence—and to hide my tears—I turned my gaze away from the parasailer. I looked instead at the shoreline and the sea, where hundreds of people swam in the water. Then I looked up at the rows of high rise hotels behind us, which lined the entire Acapulco Bay. Each high-rise was painted a beautiful bold color—such as chili pepper red or guacamole green, and each had mirrored windows that reflected the sky. There were rows and rows of balconies lining each side of each building, and then I saw that there were people on many of these balconies, leaning against their railings, admiring the view.

I gasped in horror again. In my traumatized mind I saw that photograph from the Times of all those people hanging from the windows above the burning floors. All those people screaming in terror, waiting to be rescued. And then dying. I got teary eyed again, and I hastily put on a pair of sunglasses so that no one could tell.

Now, I was not in or near the World Trade Center on September 11. In fact, I am so afraid of heights I have not been inside either tower since 1987—the one and only time I could be coaxed onto the observation deck. So what is it that held me there now, while I was thousands of miles away in Mexico? What was it that held me in the past, inside top floors of the North Tower, standing at the windows alongside the 700 doomed Cantor Fitzgerald employees? Why did I feel as if I too were caught in a moment of indecision between burning alive or jumping to the most frightening of deaths?

I don't know. And I guess I will never know because anyone who does know what it was like has disappeared.

But let's get back to the sunshine of Mexico: That evening—which was New Year's Eve—the four of us dined at Las Brisas, a five-star restaurant on the edge of Acapulco Bay. We had to drive through seven gates manned by armed guards to get there, and thus were giddy with expectation and irony by the time we reached the restaurant, and a team of valets swarmed around us to tend to our car. We were led to a beautifully laid table that was positioned between a sea wall and a tidal pool. The pink uniforms of the waitstaff matched the pink tablecloths and the giant bouquets of fragrant pink flowers. They brought us pink lemonade margaritas that matched the pink, sun-setting sky. A few margaritas later, we were greeted by a moon so huge and white it looked like something from a children's book.

"It must be because we're so close to the Equator," my husband explained. But I preferred to think we were in the presence of something magical, a sort of Never-Never land untouched by the rest of the world.

The hours passed pleasantly. We were brought course after course of delicious food and the waiters would never let our wine glasses get below half-full. All that wine, and the food, and the soft air and that huge benevolent moon, seemed to lift us a finger's breath above the table, so that we were suspended in a place of holiday happiness—a realm in which there was no World Trade Center, no trace of disharmony with my husband, and no ill in the world at all.

Just before midnight, the traditional countdown began. There was a cacophony of fireworks and noisemakers and the band played Auld Lang Syne. My husband and friends and I got out of our seats to hug and kiss and dance, and at the stroke of midnight, they released an enormous batch of silver balloons. They were just balloons, yes, but to me—in that magical place—they seemed otherworldly. As they rose, they seemed to move in tandem. And the way their metallic surfaces caught the moonlight as they twisted and turned reminded me of a giant school of fish.

Suddenly I was teary eyed again. "What's the matter?" my husband whispered. He put his arms around me as we both watched the balloons float away.

"Those balloons must be for the World Trade Center," I said. "Don't you think?"

"I don't think so, honey," my husband said. "They're just balloons. I think they do this every year."

"But there are thousands of them," I said. "There must be three thousand one hundred and sixteen. For all the missing. Don’t you think?"

My husband must have sensed my desperation, because he kissed the top of my head and said, "I think you're right. I think there are three thousand balloons."

And so, while the rest of the crowd danced, we watched the balloons rising, and prayed three thousand times for the three thousand souls. I wondered, as one always does, where those balloons would end up. Do they pop? Do they disintegrate? Or would some child in New Zealand find them, washed up like anemones on the shore? We watched them soar past that impossible moon.

Six days later, when we returned to New York, I found a slightly different city. Giuliani was gone, the daily "Portraits of Grief" of the New York Times had been discontinued, and the sports section of the Times was no longer upside down. They had also opened up a viewing platform right at Ground Zero and I decided to go there with a balloon. I thought it would be uplifting to see it soar above that charred spot. The line to get to the platform was four blocks long and it took hours to reach the platform. By that point, my Mylar balloon (which said, I'm ashamed to say, said HAPPY BIRTHDAY on it,) had lost quite a bit of its air and its metallic zest.

Thus, when I released the balloon at the platform's railing, it barely took flight. It merely hung in the air in front of me for a few moments and then sunk rather anticlimactically to the ground. People around me were crestfallen, I could tell—I realized we all needed this little symbolic lift.

"Was it someone's birthday?" a woman finally asked. Everyone was listening.

I shook my head and said “not really.” I didn’t know how to explain my need to bring this balloon to this place.

But in those days, in New York after September 11th, people no longer needed explanations. The world no longer made that much sense. But at the same time, we all seemed to understand one another a little better. Without having to say a thing.

So there we all were, looking at that balloon on the ground, bereft. I felt like such a jerk. Maybe death wasn’t like soaring at all, I told myself. Maybe death was just--death.

Then one of the rescue workers came over and picked the balloon up. You could tell by the tired look on his face that he had seen three weeks of non-stop horror; but behind his eyes I saw pure kindness. “Whose birthday is it?” he said to all of us, in a fatherly way. He was just like Giuliani.

A little girl said, “Mine” so he gave her the balloon. Everyone broke into applause. Some broke into tears. But the applause—it was thundering. The sound—and the heart behind it—soared.

Adopting a New Dog Sight Unseen

2011-07-29T08:52:00.000-07:00

Occasionally I take time off from writing about my late great dog Wallace to write about my current great dog, Chloe. Let's call this installment "Insight Unseen"

It’s not unusual these days for perfect matches—between humans and humans, animals and humans, even animals and animals—to be made online. Typically (in the Match.com department, at least), the humans actually meet before agreeing to make a full-time/life-long commitment. So is it crazy to adopt a dog you’ve never actually met face-to-face?

I did exactly that. I adopted my dog Chloe before I even met her. Crazy? Read on…

Many of you may be familiar with my previous Bark series (and book): “Rex and the City.” In this series, I chronicled my experiences trying to raise an unruly—but loveable—shelter dog (Wallace) in a 300-square-foot-apartment in New York City with an unruly—but loveable—boyfriend. In 2002, our relationship ended and Wallace died tragically. All within a few hours. I officially left Ted on the morning of November 23; that evening, Wallace was killed in an auto accident. (See “Rex: The Story Ends,” Bark, Jan/Feb ’09).

After that, I cried every day for two years. I stopped writing about dogs for two years as well. In fact, I tried not to think about dogs at all, because thinking about dogs made me miss Wallace, which me feel guilty and sad.

I knew that one day, when I was ready, I would adopt another dog, but “readiness” is such a relative and fickle thing. Sometimes I would log onto Petfinder.com and type “Spaniel” into the search engine just to see who was out there waiting for a home. But none of those 800+ Spaniels ever felt “right.”

I wrote about my new-dog quest in the aforementioned essay, but in a nutshell: after a two-year search, I finally came across a French Spaniel mix on Petfinder. Her name was Buffy, and she was being fostered by an affiliate of an English Setter rescue group in Michigan. She was listed as one year old, sweet and good with other dogs.

What struck me was Buffy’s photograph. She was looking straight at the camera, smiling, rushing forward as if she couldn’t wait to give the taker-of-the-photo a kiss. Finish what you’re doing so that I can love you up! she seemed to be saying. Her big white tail wagged behind her in a blur.

My fantasy crush Pete Townshend once wrote, in his song “Now and Then”: Now and then you see a soul and you fall in love/You can’t do a thing about it. That’s how I felt when I saw Buffy’s photograph. In that instant, my whole body began to tingle with certainty. I knew in my heart that I had found my dog.

My mind, however, disagreed. I had an incredibly wily and cantankerous mind back then, one that constantly tried to talk me out of doing anything fun. I called her “Hulga.” Hulga said, Buffy’s in Michigan, and you’re in NYC, and most rescue groups won’t adopt out beyond certain regions. You know how strict they can be. Why even bother?

Because it feels right, my heart answered. I picked up the phone.

It turned out that the adoption coordinator who answered the telephone—I’ll call her Amy—had heard of me. She’d been a fan of Bark and my column for years. The ease with which we spoke—and the camaraderie that quickly developed—was encouraging.

Amy said that Buffy was very sweet and loving. Her favorite things to do were to chase cats, eat cat poop and run through corn fields. I loved this latter image—a free-and-easy bird dog, galloping through tall green rows of corn, dodging down this row or that, occasionally springing into the air to sight and orient herself. It suggested pure joy and freedom. In NYC, our corn comes from corner delis—those tiny pickled cobs you find at salad bars.

“You should know,” Amy said, “that Buffy does have problems. She barks a lot and whines and paces and chews.”

I knew these to be signs of anxiety—most likely, stress caused by all the shuttling from shelters to foster homes. I also knew some people would label this as “problem behavior” and refuse to take the dog. But I’d been through this anxiety phase with Wallace, and we had worked it out.

“What’s Buffy’s history?”

Amy said Buffy was found wandering on a college campus. She was brought into a local kill shelter, where a woman named Kat discovered her. Kat was a cat person, who visited the shelter daily to rescue Abyssinians for her breed-specific group. When Kat saw cute, friendly Buffy, she contacted a local English Setter rescue group, and within a few days, Buffy’s profile was online. “It’s such a coincidence you called today,” Amy said. “We literally just posted her.”

But I was starting to think there is no such thing as coincidence.

“I have a good feeling about Buffy,” I said. “I believe this was meant to be.”

“Normally we don’t adopt out of state,” Amy said.

See? Hulga said in my mind. I was right.

“But we may be able to make an exception,” Amy added. “I’ll just have to consult the board.”

Oh, no. The Board. Six months earlier, I’d tried to adopt an English Setter puppy from a strict rescue group in Pennsylvania. Their rejection left me traumatized for weeks.

“Buffy’s very destructive and high-strung,” Amy said. “She’s hard to manage. You should think about it for a few days, while I consult my colleagues to see if they’d be willing to relinquish a dog to a strange New Yorker.”

So, I thought. I probably thought too much. Hulga had a field day. I asked myself: what am I doing, taking on another “problem dog”? I’d spent six years with a problem dog, and sometimes, quite honestly, it wasn’t fun. I’d had to contend with dog fights, dog bites and thousands of dollars worth of damage. Minor stuff, I told myself. In comparison to all that dog joy and dog love I received.

Still, Hulga said. Why not get an easy dog? One who’s already trained and well-adjusted? Why are you choosing another difficult relationship? I’d just divorced my difficult relationship. Was I only comfortable when life was hard?

But this is a dog we’re talking about, not one of those men things. I reminded myself.

A dog you haven’t even met, Hulga said. Who sounds dysfunctional.

What if there was more to this dog—more “problems”—that Amy wasn’t elaborating upon? What if it turned out that I couldn’t manage Buffy’s problems alone? I was a single woman, and—at the time—bitter. I planned to remain single for the rest of my life. Would a so-called “easy” dog be easy enough for a singleton in NYC? And what had Amy meant when she called me a strange New Yorker?

The questions were endless. I drove myself crazy. Or rather, Hulga drove me crazy. This is what happens when we think too much—an epic internal battle of mind and heart, logic and intuition (with an unhealthy dose of Hulga thrown in).

Finally, I visited Riverside Park to watch the sun set beyond the Hudson River. The Hudson has always given me perspective; it is the kind of vast, forgiving river that helps one make choices. As I stood there, a woman walked past with a giant Mastiff who loped along with a goofy grace. The dog looked so happy to be outside in the park with his friend. And so did she. In that instant, I knew Buffy was truly meant to be my dog. I decided once and for all to follow my heart.

When I called Amy, I felt fizzy with excitement. Amy said I could have Buffy “whenever I wanted.”

“So the board has approved?”

“What? Oh, yes,” Amy said distractedly. Something seemed off. But I’ll have to save that story for another day. It took four weeks for me to actually get Buffy (another long story involving Buffy actually being adopted—and returned—to five other people in the interim). But soon, I had secured an “arrival date” for Buffy. She would be accompanying a volunteer on a plane to NYC.

I had ten days to prepare.

Rehabilitating Wallace had taught me a lot about dogs. Writing for a dog magazine had too. I now knew what kind of training worked best (clicker, positive reinforcement), what type of diet was healthiest (raw, organic) and which veterinary treatments worked best. I’m not saying I’m an expert on dogs, but at least I wasn’t as clueless as I’d been when I adopted Wallace. I felt confident. I was going to work with Buffy’s anxieties, restore her confidence, provide her with consistent and loving guidance, and gently alter her behaviors.

First, I cleared my calendar, rescheduling any appointments that would take me out of the apartment. I wanted to stay with the dog 24/7 for a solid three weeks. Next I researched how to treat anxiety using holistic methods. I stocked up on flower essences, aromatherapy oils, herbal supplements. I bought marrow bones (an essential ingredient if your anxiety-plagued dog is a chewer) and two pounds of raw chicken to help strengthen her immune system. I also stocked up on music. Yes, music. (See http://www.thebark.com/content/soothing-songs-anxious-pup

As Buffy’s arrival date drew nearer, I purchased other essentials: A cozy, vintage-floral-patterned bed; IT’S ACTUALLY CALLED A “COZY BED” a pretty new leash-and-collar set. A soft fleece blanket with which to cover the sofa, which I knew would be covered in dog hair within three hours of the dog’s arrival. All of the above were pink in honor of my new girlie-dog. I bought doggie paw-wipes for rainy days, Musher’s Secret for snowy days, hair brushes (pink!), toys, treats (exotic NYC treats like dried kippers and ostrich skin), even a Halloween costume (more on that later).

Next, I posted on ManhattanDogChat, announcing the arrival of a new pup in the neighborhood who’d be looking for play-dates.

Already, Buffy was a true New Yorker, I thought. Hip grosgrain collars, lavender shampoo, and dates.

Soon the appointed day came. I arrived at the airport early, my purse loaded with Bach Rescue Remedy and my pockets stuffed with treats. I must say I was nervous. It was like a blind date: Will she like me? Will she think I’m unattractive? Or weird? What if we don’t get along?

Then I saw a woman wheeling a large dog crate toward me. Inside was what looked like a Border Collie mix, panting and pacing and whining. Buffy? This crate had my name on it, printed in large black letters. Beneath my name was a sticker that read: CAUTION LIVE ANIMAL. The dog whined shrilly. For a moment I was dumbfounded—I had myself a new live animal. One who might not be any part Spaniel. Was this going to be another “Rex and the City” ordeal, in which I’d spend months feeling overwhelmed?

I reminded myself that I had followed my heart, and that the heart is always right. So I unlatched the crate.

THIS APPEARED IN THE MARCH 2011 ISSUE OF THE BARK MAGAZINE.Find out what happens next in the September issue of The Bark.

2011-07-20T07:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Kind Readers:

Gosh, I haven't posted since April, because I have been so busy with teaching (I teach creative writing at NYU), writing (a few articles for Bark here and there), performing and writing music (I am lead singer in a rock band and a kirtan band), and lots of other administrative bullocks.

I also had a big setback with my spine, related to gardening, which sucks. One really needs a spine to get around. Literally and figuratively.

Mostly I spend a lot of time not-writing. And you all know how time consuming that can be.

I once had a writing professor who said: the only thing harder than writing is not-writing.

For me, the only thing harder than not-writing is trying to catch up in the digital world. (Which is the primary time-sucker these days, and the sole reason I do not have time to write).

So let's cut to the chase:

I have yet to read an eBook, and yet I am re-issuing an extended eBook of REX AND THE CITY; TRUE TALES OF A RESCUE DOG WHO RESCUED A RELATIONSHIP. The projected launch date is late August, 2011. So one month away, basically.

I am panicked. I am entering new territory with no skills or knowledge whatsoever. It's like climbing Everest in heels and a sundress. Not my terrain.

I am reaching out to you for advice.

What kind of features does an eBook offer--in terms on content, I mean. Links? Photos? Deleted chapters?

What do you enjoy about "expanded" eBooks? How can I engage the reader in a digital way? I mean, to me, books are about content--the story, the prose. Now they're saying I need a soundtrack too, and interactive material. WHat might that be?

What the heck is an eBook at it's core?

I'm still reading yellowed copies of Jane Austen....I am so not "wired". In fact, to me the term "wired" still think that term means hopped-up on Starbucks....

That I am. Techie I am not.

Help!

“THE HYPOCHONDRIAC’S GUIDE TO OVERPROTECTIVE DOG CARE”

2011-04-22T15:51:00.001-07:00

“THE HYPOCHONDRIAC’S GUIDE TO OVERPROTECTIVE DOG CARE” (More tales from my serial blog "Rex and the City")

Until I brought a dog into my life, I never considered myself a hypochondriac. And I swear I’m not—for myself that is. If I were, say, bleeding from the palms and the eyeballs, that wouldn't necessarily stop me from being first in line at the semi-annual Barney's sample sale (although whether they would let me into the dressing rooms, or allow me to manhandle the Prada bowling totes is another matter). And don't get me wrong—I like going to the doctor. I like being in the presence of someone who will listen to my problems and pretend he actually cares about them, but the thing is, in New York City, the doctors don’t listen to you. They schedule a new patient every twelve minutes, make you wait two hours in their lushly appointed reception area for your twelve o’clock appointment, then spend a total of ten minutes in your actual presence, during which they shine a light into your ears, tap you on the knees, and call you by the wrong name. (I am often addressed by my primary care specialist as “Irene”). For this you will be charged $600, with the optional consolation prize of a two-week trial sample of Prozac or Viagra (even though you came in to talk about the inexplicable stigmata on your ribs) and/or a referral to see a specialist, who will call you $900 and call you Aileen. At least when I was little I got to choose between a jeweled plastic ring or a lollypop.

So, needless to say, I didn’t go to the doctor much. But then Ted and I adopted Wallace from a New York City shelter. This was back in 1997, for those who are not familiar with my stories. Some of you have already read, in these columns, how we soon learned that Wallace had been abused, and that his spirit had been broken by his previous owner. Because of his behavioral problems, and general fear and mistrust of humans, Wallace was difficult to train and manage in those first few months, but despite the struggles this wonderful dog opened up our lives, and taught us how to be nurturers and lovers of nature, and taught us how to better love ourselves, etc. But now is the time to talk about the dark side of all this, the other, seamier emotions that attach themselves to love like demodectic parasites: worry, over-protectiveness, irrational paranoia, the fear of the loss of love.

All my friends who had birthed human children, who swore they’d never be worry-worts like their mothers, told me of their transformations into paranoid schizos who lay in bed at night obsessing over Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, child molestation, and whether the trees closest to the house should be sawed down, for fear that their branches would shatter the nursery windows during a freak New England storm. And I understood this to be a phase they went through, a Rite of Passage that every parent undergoes with their first born child. But I never imagined that I would undergo the same rites with my dog.

It all started with the instruction manual that came with Wallace when we brought him home from the shelter. It was called something simple, like “You and Your Shelter Dog” and it contained some basic advice—when to feed your dog, what to do if he or she is not housetrained—and recommended, at the end, a list of books for further reading. And because Ted and I were eager for knowledge and eager to be good caretakers, we acquired these books, but it seemed that for every one we ordered there was Amazon.com saying, If you like this book, you may like _____ and _____ and _____, listing at least 75 other books to read as well. So we acquired those additional 75 books, too. You just never knew which one would be the one, which book would explain your dog once and for all, and so, over and over again, we found ourselves clicking “add to cart,” and every night, for the next several years, Ted and I stayed up late in bed, reading side by side, pouring through countless training guides and veterinary manuals, comparing notes, hoping, praying in the meantime that the foreign four-legged creature who menacingly paced our floors would not murder us in our sleep (but who can sleep when you have one hundred and seventeen books to read?). With every book we finished, we would begin the next one, hoping, believing, that here would be the definitive one, the one that would solve the mystery of Wallace, and then we could get on with our lives. (Note: We’re still reading.) I felt like a hopeless smoker who announces he’s going to quit as he lights his next cigarette with the butt end of his current one.

And then there was the internet (which some say exists solely to pray on the paranoias of people like me). At my temp job, I would spend six of my eight hours visiting veterinary websites and recoiling at the graphic images of cocker spaniel with eyes bulging out of their sockets, of unidentified rectal prolapses and hyperestrinism (you don’t want to know), of dogs who had been hit by cars. I’d call Ted in tears, telling him to log on to such-and-such a website as proof as to why Wallace should not be allowed out of doors.

“You’re just upsetting yourself,” Ted would say. “And you’re upsetting me. Can’t you find something more constructive to do with your time?”

But Ted, too, worried about how to best care for our dog in those early days. How could we not? Our friends with human children could at least comfort themselves with the fact that someday their infants would be able speak to them and communicate their wants and needs. Our friends with human children passed through the worrywort phase smoothly, and told their second borns, who might be bleeding from the eyeballs, to “get over it” and leave them alone. But Ted and I, with our dog-child, would never have that advantage. Sure, Wallace was smarter than average—he knew 23 words in the English language (which is more than we could say for then-“President” Bush). But none of those words could be found in my Index of Signs in my Dog Owner’s Home Veterinary Handbook (which Ted soon dubbed the Hyponchondriac’s Guide to Overprotective Dog Care).

So in the beginning we always erred on the side of caution. In our first few weeks of having Wallace we very sincerely took him to the vet for panting, yawning, flatulence, and the weird black discolorations on the bottom of his paws. “Those are spots,” the nice, patient vet told us. “You have a spotted dog.”

“Oh,” I said, “I thought maybe it was tar. We crossed a street the other night that had some freshly filled pot holes and I thought—”

“They’re spots,” the vet said.

Early instances such as that did not dissuade me from always imagining the worst case scenario. In June I worried about heartworm and ringworm; in July it was fractures and fleas. My biggest paranoia, the thing that kept me up most at nights, became foxtails and burrs. Foxtails and other barbed seed-heads, I read, could easily penetrate the skin and travel down the ear canals or up the genital tract, causing irritation, abscesses, serious tissue damage and/or infection. “In extreme cases,” I read, “foxtails have been known to puncture the organs, including the brain.” This was not an image I could easily forget, and it didn’t help that the warning signs—excessive sneezing, scratching at the ears, pawing at the nose, shaking the head—were gestures Wallace made on a regular basis.

So every time my poor dog sneezed (which is a lot if you live in New York City in a ground floor apartment and like to keep your windows open, under the guise of “getting some fresh air”), I insisted that we rush him to the emergency clinic.

“Are you sure a foxtail hasn’t punctured your brain?” Ted began to say. His biggest paranoia was the rising costs of veterinary treatments, and after the seven or eighth office visit it was clear we had divided into two camps. There was sense and then there was nonsense, and in Ted’s opinion I resided in the latter.

When we had had our Wallace about 6 months, I noticed that, well, he was licking himself. A lot. Down there. Now, we have all heard the joke that starts with the question “Why does a dog lick his balls?” and ends with the punch line “Because he can!” but Wallace’s behavior seemed unusual to me. Like, kind of obsessive/compulsive. Plus, Wallace didn’t have balls. He was licking something far more, um, pointed.

I rushed to my Hypochondriac’s Guide to Overprotective Dog Care.

“If your dog begins to lick himself excessively,” I read, “and has a purulent, foul-smelling discharge coming from the prepuce, he may be suffering from balanoposthitis.” My eyes widened and I looked over at Wallace, who sure enough was licking himself again. I read this sentence a few more times, trying to figure out exactly what amount of licking constituted as “excessive.” It didn’t say. So then there was the matter of the discharge. I hadn’t noticed any per se; but then again I hadn’t looked.

Ted walked in the door as I was conducting my prepucal inspection.

“What are you doing?” he shouted, his voice screechy.

I was positioned much like an auto mechanic under a car. Wallace was busy with the task of cleaning out the insides of a Ben and Jerry’s carton that I have given him to keep him occupied, but all that ended when Ted walked in the door.

“I'm looking for a purulent, foul-smelling discharge. Come here, do you think it smells funny?”

“Stop it!" Ted said. "You're acting crazily.”

I sat up. “I think something’s wrong with him. He won’t stop licking himself.”

Ted folded his arms. “Nothing’s wrong with him.”

“What does purulent mean, anyway?" I asked. "Do you know?”

“I have no idea,” Ted said. “Wallace, come over here. Stay away from your mother.”

I stood and walked over to the bookshelves and reached for the dictionary.

“What are you doing?” Ted hugged the dog protectively.

“I’m going to find out what purulent means.”

“Would you stop it?”

“Why don’t you two go for a walk?” I said. This sent Wallace into a tizzy of barking and spinning, and Ted had no choice but to take him out. That or listen to me talk about purulence.

We had discovered a bright new way to end a discussion.

Over the next few days, Wallace kept up with his licking. And I kept up with my research. I discovered that a small amount of cloudy, yellowish discharge is not unusual in mature males, but “an excessive purulent discharge is associated with overt infection.”

“Well, there’s the word excessive again,” I said to Ted that night. “And purulent. What constitutes a normal amount of discharge?”

Wallace settled onto the sofa and began to lick himself again.

“Don’t look at me,” Ted said.

Then I read: “If the pus-like discharge is dripping directly from the penis opening, the condition is probably more serious. You should look for foreign material, such as foxtails, inside the prepuce of affected dogs.” I put the book down. “Foxtails!”

“He does not have a foxtail stuck up there,” Ted said.

“How do you know?”

“Because we haven’t been anywhere near foxtails. It’s November, for God’s sake. Foxtails are a spring occurrence.”

“Well, it could be something else.”

“But nothing is dripping. You’re overreacting here.”

At this moment, I swear, something green dripped from Wallace’s privates.

“Look!” I shouted to Ted, pointing. “Did you see that?”

Wallace ceased his licking for a moment and stared at me, a somewhat guilty look on his face. Then he looked over at Ted and, I swear, rolled his eyes, and lapped up the evidence. He buried his snout in his crouch and resumed with the licking, making a lewd snuffing sound.

“Something is wrong,” I said. “I know it.” I produced a diagram entitled “how to expose the penis” that illustrated how you were supposed to seize your dog’s privates with both hands and push one part forward (the penis) and pull another part back (the prepuce). Having been raised Catholic, I had a hard time even reading those words.

“Here,” I said to Ted, pushing the book toward him. “You do it.”

“Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s licking himself. He’s a dog.”

“But he has a discharge. And when the discharge is excessive, perhaps greenish or odorous, and the dog licks at his prepuce excessively, these are signs of balanoposthitis.” I was now waving the book in the air as if it were a Bible. “So someone is going to have to extract that prepuce and it’s not going to be me!” Wallace stood, belched, and then lumbered off to the other room.

For reasons we no longer understand or remember, it was Ted who had to take Wallace to the vet that day. This is what transpired, second hand:

DR. MARTER: “So, what seems to be the problem today?”

TED: “Well, my dog is licking himself a lot. On his penis?

DR. MARTER: “He's a male dog, right?”

TED: Yes

DR. MARTER: “Well, that's what male dogs do.”

TED: “Yes, but my wife says she saw—”

DR. MARTER: “Wives (DR PAUSES WEIGHTEDLY) know nothing about licking.”

PAN TO CLOSE UP OF TED’S BURNING FACE.

It took several years for me to live down this story, and for Ted to get over the humiliation of having brought the dog in in the first place. He vowed never to listen to me again.

And they seemed to have the same idea at the veterinary clinic. I noticed that, after that, every time I brought Wallace in for an appointment we got The New Vet, the one who had graduated from Cornell like the week before. And this is not to say Wallace got inferior treatment; it’s just that I started to wonder: was I not being taken seriously? Did they see me as a crazy dog lady?

Or was it the dog? Early on in his career as the English Setter Patient at this particular vet, Wallace had received a written warning of sorts. Someone at the vet’s office had written caution in black magic markers at the top of Wallace’s chart. This is another story, which requires a lengthy explanation, but the point is, I started to wonder if that caution referred to me.

Soon it seemed even Wallace saw me as a Crazy Dog Lady. If I, say, admonished him if he ate his food too quickly, he’d eat even more quickly, attempting to finish off his breakfast before I had even placed the dish squarely on the floor.

Like many dogs, Wallace gulped down his food as if at any moment, six adolescent wolves were going to burst forth from the kitchen cabinets and try to steal it away. (Thus the verb “to wolf”.) But this, I had read, was not healthy. “Wallace, don’t eat so quickly,” I’d say. “You might get volvulus.” He ignored me and continued to wolf. Clearly, volvulus was not one of Wallace’s 23 words.

“If you eat too quickly,” I continued, “your stomach could bloat, and then distend, and then twist on its axis, and that’s life threatening, and we’d have to rush you to the vet. Do you want to have to go to the vet?”

In two more bites he finished his food off, lapped up some water, and then belched. He knew the word “vet” but pretended that he didn’t. The belch I took as an insult. And a secret signal that he sided with Ted.

By the end of the summer, I had pretty much given up on the idea that I would ever be able to properly care for Wallace. And I realized, again, that this is something parents of human children must go through. You must reach a stage of resignation, in which you vow to simply do your best. And pray that no tree branches crash through the windows.

That August, my sister had to go away for a week and she asked me to come look after her two young daughters and their Yellow Lab. (This in itself is another story, for after this visit my sister banished Wallace from both her properties for this and all future lifetimes, but let us not go there.) I was flattered that my sister would entrust her two children to me, and I looked forward to spending a week on the Cape. There would be bike rides to the beach in the morning, blueberry picking at dusk, ice cream and fried clams in the early evenings, and then leisurely walks around the cranberry bog with the dogs.

And it was a lovely week, despite the fact that I felt inadequate as a substitute parent. I had always thought that children loved chaos, loved to defy order, and loved to eat candy for lunch, but not my nieces. They, bless their hearts (and my sister’s) found true stability in the routines my sister had set up for them. So instead of taking delight in the fact that I was not a rule enforcer, that I was a Cool Aunt, they themselves enforced the rules. When I told them the first morning that they could get their own breakfasts (which would have been a thrill to me as a child, as I was not allowed to eat anything but what my father dictated, and that was usually unsweetened wheat squares) they just looked at me with perplexity. “Mom always makes us fruit salad,” they said.

“Mom always gives us lunch at twelve,” they would say at three o’clock with their stomachs rumbling. “Mom always brings sunscreen to the beach,” they would say at high noon, as the sun’s harmful UV rays beat down upon us. Egads.

“It’s a good thing I don’t have children of my own,” I said to my friend that night on the telephone. “Can you believe I forgot sunscreen? My poor nieces. It’s like my sister has left them with a chimpanzee.”

“It’s understandable,” my friend said.

“But how do people do it?” I said. “How do people have children? How many childrearing manuals did you have to read before your first son was born?”

“None,” she said. “It’s just a wisdom we all have within us. You’ll see. It’s there.”

But I didn’t believe her. Take my wisdom with Wallace for instance. He had already burst through a screen door, stolen all the rawhide from his Lab cousin Bailey, and shredded two of my niece’s favorite towels. He played tug-of-war not to win, it seemed, but to kill, as if he had watched one too many episodes of Gladiator, and poor Bailey took to hiding under the porch as soon as we let her out. I wasn’t the Cool Aunt, I realized; I was the Lame Aunt. Not even a houseplant could thrive under my care.

But then, on the final day of my visit, there, I was lying on the lawn, reading a book, and occasionally marveling (as city people will) at the smell and feel and the color of the grass. Nearby, my nieces played on the waterslide and Wallace and Bailey were down by the cranberry bog, traipsing around with a giant Wolfhound puppy (cutely named Chewbacca) who lived down the road. This pup’s goofy presence, or perhaps his size, had sedated Wallace somehow, and he no longer lunged at Bailey. So all was well for the moment, and I kept putting my book down to smile at my nieces and check up on the dogs. The air had a lazy, end-of-day quality to it: soft and supple, and in the distance lawn mowers hummed and the birds had started their evening song. Off and on, my nieces giggled, a musical, uplifting sound that spoke of purity and innocence. Intermittently, the dogs barked.

But then, suddenly my youngest niece ran up to me and said, “Aunt Lee, Wallace is limping.” And sure enough, there was Wallace, hobbling toward me on three legs from the bottom of the hill. His friend Chewbacca ran alongside him, like some bucktoothed neighbor; he had an “I didn’t do it” look on his face. Wallace came right over to me and presented me with his paw. Suddenly I was surrounded by two children and three dogs, all of them panting from the swift climb up the hill, all of them expecting me to somehow know what to do. Never had I been so aware that I was an adult, at least in theory. Never had I felt so inadequate. In the distance, a pair of seagulls cawed, and it sounded mocking. The salt air suddenly felt harsh and abrasive. I took Wallace’s paw in my hand to inspect it, thinking that I had to at least go through the motions of a competent person, and Wallace seemed willing to go with this. But when I turned Wallace’s foot over I saw very clearly that he had a thorn in one of his pads. A rosebush thorn stuck right smack into the center. And so I pulled it out. “There you go,” I said to Wallace. “You’re fine now.” Wallace gave me one wet kiss and then tore off down the hill again with his pals, to menace the seagulls who had dared laugh at me.

“You did it!” my younger niece said. “You fixed him.”

I smiled. “I did!”

I looked down at the thorn in my hand, feeling outlandishly proud and competent. My pride was disproportionate of course, but still I let myself feel it. Then I put the thorn in my pocket so that no one would ever step on it again.

I pulled my niece onto my lap and stroked her sun-warmed hair. Together we watched the Wallace and his pals frolic. Wallace, my formerly broken dog, had been fixed.

Foul Weather Friends - What do to with white dogs on rainy days in NYC

2011-02-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

April is the cruelest month. And in New York City, February and March are too. Especially if you have a white dog. Each spring, with the thaw, come the rivers of mud, collecting mostly in those places you need them least: like right on the walking trails of Prospect Park, inside all the dog runs, and in a big, unavoidable puddle right at the bottom of your apartment building’s stoop. City mud, of course, has its own unique accoutrements, including cigarette butts, lottery tickets, and carcasses of the rats poisoned by the parks department every fall. These are not the sorts of things you want your white dog rolling in.

The spring thaw also reveals all that unscooped poop that people left behind during the winter months. For some reason, even those New Yorkers who are typically conscientious about cleaning up after their dogs will walk away from steaming piles on the snow during the winter. Perhaps because the snow in New York is so offensive anyway (it’s not white, dear readers—it’s gray). Perhaps they think the poop will simply disappear, blanketed by more and more layers of snow, until it disintegrates. But just as a frozen body can last thirty years in the name of science, so can frozen poop. It can last until the thaws of April, the cruelest month, when there it is once again, underfoot. This is proof that you can’t leave the past behind.

So can you blame New Yorkers for being grouchy in the spring? When we were children, spring meant crocuses and daffodils, green grass, budding trees, and the smell of Mother Earth shaking herself off and rising again in all her rich wonder. When we were children, I swear it didn’t rain so much. So where did all this rain come from—the Bush era?

In New York, the spring rain falls so hard that it bounces right off the sidewalks and straight up your skirt. It ricochets off the sides of buildings, pelts you on the neck, and seeps down into your collar, even though you are wearing a giant duck-billed hood and a scarf wrapped thrice around your neck.

Wallace, like many dogs, did not like the rain. At least not city rain. In the country, he would bound across the fields as he always did, occasionally stopping to shake himself, even though he never got dry, but on the Upper East Side he considered rain to be an assault. When we took him out to relieve himself, he’d press his body against the sides of buildings, trying to shelter against the downpour. Sometimes we’d pass under a scrawny awning, and there Wallace would stop. He’d put on his doggie emergency brakes: feet planted, leaning backward, with a look of stubborn solidity on his face—like that of George Washington on Mt. Rushmore.

I always had an umbrella on these occasions, of course. And, good dog-parent that I was, I would hold the umbrella over him rather than myself. I’d follow him along and hold the umbrella over him as he squatted to poop. Last summer I saw a picture of Puff Daddy, or P. Diddy, or whatever he’s called, strolling along the promenade at Cannes looking positively smashing in white linen pants and a white shirt. And a similarly dressed manservant was hurrying alongside him, holding a white umbrella over his boss’s head. I couldn’t help but think of this picture as Wallace lifted his leg on a fire hydrant—he was protected: I was splashed by a passing cab.

The big problem with carrying an umbrella to keep your white dog clean and dry is that when it comes time to pick up his deposit, you need a third hand, because one of your two hands is holding the leash and the other the umbrella. This is why Puff Daddy has a manservant, I guess. My method was to put the umbrella between my knees, but then it would tip over, and both of us would get wet. Wallace, offended at this injustice, would bolt toward another awning, and more often than not, I’d topple over.

I decided to buy the dog a raincoat. Now, on the Upper East Side, most of the dogs wore clothing—expensive garments from Burberry’s and Coach. But Ted refused to pay $300 for a “sissy rain coat.” So I ordered an inexpensive coat from Drs. Foster and Smith. It was a cute yellow slicker, just like the one I’d had as a child, the color of a school bus, or a Crayola crayon. This made me like the idea of a raincoat even better, because I always liked to find yet another way to infantilize the dog. But when the slicker arrived, it was too small. I’d ordered at Extra-Large, but it still didn’t reach all the way to his backside. You were supposed to hook a large elastic band around the dog’s tail, but this coat barely reached the big brown spot on top of his rump. So I had to return it.

“Good,” Ted said. “How are you supposed to shit with a big yellow elastic stretched across your anus anyway?”

“Could you not use the word ‘anus’?” I said.

Then Ted said he had another, less expensive idea. “Remember that dog at the Halloween contest that was dressed like a raisin?”

I did—an Irish Setter had been wearing a big Hefty bag that was stuffed with newspaper. It never occurred to me to wonder how the “raisin” went to the bathroom, but Ted figured we could cut the bag in half lengthwise and fasten the “cinch wrap” around Wallace’s neck.

“What about his anus?” I said. “And that other body part he needs to use?”

“They will be unobstructed,” Ted said. I figured that, when it came to matters of male anatomy, he knew best.

And so Wallace became a raisin. It took an additional 20 minutes to walk him each time it rained, because Ted and I laughed so much at the way he looked in his Hefty bag and his cinched-up face. We didn’t stuff him with newspaper, but still. It seemed to embarrass Wallace to have to walk past all the fancy restaurants on Madison Avenue, and by that Poodle in the pink plaid Burberry raincoat. And he still pressed himself against the awnings, and his belly still got wet and black and coated with that toxic spring mud.

After it had been raining for what seemed like 40 days and 40 nights, and Noah had not yet called to invite us aboard his arc, I decided to keep the dog indoors more often. I bought a book called Caninestein, which showed you how to measure your dog’s intelligence and offered tips on how to increase his IQ. Thus I was inspired to develop a game I called “Find the Kong.” I’d make Wallace sit and stay in one room (remember that we only had three rooms in that apartment: the kitchen/living room combo, the bedroom and the tiny bathroom only big enough for one). Anyway, I’d make him sit in the kitchen and then I’d go “hide” the Kong in one of the other rooms. I used the word hide in quotation marks, because, in the bathroom, the Kong would be “hidden” right on top of the toilet and in the living room it would be “hidden” on the windowsill. In any case, I’d tell Wallace, “Okay, go find it. Find the Kong!” And he’d race off, tail held high in excitement, with that look of fun in his eyes. He always found the Kong, of course, and would bring it back to me, his ears flattened back with pride and his tail wagging. I made a big show of praising him and his cleverness. “Who’s an Einstein? Who’s a Caninestein?” And then I’d hide it again—always in an obvious place—and the game would begin again. Sometimes Wallace would cheat and break his stay. I’d see him peeking at me from the doorway, and make him return to his designated spot. Most of the time he cooperated, because he knew if he cheated too much, I’d stop the game. He was a genius, I tell you. A regular Caninestein.

When Ted came home from work, soaked to the waist even though his umbrella was the size of a table for six, I threw myself on him in excitement and told him I had taught the dog a new game. I was as proud as if I had just typed a full novel in 23 days, which is what they say Stephen King always does.

“What a good mother you are,” Ted said, “teaching him a rainy-day game. Most mothers would just plunk him down in front of the television set.”

When we moved to the Upper East Side, our repertoire of rainy-day activities increased. This is a neighborhood where, starting at age three, all the children are sent to riding school at the Claremont Riding Academy, impressionistic painting classes (in oils) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then to flute lessons with a man who used to play with the New York Symphony. After a short break for toast and tea with their etiquette instructor, the children would be on to French lessons at the Alliance Française.
On the Upper East Side your dog could have a quadruple pedicure at Lolly’s Pet Salon, or go for a temperature-controlled swim at Biscuits and Bath. Then, after being washed, dried and fluffed by an aesthetician at the club, your dog could accompany you to the Regency Hotel, where waiters in white gloves would pour chilled Evian into a silver dog dish, and then serve him a warm dish of chicken, broccoli and rice. Twenty bucks if just the dog ate. Forty if you treated yourself. But you can’t do any of this wearing a plastic bag.

Luckily, Petco was just a few blocks away from our apartment. And, as you all know, “well-behaved” dogs are allowed inside the store, provided they are on a leash. Petco doesn’t even mind those dogs who leap up onto the biscuit bar and steal a couple of treats, because there are always security guards around who will narc on you and you will be forced to pay for the treats. This is a New York thing, I think—the security guards in a pet store. I heard that one time an Akita peed on one of them—a quick squirt to the pant leg—and the dog was banished for life. But then people on Manhattan Dog Chat got word of the banishment and threatened to sue Petco for breed-specific discrimination.

Anyway, my dog did not pee on anyone at Petco; nor did he jump onto the breakfast bar. He seemed to know that those biscuits, in their unnatural colors of orange and green, were not fit for canine consumption. Plus, I had told him that most commercial dog food was made of euthanized animals, elephant carcasses and baseball gloves, and reminded him that such food was beneath him. “Remember, you are a French Spaniel, and as a Frenchman, you must value your food.”

Instead, he would pull me to the second floor, where all the fish, birds and rodents were kept. It always smelled to me like sawdust up there, and indoor/outdoor carpeting; but to Wallace, with his heightened sense of smell, it must have smelled like the rainforests of Costa Rica, or the hedgerows of England. As we walked past the sealed terrariums full of gerbils, hamsters and tiny white mice, his nose quivered, his eyes narrowed into pinpoints, and his right foreleg rose into a hunting point. His face was focused and full of anticipation, and I realized this was the same look I had as I walked though the shoe section at Barneys: I want one of those, and one of those, and two of that pair...

Wallace would rush up to each terrarium and press his face against the glass. Oddly enough, the rodents never noticed him. They would continue spinning on their little wheels, or nibbling on grass, their little pink noses twitching and their tiny red eyes focused on the task at hand. If they had noticed him I would have taken Wallace away, because I don’t like to frighten other living creatures, but I never saw them blink or shiver. I wondered if they were sedated. Or if their cages were sealed so tightly they got no real air.

Once we had said hello to all 36 gerbils and hamsters, Wallace would pull me on to the bird section. This was a small, glassed-in room, like a squash court, full of cockatoos and parrots and one splendid African Gray. They were kept in cages, in neat rows, except for that Gray, who stood in a bird cage the center of the room, suspended from the ceiling like a chandelier. This was Wallace’s favorite room. The birds were not encased in glass, so the smell was more acute. Wallace would jump toward their cages and send them squawking in various notes. I’d always pull him off, make him sit and tell him to be quiet. “If the security guards hear us, they’ll kick us out,” I said.

But the security guards never said anything. Which I thought was weird. I’ve noticed that sometimes the people who work in pet stores seem to have little compassion for the animals they sell. But here, I guess, as long as you didn’t pee on them, you were okay.

I found a way to calm the birds down. I am now officially a crazy dog lady, remember, so why not talk to birds? I’d cluck and whistle and explain that, although technically Wallace was a bird dog, he wasn’t really all that that “birdy.” This wasn’t true, but I wanted to reassure the birds, let them know we meant no harm. Wallace would sit there, all beady-eyed, his body tense, with just the tip of his tail moving. Anyone with a bird dog knows what this means. But I explained to the birds that we lived in a tenement apartment building, and that there were no trees on our street, so we really didn’t get that much exposure to wildlife. “Plus, it’s raining cats and dogs out there,” I said, which sent them squawking again, I guess because I mentioned cats.

At that point we’d leave; Wallace reluctantly (at having to leave his own private aviary and head back into the dreadful rain) and I, satisfied (knowing that my dog got to hone his instincts and exercise his brain). Caninestein said this was essential. At Petco, Wallace got to practice what he did best: plotting how to kill all these hapless creatures. In his dreams, he actually did kill them. I could tell by the way he woofed triumphantly and flexed his lips and his paws. I knew he dreamed of open fields and sunny days. None of this rainy-day-in-a-Petco crap.

Anyway, I always allowed Wallace to pick out one toy on our way out of the store as a reward for not lunging at any of the birds. Wallace liked the fuzzy-wuzzy toys, especially those that resembled a squirrel, because he liked to practice the art of snapping spines. He also liked to pick out a greenie bone or a piggy ear and carry it home himself. With his tail up and a spring in his step, he’d hurry home, anxious to get out of the rain and eat his treat. His lips stretched around his prize into a dog-smile, big a goofy grin. And even though it was raining, and even though rain puts all New Yorkers into the foulest of moods, everyone we passed would smile at him as. He seemed to suggest that May would come, that spring really was just around the corner, and that the cruelest month would soon come to an end.

On Being a Slightly Overweight Woman with a Slightly Overweight Dog

2011-01-27T05:23:00.000-08:00

Chunky Canines & Portly Pooches

January is the month, as we know, of New Year’s resolutions. Take one look at the covers of dozens of womens’ magazines at the local newspaper kiosk and you will see that most resolutions—in fact, 90%--involve Losing Weight. My resolutions, however, have nothing to do with losing my own weight. It’s my dog who needs to shed some pounds.

My niece likes to tell the story of the time I stayed at their house for Christmas a few years ago, and brought along my dog—a jolly little spaniel mix named Chloe. As we pulled up to my sister’s driveway in suburban Massachusetts (“we” being the dog and I), and stepped out of the car, my niece and brother-in-law were watching from their living room window. It was snowing; I think they wanted to make sure I didn’t slip.

“Wow, she’s put on weight,” my brother-in-law said as they watched us make our way up the walkway.

“Dad!” my niece replied in horror. “How can you say that about Auntie Lee? She looks great. She always looks great.”

“I mean the dog,” John said.

I get this a lot. People telling me my dog is fat. But is this true? I mean really and truly true? Read on...

The words Chloe’s critics (and my friends) use to describe her are myriad: plump, chunky, well-fed, sturdy, a linebacker, no-stranger-to-the-meatloaf. My favorite description comes from the sweet Austrian librarian at our local library. “My, my, aren’t you getting portly,” she’ll say to Chloe, when Chloe comes forth for her daily treat.

On the one hand it’s cute; on the other it’s not. I’ve become The Woman With the Fat Dog. Perhaps I am even known as the Crazy Dog Lady with the Crazy Fat Dog.

It seems so unfair, especially given that I take her out on walks at least five times a day. In the country these are full-out romping walks, and Chloe gets to run on miles and miles of wooded trails. In this city, we walk through Greenwich Village and play in Washington Square Park. She is not a sedentary dog and I am not a sedentary person. So. Mr. Cesar-Macho Male Milan can’t call me on that one.

I also feed my dog the best possible food one can provide. Most of her diet is of the BARF variety—an unfortunate acronym for what is otherwise a superb food system. It means Bones And Raw Food and it follows the theory that dogs, in the wild, would eat bones and raw food. Simple as that.

I personally find this BARF dog diet most convenient for me, the provider, because I don’t have to open any cans or lug around large bags of kibble. And who knows what’s in some of that low-quality kibble anyway? Beyond the preservatives and genetically modified corn meal I mean. Old baseball gloves and work boots, ground to a fine oily powder? Sawdust? Old elephant hide? One study found traces of—get this—euthanized dogs in dog food. Can you imagine? Anyway, let’s get back to BARF, because thinking of dogs eating dog meat, or animal shelters selling this meat to manufacturers, makes me want to barf...

As I was saying, feeding your dog raw meat is very easy. You just have the butcher chop up the chicken or beef or whatnot to designated sizes, and then you just throw the meat on the floor (or outside) for your dog to chow down. “There, go pretend your feral,” I always say to Chloe when I toss her her meat. I don’t think she quite gets the joke, but she eats happily, and that’s all that counts. That girl ain’t got a feral bone in her body. And neither do I.

Feeding raw, by the way, is less expensive than purchasing commercial manufactured dog food. Go look at the per-pound price of the kibble and/or wet food you are buying. And see the light.

When I am traveling, and/or visiting family I do not feed Chloe raw, mostly because it grosses people out. Once my step-brother, as a joke, started to spread a rumor among family that I fed Chloe raw meat on his bed. That part was funny. It was not, however, funny when I found out the rest of the family believed it was true! That’s when I realized I better work hard to change their opinion of me and my ways :)

So, no raw meat at the homes of my hosts. Instead, I cook Chloe’s food. This is a hot new trend, by the way, but I’ve been doing it for years. My previous dog, Wallace, had food allergies, so I prepared his meals as well. Beef and vegetables mixed with oatmeal, or a bit of yogurt, and funny things like kelp, krill oil, lentils, kale....the kinds of things people who buy kibble like to make fun of. They find us excessive. And who knows?

The funny thing is, I technically don’t cook. Not for myself. I eat like a bachelor (frozen burritos and Indian entrees) and my only saving grace is that I buy organic bachelor-food. And I don’t microwave it. I use the stove—less chemical mutation that way. So my “cooking” consists of buying pre-made thing and pushing buttons. But the dog gets the whole shebang: stews prepared in large soup pots, vegetables pureed in a food processor, grains fluffed up in rice cookers, and then a hundred pots to wash. And I’m the one who has to wash them. This, to me, is a solid reason not to cook.

So sometimes, when I am in a rush, and/or camping, I do buy canned food. But it’s always no-grain organic food. PetGuard or Wellness. Nothing but the best for my dog.

And, despite giving her the best with my best, she’s still fat.

Would you like to hear my excuses?

EXCUSE #1: HYPOTHYROIDISM - A VALID MEDICAL REASON
For the record, Chloe has thyroid issues, and that’s why we have trouble keeping her weight down. It’s true—you can call my vet and ask her. And I have a thyroid problem too (hypo, just like Chloe). So cut us some slack.

In fact, one might say that my dog has thyroid problems because I do. You’ve all heard how some animals “take on” our physical ailments, i.e.: the heroic cat who developed throat cancer just after her human went into remission for the same thing. But is another topic for another day....in the meantime we have heroic Chloe taking on my propensity to gain weight.

Not a day goes by in which people do not tell me she is fat. I mean, I find it cute when Pia the librarian calls Chloe portly. Or when Clayton, my ten-year old nephew, calls Chloe “Miss Chubs” or “Chunky Monkey” or “Honker-Wonker.”

But when other unnamed people offer their habitual “your dog is overweight” comment, I get pissed. I get offended. I take it personally. I hear in their benign, offhand observations decades of latent criticism: you’re a failure; you don’t have a real job; you don’t know how to take care of yourself, let alone your dog; you’re a f—ck up—look! Your dog is going to die of heart failure, or suffer through a lifetime of hip problems and arthritic needs, all because YOU ARE A FAILURE!!

Do they actually say these things?
No

Do they actually think these things about me?
Probably not.
Okay, definitely not.

Then why do I react so negatively to being told my dog is overweight? Why do I take it so personally?

For one thing, it’s rather bad manners, don’t you think? Children are taught that it is rude to shout “Mommy, look at that fat man!” in the supermarket aisles. Aren’t they? Or is this permissible now?
But then again, some people these days spend most of their days flaming other people anonymously on the internet....perhaps children are more apt to flame to peoples’ faces now.

Anyway, I guess people think it’s okay to insult a dog’s weight because some people think dogs don’t have feelings. Or that they don’t hold grudges. The latter is true. And Chloe, she’s just as friendly and loving and goofy with the strangers who call her a Fatty-Fat as she is with the people who call her a Cutie-Cute. She, likes all dogs, loves the attention.

I suppose I like attention too, as long as it’s positive. Criticism crushes me.
In the interest of full disclosure: I used to be very self-conscious about my weight, and about the way I looked. I cared so much about looking “good” that I starved myself into near-oblivion. They called it anorexia back then and they still do. I remember well the feeling of starvation, of insatiable hunger, coupled with an intense self-loathing that had somehow convinced me I didn’t deserve food. At that time in my life I guess I thought I didn’t deserve to live. It was a horrible belief, a horrible sensation.

Now, thankfully, I don’t really care how I look. I could stand to lose five pound, but I don’t care enough to spend the time or effort accomplishing this. I just don’t eat crap, or high fructose corn syrup, or anything with exclamation points or cartoons on the packaging. I don’t eat anything genetically modified, artificially colored, or brewed in a test tube. Simply put: When I am hungry I eat and I eat when I am hungry. In behavioral therapist terms, this is called a “healthy relationship to food.”

So does my dog. She has an extremely healthy, well-functioning, vigorous relationship to food.

EXCUSE #2 – IT’S GENETIC! SHE’S GOT CHOCOLATE LAB IN HER BLOOD!
Chloe is part Lab, however, and it is said that Labs will eat and eat and eat until they explode. I cannot prove this, having never seen a dog explode.

But once, when I was staying at a friend and fellow band-member’s house (a friend who serves her dog kibble), we came home late from a music gig and found Chloe lying sideways on the floor. She seemed stiff and uncomfortable, and didn’t get up to greet us when we walked in the door. This is unusual Chloe, who always regards the occasion of a human entering a room as a cause to celebrate.

I rushed over and knelt before her, to check her breathing and feel her heart. I even checked for blood and felt for broken bones. “What’s wrong?” I said to the dog. Her posture was that of a dog with a twisted intestine.

“I think I found the answer,” my friend called from the kitchen. She led me into the pantry, where we beheld a tipped-over bag of kibble, more than half of it gone. And we’re talking one of those thirty-pound bags.

“Chloe, how could you?” I said to her, back in the living room. But she didn’t acknowledge me. She was practically passed out on the braided rug, sleeping off her kibble-induced stupor like a drunk.

She farted all night, by the way. Which is why I personally never give my dog kibble.

So. Here was proof that any animal with a drop of Labrador Retriever in her portly body will at least try to eat until she explodes. But she will not actually explode.

Chloe remained comically bloated for the next day or two, and even seemed somewhat chagrined...the way a college freshman might be after one of those nights of too-much-to-drink, and “Oh, God, I don’t remember what I said.”

During those two days I was a bit more lax in my reaction to those people who happened to call her fat. I had a perfect excuse.

And why are the called Chocolate labs, by the way? Isn’t chocolate often associated with food addiction? I’m just saying...

EXCUSE #3 – YOU’D LOOK FAT TOO IF YOU WERE WEARING A FOUR INCH THICK FUR COAT.
I like to joke that Chloe is part Wooly Mammoth. She has very long, very course, very thick white fur on certain parts of her body—mostly her back. I don’t know where this fur comes from—I mean, what part of her DNA would produce such thick, abundant fuzz, that is wiry in some areas of her body, long and smooth in others, and short and coarse underneath?

But this fur honestly does make her look bigger than she is. Go ahead and call my groomer if you don’t believe me—he’ll vouch for us.

In the summer time I get the dog groomed—a “spaniel cut,” they call it—shaved down to a buzz cut on the top half of her body, and fringed on the lower half. Thus, in the summer time, everyone says: “Wow, Chloe has lost a lot of weight.”

People say that to me too, in the summer time, by the way: that whole “Wow, you’ve lost weight! You look great!” thing.

“It’s because I’m no longer wearing seven layers of sweaters, four layers of woolen leggings, and a North Face full-body ski suit on top of it all,” I tell them. Rather irritably. Because inside I’m thinking: so this whole time you’ve been thinking I’m a fat cow?

It’s true that in the winter I look like the Michelin man. In the winter I do not get asked on dates. But who cares? Looking bloated is better than being cold, I always say.

But when people start to exclaim in the summer how great I look, it makes me suspect that I must look absolutely wretched and bloated in the winter.
How shallow people are, to judge a book by her covers like that. Her many, many covers. I’ll see you next June.

EXCUSE #4 – SHE WAS A SHELTER DOG, AND MALNOURISHED; I CAN’T JUST LET HER STARVE, CAN I?
Yes, yes, I know it is unhealthy for a dog—or anyone—to remain overweight. It’s not like I’m trying to have an unhealthy dog.
Let’s recap my excuses thus far:
1) She has low thyroid function.
2) She is a part Lab. Chocoholic Lab.
3) She is part Wooly Mammoth.

Plus, I want her to be happy and comfortable. Starving is not at all comfortable. I know this first-hand. I starved myself for about four years when I was a teenager. It was horrible.

One of my friends once told me that his vet told him that dogs are always supposed to be in a state of hunger. It’s in their nature, this vet says.

Always in a state of hunger.

When I was anorexic I was like a ghost. I used to think of food all day and dream of food all night—I used to consume trays of macaroons and French baguettes and almond croissants in my dreams, and then wake up aghast at the thought that I might have actually truly eaten something. I rarely ate anything. Food was the enemy. Food equaled fat and fat made me detestable, corrupt, hideous, etc. I don’t think I had a genuinely happy or healthy thought for about ten years.

In my twenties, when I moved beyond the affliction of eating disorders, I made a vow to myself: I would never go hungry again. So now we must ask: Am I somehow transferring this vow, this fear of starvation, onto my dog?

When she is hungry she lets me know it. She pokes me with her snout and leads me, like a gallant Lassie, into the kitchen, toward the refrigerator, and then goes en pointe, like an elegant, hard-working bird dog. It’s so cute I just have to feed her. Even if it’s just a small morsel of something. But usually she does this only twice a day—at her usual feeding times. She reminds me to feed her, you see. Because she knows that I am a spacey artist who needs to be reminded to tend to practical things. I forget a lot of things these days. I need a service dog to remind me to feed the dog.

Years ago, a very famous article appeared in Atlantic Magazine, entitled “Why Your Dog Pretends to Love You.” I can’t remember the author’s name, and I don’t have time to Google it, but the author’s theory was that dogs have learned that acting affectionate and cute and loving will result in the reward of food. But that they don’t actually really love you. Or even like you. They’re just in it for the food.

Hmmm. My ex-husband once accused me of the same thing....

I wouldn’t be surprised to find scientific proof that my dog Chloe is manipulating me, and that she goes en pointe at the refrigerator because she knows it will make me laugh and because she knows she will get a small morsel of hotdog or a larger morsel of sliced turkey breast, or perhaps even a full-fledged dinner, even though it’s technically not dinner time. We call it the “early bird special”: her 6:00 pm dinner meal, served at 4. All because she is cute. And please note that she always gets her thyroid supplements with her meals.

Okay. So perhaps we could say that it is my dog’s fault that she is so fat. Or portly. Or chunky, chubby. A Mack-truck-in-fur...whatever you want to call her.

Perhaps we could say I am wimp with former eating disorders and self-worth issues, who is afraid that her dog won’t love her if she doesn’t feed her “enough.”

Or perhaps we could say I’m just a softie, with a kind heart, who wants her sweet middle-aged dog to have a happy, comfortable life.
I prefer to think of it this way.

Years ago, when I was married, and had another life, and another dog, the dog named Wallace, who had a perfectly functioning thyroid, we used to spend our summers up in Wisconsin. My former mother-in-law had a place there--an old family compound belonging to her husband and his siblings. My husband, dog and I had the grandmother’s old cabin (Oh, that place was heaven!) and my step-father-in-law’s step-brother F____ had the cabin next door.

F___ and his wife had an old Labrador Retriever. I forget his name but I remember his girth, and his sweet grey muzzle, and his vaguely clouded eyes. I also remember that he was—and remains—the fattest dog I have ever seen.

Two images stay in my mind: One is of this old dog lying on the dock, in such a manner that his entire body covered the width of the dock. He was the sort of dog who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, move much, so once he spread himself on the dock he was there for the day. We’d step over him on our way out to the kayaks, and step back over him to retrieve the coolers and the sun block, etc. This was easy and simple enough for us humans. But I remember my dog Wallace did not quite know what to do. He was the younger dog, clearly not the leader of any pack, and also clearly a guest at this compound. Wallace seemed to know that it would not be cool for him, the Gamma, to jump over the Alpha dog. So he used to leap off the dock and swim up to the kayaks, or back to shore.
This was my first experience with fat-dogs-as-roadblocks.

The other thing I remember about that fat old lovely lab is that, at meal times, he would plant himself next to his Mum—a jolly woman named M.—and rest his head on the table, and basically receive treats all night long. Like a slot machine.

M. too was a softie. Older than me. I always saw her as someone I might become.

Ben was the dog’s name—I remember now! We all used to joke about how, well, obscenely obese Ben was, but we never said that in front of M. Or in front of Ben for that matter. What we would say—and mean—is that “Ben has a good life, eh?” And he did. He lived eighteen years as a canine slot machine.

So back to Chloe. Chloe of the Big Appetite and the Low Thyroid. You may call her portly or flabby or Chunky-Monkey. But you can’t call her unloved.

Perhaps that is why I get so offended when strangers—and family members—make those off-hand comments. Perhaps I worry that at some level, another person is challenging my own personal version of love. But that’s just is—love is so personal. And we I’m just trying to love my dog the way I think she deserves to be loved.

And so, I give her her thyroid medication (when I can afford it, which lately has not been often). I dose her up with homeopathic remedies and herbs. I groom her in the summer and call her a Mammoth in the winter. I give her plenty of off-leash exercise in the acres of mountain trails behind our house.

And when she eats, I watch her wag and wag and wag her tail and think about an Alice Walker quote I read in Oprah magazine: “You do your best, and when you know better, you do better.” And in the meantime, let us eat and be merry.

If you, dear readers, have any input as to how you handle your portly pooches, we welcome it. Cheers!

PS - That sweet fat dog pictured above is not Chloe. Here she is. Ain't she cute?

Rex and the City, Part 4 - The Country Dog Acclimates to City Life

2011-01-15T13:54:00.001-08:00

Here is the (very belated) fourth installment of my little series about my beloved dog Wallace. In the previous installment, my boyfriend Ted and I were on the verge of taking this dog back to the shelter, because he had turned out to be more than we could handle (wild, aggressive, untrained, hostile to all dogs and humans, and slightly dangerous). But then we took the dog camping and finally saw his (Wallace’s) potential as a normal happy dog. We decided to keep him no matter what. We decided we were willing to face the hardships because we knew that beyond the hardships we would find a beautiful, rehabilitated dog, ready to accept our love.

So here is a continuation of that story:

Rex and the City, Part 4

It had been two months since we adopted our shelter dog Wallace, and in that time he had shown us affection exactly once. But when it comes to love, isn’t once sometimes enough? Last night, Wallace had pressed his body against mine while we slept at a campsite. And those few hours of closeness was enough to give Ted and me hope.

On the way home from the Catskills that fateful weekend, Ted and I stopped at a small-town diner for a late lunch and left Wallace in the car. He howled, of course, and the three customers in the restaurant turned around to stare.

“That a bird dog you got there?” one of the men at the counter asked.

“Yes,” we said sheepishly. And then we went into our now-familiar spiel about how we had just rescued him and that we suspected he had been abused because he was so hard to deal with, but we loved him nevertheless, etc., etc., etc. The waitress, one of those gruff, big-bosomed, grandmotherly types, smiled at us and said, “Yep. Dogs is harder than kids. But you gotta love ’em. Look at that face!” She walked over to the window and tapped on it and began to coo. “Aw, what a sweetheart!” she said. “Look at that brown and white puppy wuppy face!”

This sent Wallace into a froth of snarls and barking and scratching maniacally at the windows.

“Looks like you got a live one there,” the man said.

“That we do,” we said, but when Ted and I exchanged a look, I saw that something had changed in our attitude. Yes, we had a live one, but he was our live one and we knew from that moment on we would be fully committed to him.

Once we got back to New York City, Ted and I began to work doubly hard on turning Wallace into the Dog He Was Meant to Be. First we hired a private trainer—an eager young woman from neutral Switzerland who managed to strike a workable balance between my coddle-and-nurture training methods and Ted’s sock-it-to-'em New Skete.

Now, before we go any further, let me remind you—gentle readers—that I am currently an avid (Ted would say “rabid”) supporter of clicker-training, which is a brilliant, effective, and impeccable easy system of training that uses positive reinforcement. I have now been working with and writing about dogs for eleven years, and I see no reason why anyone should have to resort to shouting, alpha rolling, and/or choke-chaining their dogs to get their dogs to behave in certain ways. We don’t need to choke our dogs every time they try to walk in a certain direction. I’ve seen men yank harshly on their dogs’ leashes if the dog so much as looks in a certain direction. This damages our dogs’ throats, necks, and vocal cords, my friends. We do not need this Cesar Milan negative-reinforcement bullocks. Clicker training is easy, safe, fool-proof and pleasurable for your dog. This sort of positive reinforcement training is crucial when working with shelter dogs, who may have experienced abuse, neglect, or heedless cruelty at the hands of humans. So enough of the soapbox (before I get flamed!)

I am ashamed to say that, back in 1997 when we first got Wallace, I knew nothing of clicker training. Therefore I brought needless, heedless suffering upon my already traumatized dog. I am so sorry, Wallace, wherever you are. Now, back to the story:

So we had hired a trainer. And each morning Ted and I would meet her at East River Park and work with Wallace on a forty-foot lead. We worked on sit, heel, come, stay, and if Wallace’s attention strayed she encouraged us to yank violently on his choke collar and then offer praise. None of us paused to consider the incongruity of these mixed messages, and how that would affect an already confused do. No one took into consideration how hard it would be for us non-prey animals to keep the attention of a hunting dog: or, for that matter, how hard it would be for me, at that hour, to stay focused myself.

I’d always said I wanted to be a morning person--out there at dawn with the joggers, the go-getters, the high-metabolism Wall Street freaks who made gobs of money. But now that I was required to get up before seven and stand inside an abandoned soccer field, I wished I was still in bed. While the trainer talked to Ted about, say, the importance of always heeling the dog on his right side vs. left, I’d find my attention drifting off toward the other dog people, who passed beyond the fence with their well-trained dogs.

There was the tall, sleek Icelandic woman gliding by on Rollerblades with her ice-blue Weimaraner. There was the hipster East Village dude racing his Ridgeback on his bike. And then there was the perfect blond yuppie couple with their perfect blond baby and a matching yellow Lab. Every day they would appear through the morning mist like aliens from Planet Future with their high-tech stroller and their crisp, seize-the-day clothes. The Lab trotted along side them happily with a ball in his mouth, his leash slack, his focus on them. They would park the stroller under a willow tree and throw the ball for the dog exactly 30 times. The baby never cried; the dog never pooped. Then they were off again, off to their bright, promising days. I would stare after them in wonder. How did she manage to push the stroller, drink a Starbucks Caramel Macchiato and hold the dog’s leash all at the same time? How did she find the time to have a dog and a baby? Or even just a dog?

Ted would yank on my sleeve and tell me to “Pay attention!” All in all, Wallace caught on quickly to the training. He learned that for one hour every day we would take him to a certain spot on a certain leash in the presence of a certain woman and require him to be obedient. The rest of the time he still pulled on his leash as much as ever. I honestly was not enjoying this. Walking a dog, at that point in my selfish city life, felt like work. And I wanted so much for everything in life to be easy and breezy and light. And I wanted to look good doing it.

But that was not to be. Five times a day I was getting yanked through the city streets by a dog who didn’t even seem to really like me.

“Faster than a speeding bullet,” our super, Sander, would say as I got yanked down the stairs of our apartment building in the morning. “More powerful than a locomotive,” Sander would add in his deliciously ironic tone. “Able to leap out of car windows in a single bound.”

“You heard about the car window incident?” I asked, surprised. In New York, one cannot keep secrets. Especially if one lives in an old tenement building on an un-gentrified street in the not-yet-hip portion of the Lower East Side. We were a building full of young white artists, dreamers, and public school teachers in a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. We did not quite fit in, and that made us all band together in familial ways.

“Oh, I heard all about that dog, all right,” Sander said with a wink.

I should point out that our super was not your ordinary gray-haired Mr. Fixit with 800 keys on his belt and stained workman’s pants. No, our Sander was a hot young poet/playwright/Marxist with a Mohawk and his own printing press. He had a piano in his kitchen and held poetry readings in his bedroom and was so über-cool that in his presence even Lou Reed might shake in his combat boots. At night we could hear him singing show tunes through the air shaft, his warm voice curling into our windows like an appetizing scent. Ah, Sander.

Secretly I had a crush on him, so in his presence I got tongue-tied and turned red. In his presence Wallace always took gigantic poops on the sidewalk, which I then I had to stoop down and pick up using a plastic bag. (This made Ted laugh for hours on end, for he knew of my crush and loved to tease me about it).

Once, just as I was carrying a bag of poop to the outside trash can, Sander appeared, wearing a pair of workman’s gloves, a white tanktop, and a pair of overalls, with one of the straps sexily undone. I felt bad that I was placing shit into a barrel that he would be required to empty.

“Things seem much better,” Sander said to me that day.

“What seems better?” I asked, a bit alarmed. You see, in New York City, all your neighbors can hear your arguments, and for the past few weeks Ted and I had been having huge ones about how best to handle the new dog. But we hadn’t argued for at least two days which seemed magnanimous.

“Your new dog,” Sander said. He seems like he’s chilling out.”

I smiled, relieved. It was true. As the weeks passed, Wallace was becoming more and more dog-like. He stopped to sniff more often on our walks through the neighborhood and began to mark. Up until then he would squat to pee, and let it all out in one sitting, as if this were the one and only chance he’d get. Now he lifted his leg like a boy-dog and took his time. I can’t tell you how joyful that made me feel. Just that one tiny change meant to me that whatever we were doing was working.

And even though it still wasn’t easy to walk him, he at least began to acknowledge that we were there at the other end of his leash. That in itself—just the fact that he would turn his head toward me sometimes while I walked him, began to make dog-walking more fun.

I wouldn’t say Wallace had taken a total liking to us yet, but his seething, misguided hatred of us had definitely toned down. Sometimes, in the apartment, he would allow us to pet him and praise his patrician good looks; but he still wouldn’t look at us, nor offer any affection in return. But at least he wasn’t cowering so much. Slowly, we seemed to be earning his fractured trust.

And sometimes, when I paused from writing at the computer, I’d feel him watching me, as if trying to figure out exactly what my role was in his life. “I think you’re starting to like me,” I’d say, my eyes still on the screen. “Yes, I think you are.” But when I turned to smile at him he’d quickly look away and pretend to be consumed with licking his paws.

And while Wallace was becoming a dog, we were becoming dog people. The city was full of them—I had just never really noticed before. And now they all gravitated toward us and stopped us on the sidewalk to say hello. They’d address Wallace first, and after he recoiled from their outstretched hands or barked at them or their dogs and/or lunged at their throats, we would go into the “he’s a rescue dog” spiel and nine times out of ten it would turn out their dog was a rescue too. Or liberated from a junkyard. Or abandoned on the streets.

We found, in our neighborhood, an entire support group of young and old people who had gone through what we were going through. And most of them were visibly insane. One such neighbor—a weathered man in his fifties—wore marching-band jackets and painted his fingernails pink. He rejoiced every time Wallace barked at him. “What a wonderful dog!” he would shout from across the street. His three dogs—whom he called his children—would bark back at us, and everyone would have to shout to continue the conversation. “My children bark at everybody and Mother of Mary I prefer it that way,” our neighbor would say. “I got mugged back in the Seventies when this place was a festering drug pit, and then I went straight to the ASPCA and adopted my children and that, thank the Blessed Mother, was the end of that. Your dog was definitely abused.”

“How can you tell?” I said.

“Look at him! He has no hair around his neck. It’s all worn away.”

Ted and I looked at each other guiltily. “We did that,” I said. “It’s from his choke collar.” I waited for this dear man to curse me for being cruel.

But instead he said: “Ah, you’re good people, I can tell.” He paused to wheeze. “It took one of my children three years to figure out this leash-walking ordeal. Patience is all it takes. Patience and a no-pull harness.”

Ted and I smiled as we walked away. A stranger had called us good. Could it be true?

I thought about how rapidly our lives had been changing since we got Wallace. Up until then both Ted and I had been devotedly, almost rabidly pursuing our careers and following our bliss. Now we were following some mad dog’s rump.

I was so encouraged by the Marching Band Man’s compliment I decided to take our relationship to a new level.

“Let’s take Wallace to a café,” I said to Ted.

I had always wanted a café dog—a dog who would sit placidly under the table while my lover and I nibbled each other’s earlobes and sipped white wine. You know, like in Paris.

“I don’t think he’s quite ready for that yet,” Ted said. He was always the voice of reason. Blast him.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Please? We’re good people.”

“Well....”

I finally convinced Ted to take us to Benny’s Burritos—a Mexican restaurant with sidewalk tables that faced a relatively quiet street. Our waitress had the innocent, pouty-lipped look of Liv Tyler, and when she saw Wallace she gasped in sweet, childlike wonder and sunk down to her knees. “What a beautiful dog!” she said. I started to tell her that Wallace had been abused as a pup, that he was afraid of people, that he might bite, but hers was the sort of beauty that healed wounds and opened doors, and Wallace melted beneath her touch. He spread himself beneath the table, head on paws. I was so proud of our beautiful dog. And proud of us for having chosen him.

“He likes you!” Ted said giddily to the waitress.

When I saw Ted sneaking a peek down the waitress’s shirt, I said, rather testily, “Could we order some drinks?”

, Ted felt we should order our food right away as well. “Just in case. Wallace is being good now, but I don’t want to push our luck.” So we put in our orders for giant stuffed burritos.

Our drinks came first—big, salty Margaritas on ice—along with a bowl of tortilla chips with salsa, and as I took a sip of my drink I had one of those moments when you realize you are exactly where you want to be at that particular time. I was at a sidewalk café on a beautiful summer evening with my handsome boyfriend and our handsome dog in the most magnificent city in the world.

“I’m happy,” I said, meaning it. How glorious it was to finally have a cafe dog after all these years! But then a homeless man came up to our table asking for change. Ted said we didn’t have any. All we had was a fifty-dollar bill with which we planned to dine. The man continued to beg of us however. And thus. Wallace’s fur began to rise. Ted noticed and shouted, “Hold on to him, Lee!” but before I could, Wallace had already sprung into action, tipping the table over as he lunged. Immediately Ted caught Wallace by the collar, and the homeless man shuffled away, but still. Our complimentary bowl of tortilla chips had crashed onto the pavement, our drinks had spilled, and a bottle of hot sauce had rolled off the curb, making its way up First Avenue as if fleeing the scene.

“Oh dear,” our waitress said, arriving with our order. “Should I wrap this up to go?”

~

Ted and I didn’t speak on the long walk home, but I know we were both thinking the same thing: “He’s your dog.” Once again I was unhappy with my choice and with my life. And yet, when we turned the corner that was our block, there was the marching-band man out walking his children. He looked so content, so deliriously happy. Like a true New Yorker. “Have a fabulous evening!” he shouted from across the street. “And God bless you for saving that beauuuuutiful dog!”

Ted and laughed and joined hands. Sometimes, in New York, you need someone else to tell you who you really are. And we were ready to listen.

The Moment You Realize Your New Shelter Dog Loves You

2010-12-16T09:49:00.000-08:00

The Moment You Realize Your New Shelter Dog Loves You

Rex and the City

Part III: The Trial Period

It was the Fourth of July weekend of 1997, normally a time when my then-boyfriend and I would have been out barbecuing on the rooftop or having drinks with friends. Anything that involved being outside in the cool night air, basically; for Ted and I lived, back then, in a 300-square foot tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. With a new shelter dog. The fact that we now had a dog had us in shock. Still. So no fun rooftop parties for us.

Instead, Ted and I were sitting comatose in front of the television, watching a documentary on fireworks with the sound turned down. We were not habitual TV watchers per se, but there was something about having added a satanic shelter dog to our lives that made us want to prostrate ourselves in front of something that wouldn’t challenge us or make us think.

Meanwhile, on the television, a burst of green explosives lit up the TV sky, and then came a commercial for carving knives. Vegetables and fruits were chopped with alarming speed, curls of yellow peppers falling away from the knife in spirals, like fireworks, and then a fast-talking announcer promised guaranteed satisfaction over a 30-day trial period or your money back.

“You see that, Wallace?” Ted called to the dog hunkered under the computer table.

I forgot to mention that Ted and I weren’t speaking.

“You’re on a trial period,” Ted continued, still addressing the dog rather than me. “Thirty days. After that, we might have to take you back to the shelter.” He actually wasn’t joking.

“Don’t let him talk to you like that,” I said to the dog. “We’re on trial just as much as you are.” I reached over to pet my dog, to smooth back his ears, but he growled at me and ducked away.

So great. Ted wasn't speaking to me and neither was this dog.

Why were we so upset with the dog? And why were we not speaking? Well, earlier that day, Wallace had tried to escape again. (I am told that shelter dogs do this often--try to run away from their new owners). On this, this second escape attempt on Wallace's behalf, we’d had him in a fenced-in lot on Suffolk Street, and we were trying to get him interested in a tennis ball, which is what we thought all normal dogs would be interested in. But Wallace apparently had no time for games. And no interest in living in New York City. He seemed to consider himself a prisoner and thus, he had apparently scoped this abandoned lot for escape routes and had spotted on a hole in the fence in a far corner.

Meanwhile, Ted and I bounced the ball to each other at first, talking in loud, baby voices about how fun it was, and then we threw the ball for Wallace, saying “Look at the ball! Look at the bouncy wouncy tennis ball!” Ted even unsnapped the dog’s leash and encouraged him to chase it.

Wallace—intelligent, scheming creature that he was—took off after the ball and then, we swear, turned at a 90-degree angle and made his escape. He ran straight up Orchard Street and turned toward Houston.

I screamed his name in terror, but the thing was, Wallace didn’t even really know that his name was Wallace yet. He seemed to still think his name was AH1012 – the intake number he had been assigned at the shelter.

Anyway, Ted and I of course ran after the dog, shouting, crying. After a complicated, death-defying chase, which involved lots of shouting and O.J.-Simpsoning ourselves over hydrants and traffic cones, we caught him. Or rather, Ted caught him, tackling Wallace outside a bodega. By the time I reached them, Ted had alpha-rolled the dog onto the sidewalk and was clutching a hand to the dog’s throat. “Look at me!” Ted was shouting at Wallace. “You look at me when I’m talking to you!”

Poor Wallace was terrified. He had his tail tucked so high between his legs he looked as if he might swallow it.

“Leave him alone,” I said. “He’s upset.”

“You!” Ted turned to me with venom in his eyes. “You baby him too much.”

“Well, you bully him. Dogs don’t like to make eye contact. It’s not natural for them.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“What the fuck do you know?” Ted said. "And why did you let go of him anyway?"

"What do you mean why did I let him go. You unclipped his leash!"

"Well, you should have known there was a hole in the fence."

Inside, I was thinking: I should have known there was a hole in your heart.

Ted turned away from me in disgust and shook the dog again.

Thirty days, I was thinking. Maybe I’d go to a shelter myself. And take the dog with me.

For the past few weeks we had been doing everything we could to figure out how to handle this shelter dog. We loved him from the moment we set eyes on him, and we knew he was meant to be our dog. But still, we were slowly realizing that the dog's aggression was more than we could handle. We had never had a dog before, and we were clueless about them. Still, we tried out best.

That month, we had cancelled all social and job-related engagements, read every dog book and training manual we could get our hands on, and took Wallace to the park daily to apply what we had learned from our books the night before. The thing was, the books I favored suggested positive reinforcement, whereas Ted’s books encouraged aggressive dominance paired with punishment. My books said to reward desired behavior with treats and praise. Ed’s books said if the dog exhibited undesired behavior, you should clock the unruly dog under the jaw.

Not my style, really. I was more of a let's-talk-this-out-peacefully sort of girl. I imagined Wallace years later on a therapist’s couch, complaining about all the mixed messages his parents gave him. “I never learned how to be a good dog,” he would say. "Everything I did was wrong."

Needless to say, both Ted and I were feeling that we really weren’t capable of handling a dog. One night, Ted and I looked up Wallace’s alleged breed on the Internet. We visited all Spaniel and Setter sites and were told, repeatedly: It is cruel to keep this type of exuberant hunting dog in a city apartment. The word cruel really struck us. Wallace no longer had hair around his neck because his choke collar had pinched it all off (think Epilady). He had to walk backward out of the bathroom because there wasn’t enough room for the poor dog to turn his body around. “It’s like making him parallel park,” Ted said. Outside, on walks, poor Wallace would cut his pads on the glass that littered the sidewalk, and not even sleep gave him solace, as he would spend the nights snarling and snapping and grinding his teeth.

“Maybe we should leave New York City,” I said. “Or give Wallace to someone in the country who wants a dog.”

“But he’s not a normal dog,” Ted reminded me. “He needs professional help.”

At this, I started to cry. We all need professional help, now and then, and I loved my needy, confused little dog. He needed me. How could I ever abandon him after all he had been through?

Ted seemed to be thinking the same thing. He suggested we go camping. “Maybe all Wallace needs is some country air.”

“That’s a great idea,” I said.

We smiled at one another for the first time in weeks. It was so nice to actually agree on something.

So, that weekend, we drove to the Catskills, with Wallace howling in protest the entire way. Who knows what he was thinking--that we were taking back to a shelter? That we would dump him off the side of some highway? He kept hurling himself against the back seat and clawed at the windows, calling out in desperation to the birds overhead and the passing cars: Save me! Can’t you see I’m being kidnapped? It was like traveling with your own personal mosh pit, and by the time we reached the mountains our ears were shot, our jaws were tight and my crisp linen skirt was as crumpled and dirty as that one-dollar bill you always see in a homeless person’s bucket--the one he put there himself.

OKay, so the dogs hates b eing in cars, I thought. Just as musch as he hates being in apartments. Or maybe he simply hates being with us. And who couldblame the dog? Frankly sometimes I hated being with us too.

Once we reached the campground, however, my thoughts changed and I was hopeful again. About Ted, about Wallace, about the concept of "us." Perhaps it was he fertile smell of Silver Lake that lifted my state of mind. And Ted's too. I could see it on his face as he rolled down all the windows.

It was as if each of us saw in that shimmering water the solution to everything: the need to be cool, the need to relax, the need to be cleansed.A vacation! It's what all New Yorkers need.

We headed to this lake as soon as we had set up the campsite--Ted and I in flip-flops, Wallace on his Epilady leash. Two fishermen in a rowboat were just coming in from a day’s outing, and when they saw us at the shoreline they touched their caps. “Good-looking dog you got there,” one of them said. I smiled and said thanks.

“Are you supposed to thank people who compliment your dog?” I asked Ted, who walked far ahead of me. “because it’s not as if we birthed him.”

“Does it matter?” Ted said. He was already busy trying to coax Wallace into the water. Wallace seemed nervous as we waded in. He’d lift one paw out of the water, then another, as if trying to figure out a way to lift all four at the same time. Ted tugged gently on his leash. “Come on, boy,” he said. “Come! Come!”

“Maybe he can’t swim,” I said.

“All dogs can swim.”

“Where did you read that?”

“It’s just a fact,” Ted said.

He started to say come in a more authoritative voice, the way his MOnks of New Skete said to do it. They were the ones who encouraged jaw-punching, and I secretly referred to them as the Monks of Steel.

So as Ted called to the dog in his commanding, slightly threatening Alpha voice, I joined in using a happy, lilting voice, in the manner of my books.

As we spoke, both Ted and I waded backwards, into deeper water, tugging the dog along. But Wallace had put his emergency brake on: feet planted, body leaning back, refusing to go any further. Just then a duck flew overhead and like that, Wallace changed. He became a bird dog, arching his neck and howling in an ancient, primal way, as if calling out to his ancestors. Then he plunged in the direction that the duck had flown. He hopped through the water—his body making lovely, acrobatic arcs—and stopped (in an almost comical way) when he found himself immersed.

Then he wasn’t a bird dog anymore—he was once again a confused city dog, newly released from prison, finding himself in another new and impossible situation. A situation which was cold and wet.

Looking confused, he moved his legs slowly, then more quickly as he realized paddling would propel him forth. He seemed surprised by his own abilities and kept moving his head around, a gesture that made him swim circles.

“Look! He’s swimming!” I said. “Isn’t that cute?” My heart seemed to leap with joy –this was one of my first experiences with the true elation one can feel when witnessing dog joy, and it was exhilarating.

It wasn’t cute or exhilarating, however, when Wallace, suddenly an expert, doggy-paddled to the shore and sprinted away.

“Not again!” Ted said. He used some of his favorite swear words and waded quickly to shore.

Ted and I scrambled to pursue the dog, but given that we were both wearing flip-flops, we couldn’t run very quickly. Plus, I was not about to bounce through the woods in a bikini. O.J. Simpson, yes. Pamela Anderson, no.

Ted ran off ahead of me while I threw on my clothes. Why had we gotten a dog? I asked myself as I heard Ted’s angry voice fading farther and farther away. The answer seemed as elusive as Wallace himself. Instead of bringing us together, it seemed, the dog was wrenching us apart.

For a moment I stood there, seized with worry. The dog would fall off a cliff and get killed. The dog would get shot by an off-season hunter. The dog would get caught in a bear trap. The dog would get hit by a car. And it would be all my fault! Ted would totally blame me! I had to find him now!

I decided to go dog-hunting in the opposite direction of Ted. My instinct told me that Wallace had run east, not west. Plus, I didn’t Ted to yell at me. So I bush-whacked through the woods for about twenty minutes, listening for the dog, and after twenty minutes of searching I spotted a flash of white in some far-off woods. It was our Wallace, galloping down a hill toward a creek, and the look on his face was one I had not seen before. It was a smile. A doggy smile. He disappeared jubilantly from my sight and remained missing for another hour. Maybe he would be happier out here, living in the wilds, hunting birds.

Then Ted’s words came back to me: What the hell do you know?

Feeling worried, abandoned, and defeated, I decided to return to the car. Then, up in the distance, I saw Ted walking toward me with our dog in his arms. Ted was limping from having reactivated an old ski injury. I was limping from weeks of trying to walk Wallace on a leash.

Ted carried Wallace the way a farmer carries a lamb, and Wallace looked distinctively embarrassed by his capture. He’d been emasculated (e-dogulated?), and he knew enough not to protest when Ted put him down on top of a large, flat rock. “Get the camera out,” Ted said. “I want to take some pictures to remember him by, because on Monday we’re taking him back.”

I nodded and once again started to cry. Ted, back in those days, made all the decisions; and I was the wimp who let him.

And so, sadly, we took pictures—one with Wallace and Ted, one with Wallace and me, and then a family shot, automatically timed. You can see in hindsight how exhausted and unhappy we all were. In the group shot the three of us—young couple, messed-up dog—look like Angry White Men on an album cover. Our hard stares were aimed away from one another, as if we were each so locked into our private disappointments we could no longer reach out to people and were ready to turn to drugs.Ah, relationships.

On the way back to the campsite, I held Ted’s hand and Ted held Wallace’s leash. Neither of us spoke until Wallace stopped to poop on the pavement. This made me incredibly sad. “He’s been holding that in for hours!” I said. “Do you think he doesn’t know enough that he can go on grass?”

“Maybe he has never seen grass,” Ted said.

We both considered this. It seemed so tragic to be a dog and not know grass. To not know human love.

That night, in our tent, Ted and I both slept fitfully. I presonally felt like a horrible person--returning an abused dog to a shelter! But I had no words to express this. I worried that Ted would simply criticize me for having such feelings. For having been "stupid" enough to adopt a dog in the first place without thinking it through. I worried he would blame , even though Ted is the one who chose Wallace out of all those dogs at the pound.

Meanwhile, Wallace was outside the tent, tied up to the picnic bench (having declined our invitation to join us), and he paced around like, well, like a wild animal. “Who ever heard of a dog insomniac?” I said. Back and forth the dog paced, uttering grunts of frustration. It was like a tangible represenation of my own thoughts; my own decision.

Ted too kept shifting his position.“Maybe I was too hard on him,” Ted said finallly said after about an hour. There was a tenderness to his voice that made me remember why I had fallen in love with him.

I crawled into his sleeping bag. “Maybe I was too soft,” I said, hugging him. “Maybe we can find a way to meet in the middle.”
Finally, it felt safe to sleep.

As we dozed off, Wallace continued his nervous pacing (a sign of anxiety in dogs). It was though he also had some serious thinking to do—about his life, his career, his future. Or perhaps he had simply felt the weight of our thoughts. And wanted to get away from us—this angry, dysfunctional couple—as quickly as he could.

I could only hope that Wallace, in some moment of clarity, would recognize that we kept chasing him down because we loved him, not because we wanted to hold him back.

In the morning, as the sunlight sieved through the tent screens and the swallows chirped, I felt a strange weight on the right side of my body. I thought for a moment that I had slept in an awkward position that had put half my body to sleep, but then I realized that the pressure came from outside the tent—and that it was something large and warm. Wallace, at some point in the evening, had gotten cold or lonely and had spread himself against me. This was the first time our dog had ever really touched us. There we were, separated by only a thin wall of nylon,

“Ted,” I whispered. “Give me your hand.”

Sleepily he complied, and as I took his hand and pressed it against the warm flank of Wallace’s body, he opened his eyes.

“What’s this?” he said with a smile. And I answered: “I think it’s a normal dog, looking for some snuggling.”

And that was all it took for us to become a family.

Doggie Halloween Costume Contests - How Far Will We Go To Win? I Went Over the Edge....

2010-10-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

In honor of my appearance—as a “celebrity judge” at the 17th Annual Tompkins Square Park Halloween Dog Parade, I thought I would post a chronicle of my own experiences forcing my poor dog to wear a costume, and how I became a psycho-stage mother in my desperation to win the contest.

Rex and the City: The Curse of the Three-Headed Dog

There’s nothing like Halloween in New York City. New York is home to some of the most artistic and creative people on the planet, most of whom will jump at any opportunity to put on a show. Consider the city’s eight hundred thousand drag queens, who, just to take a trip out to the deli, will put on seven-inch platforms, a sequined butterfly shawl and a two-foot wig. In the weeks before Halloween, the whole city began to fill with a fizzy, randy excitement. Shop windows were crammed with bondage gear, feather boas, broquaded undies and outrageous wigs, and the window boxes of the West Village overflowed with chrysanthemums and pumpkins and squash—all in their final bursts of color before the decay of the winter set in. And all those flamboyant colors; all those sequins, feathers and rubber masks started to bring out everyone’s inner drag queen. And it was no different for the dog people. There are more that thirty dog runs in the city, and therefore more than thirty annual doggie costume parades.

At that point in time (1998) we had just started taking Wallace to the Tompkins Square Park dog run. Each run in the city has its own flavor and “First Run” as it was called (because it was the first in NYC) was known for 1) the youth of its doggie parents (most were East Village kids in their twenties); 2) the number of pit-bull mixes (most of the young doggie parents adopted pits from the ASCPA in the East 90’s, or found them on the streets); 3) the number of dog-brawls that occurred daily (it was a transient neighborhood, with a lot of new dogs); and 4) The legendary First Run Annual Halloween Costume Contest, which drew the likes of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

When I first saw the sign for this Halloween contest in early October, I felt my entire universe expand. Dogs in costume! At the thought of this, something latent was awakened in me—something ancient and profound. I told my then-husband Ted in no uncertain terms that we had to go to this contest.

“Are you thinking of dressing Wallace in a costume?” Ted asked.

“Absolutely.”

“He’ll hate it.”

“No he won’t.”

Most conversations I had with Ted went like this: yes, no, yes, no, why, because, no, yes, I said no, yes, no, FUCK YOU!

In the case of whether to dress up our dog in a silly costume, I ultimately won. I can’t remember how, actually. Perhaps I had to promise some sort of sexual favor, but it’s hard to say....I’ve blocked it all out.

Anyway, I managed to convince Ted that Wallace wouldn’t mind having to wear a costume. I can’t remember how we came up with the idea, but we had decided to dress him up like a little hiker. I think it all started with this brown wool hippy hat that used to belong to a stoner friend of Ted’s from high school. The hat was handmade in Peru, and slightly pointy on top, and had two strings that you could tie under your chin. Ted had asked me once if I wanted it, but I am much too serious a person to wear silly Peruvian hats. (The hats I wear cost $550 and I never even wear those, because I always buy them on a whim, and they are really only appropriate at English garden weddings, and I have not yet to date been invited to any weddings in the UK.) So anyway, I suggested we put the Peruvian hat on Wallace, just for kicks.

This opened up a can of worms, of course, that determined much of Wallace’s future. For I quickly realized that I got a true and unadulterated pleasure from dressing up my dog. “He looks so cute,” I shouted. “Oh my God. Get the camera.”

“The poor boy,” Ted said. “How humiliating.” But still Ted got the camera.

The rest of Wallace’s Halloween costume quickly fell into place. Wallace already had his own little backpack, for camping trips, and Ted agreed to donate a pair of ratty hiking shorts he’d had for years. He started to have regrets, however, when I spent $30 on a little wool sweater and cut strategic holes in his cherished shorts to accommodate Wallace’s tail and privates, but by then it was too late. The contest was only one day away.

“You’re going overboard,” he said the next morning as I gussied up Wallace. “Everyone else will probably show up with their dogs in cat ears and witch hats.”

“So what?” I said. “This is fun. Plus, we’ll win.” For a final touch, I put a Catskills trail guide in the pocket of Wallace’s backpack, so that there would be no doubt that he was a hiker.

The day itself was one of those perfect fall days you read about: crisp, cool, clear, with the scent of autumn leaves and hot cider donuts lingering in the air. I insisted on dressing up Wallace at the apartment and couldn’t contain my excitement at the cuteness of it all. I started to have visions of Wallace being in the movies, of starring in dog food commercials, of his face gracing millions of cutesy-dog greeting cards. And a photographer from the Times would definitely be at the contest—one came every year. So maybe finally I’d get my picture in that paper. With my award-winning dog.

“Oh my god, he’s so cute!” I said for the millionth time. (If I couldn’t have my own time in the spotlight, then, by God, Wallace was going to have his.) “Will you take a picture of him before we leave? It’s his first party, in his first party suit.”

“Let’s not prolong the torture,” Ted said. “The poor boy.” Admittedly, Wallace did look downtrodden, as if he wished he had nothing to do with the human world. He kept lifting his eyelids, and twisting his head left to right, trying to figure out what was on top of his head. He also tried to pull off the backpack with his mouth, but he couldn’t quite reach.

“Let’s just go!” Ted said.

I enjoyed all the attention we got on our twenty-minute walk to the dog run. “Look at that dog!” people on the sidewalks shouted. “He’s so cute!” All around us, people laughed and pointed and smiled. I basked in their praise; I loved being in the spotlight, even indirectly.

But Ted seemed pained. “He’s such a dignified dog,” he kept saying as we walked through the East Village. “This isn’t right. You’re humiliating him. He’s going to grow up to be a pansy. He’s going to be like Hemingway, who was all screwed up because his grandmother dressed him in girlie clothes.”

“No, he’s not,” I said, undaunted. I stopped to talk to strangers and told everyone cute little anecdotes about Wallace. “He used to be a shelter dog,” I would begin. “And he used to hate us. And he would never let us touch his head. And now look at him with his little hat….”

“Wallace come,” Ted would say, pulling on the leash.

“Wallace was enjoying himself,” I said to Ted when I caught up to him.

“That’s because that woman petting him has a hot dog.”

“No it’s not. It’s because she told him he was cute.”

On and on this went, all the way to the park. It wasn’t until a horde of pretty girls in go-go boots ran up to Ted to ask what kind of dog Wallace was, that the tight, slightly pained look left Ted’s face.

When we reached the grassy area within Tompkins Square Park, Wallace went immediately went into hunting mode. His steps slowed, his torso sank lower to the ground, and his nose twitched with the precision of a sonograph as he picked up subtle scents. You could tell he had forgotten he had a little ski cap on, and a backpack, and a toddler’s sweater and silly shorts. “Look at him stalking those squirrels!” the girls in the go-go boots shouted.

“Poor Wallace,” Ted muttered. “The poor emasculated boy.” But this hadn’t stopped him from bringing along his video camera. He followed Wallace along, zooming in for close-ups, as Wallace crept slowly toward a squirrel.

When we finally reached the dog run, I was astounded at what I saw. You’re always going to find, at every Halloween contest across the country, a lab in Christmas antlers, and one or two Dog-zillas, and a golden retriever in a store-bought Yankees cap. But try to picture a Harlequin Great Dane dressed up as a giant sunflower. Or a matted grey Shitzhu dressed as a mop and accompanied by a short gay man dressed as a frumpy housewife. The costumes were spectacular. There was a shepherd mix in a curly black wig and Gene Simmons makeup, and a tiny leather jacket embossed with the logo: Kiss. There was a couple dressed up like farmers, carrying baskets of produce, and tucked within the vegetables was a tiny Chihuahua in a pea pod costume, shivering nervously the way Chihuahuas do. There were Pit Bulls sporting cow udders, and six Dachshunds spray-painted yellow to look like a bunch of bananas, accompanied by a giant man in a gorilla suit.

“Wow,” Ted said. “I’m impressed.”

“I’m depressed,” I said. One of the great, but also one of the rotten, things about New York City is that no matter how creative you are, no matter how talented or clever or smart, there’s always going to be someone out there who’s smarter and more talented and more creative than you. Every second of every day.

“Look at that costume!” Ted said. And there I beheld my nemesis. Across the run, wearing Gucci sunglasses and surrounded by adoring fans, was a man and his golden retriever, whom he had fashioned into a Three Headed Dog. From a distance the two extra heads looked life-like, and they continued to look life like even as we got close. “How did you do that?” someone asked, through a crowd that was three-people deep. “With Styrofoam,” he explained. “I’m a set designer.” And he went on to describe how he had begun constructing the heads back in August, how he had required his dog, Butterscotch, to pose for an hour each evening as he painted her likeness on the busts, and how it had taken him three weeks to find the best “suspension mechanisms” to attach the heads to Butterscotch’s collar. Then of course he had to go out and find the perfect cape to conceal the suspension mechanisms. And the cape had come from Shanghai Tang ( a high-end Asian boutique on Madison Avenue).

“That shawl had to have cost six hundred dollars,” I said to Ted as we slunk away. “And did you see that they eyes on the Styrofoam heads actually blinked?”

“I’m blown away,” Ted said.

“If I had known people were going to spend six months on their costumes, I would have put more effort into Wallace’s.” I stared at the three-headed dog’s magnificent cape. “I don’t even have socks from Shanghai Tang.”

“But look our puppy, he’s adorable,” Ted said. “And he’s being such a good boy.” Wallace always stayed by our side at the dog run, because he was still intimidated by the presence of so many dogs. “Come on,” Ted said. “Let’s go sign him in.”

When we got to the registration desk, we found out we had to have a name for Wallace’s costume. I hadn’t thought of a name. I thought the costume spoke for itself. To me, Wallace looked like a little hippie kid, a Bates student, a Trustafarian going off on a hike. “How about Happy Camper?” I said to Ted.

And don’t they always say First Thought, Best Thought? Because then, for some reason, I decided that I had needed to have a more literary name. Something more clever and tongue-in-cheek. I thought then of Jon Krakauer, the author of Into The Wild.

“No one is going to know what you’re talking about,” Ted said.

But I reasoned that we were in the East Village, a neighborhood full of artists and writers and tortured souls. Any of the above would certainly have read Into the Wild, which was the “it” book of the moment.
So we—or rather, I—registered Wallace as “Jon Krakauer” and we took our place in line for the parade to begin. Ted gave me one of his looks—one I liked to call “The Crow.”

The contest began by everyone parading their dogs around the perimeter of the run as a group, and then each of the contestants was called one by one. The whole dog run was lined with was lined with giddy onlookers. As each contestant was called forth they hooted and clapped and cheered. The sound of so much applause was uplifting, and I laughing along, but then Wallace’s name was called. The MC said: “And here’s Wallace the English Setter, and he’s posing as, as, um, Jonathan Kra……Jon Cracker?” The crowd, who had just been cheering madly for the Mastiff-as-ballerina before us, now grew silent.

In this void, I told Wallace to heel and we promenaded along. I smiled nervously and fakely, like a beauty contestant finalist who has just found out she was eliminated after just the first round. I tried to make eye contact with Ted, who was out there somewhere with the onlookers, but I couldn’t find him in such a crowd. Then our moment was over. Wallace and I returned to our place in line, and then some other dog’s name was called. “That was our fifteen minutes of fame,” I whispered to the dog. “And it sucked!”

The Three-Headed Dog won of course, soon the dog and his costume designer were mobbed by photographers and fans. Dejectedly, I took off Wallace’s short and backpack, so that he could go and happily hump the ballerina and bite other dog’s necks. “I should have just called him the Happy Camper,” I said to Ted as I stuffed Wallace’s little hiking shorts into my bag. Across the run, I watched people congratulate the set designer. He seemed a bit too proud of his achievements; a bit too smug.

Ted thought the whole thing was hilarious. “Jon Krakauer,” he said over and over again. “Into the Wild!” He trained his video camera onto me and said, “This is Lee pouting because Wallace didn’t win the Halloween contest.”

When he saw that I wasn’t laughing, he said. “Let’s go to Veselka’s and get some lunch.” Ted, like all good city boyfriends, knew that certain restaurants could always cheer certain mopey women up. For me, it was Veselka’s: pirogues (steamed, and stuffed with potatoes, cheese and broccoli), French fries, and a cold Pilsner Urquell on tap.

We leashed up Wallace and headed off. As we were leaving the park, a nice young woman ran up and touched my shoulder. “I thought yours was the best costume.”

“Really?” I turned to her and smiled.

“He should have won first place.”

“Thanks.”

This is one of the wonderful things about New York: for every stranger who has the capacity to ruin your day—whether deliberately or not—there are always two or three more strangers who will extend to you a fresh, pure act of kindness.

“See?” I said to Ted at Veselka’s. “Someone got it. I wasn’t totally out of line.”

“Yes, Lee,” he said. “One in twelve hundred people gets you.” He touched my hand. “Make that two.”

Wallace, as if he understood us, turned around at that moment and looked at us with what we call his “treat face.”

“Make that three,” Ted said.

This is not where the story ends, however, because from that day forward, for the next two years I tried to devise schemes to out-do the Three Headed Dog and his set designer man.

It was now the year 2000 and, much to my disappointment, the world had not ended as everyone kept insisting it would. Thus, I had to continue living my drudgery of a life. I started thinking about Wallace’s costume in early August. Ted and I would be walking along the beach at Fire Island, or hiking in the Hudson Valley, swatting away flies, and I’d say things like, “What do you think of Tommy Hilsetter?”

“What?” Ted would say. “What are you talking about?” He was a serious hiker, who always kept his eyes on the trails, and therefore never really listened to me while he was hiking. Perhaps—and I am seriously just realizing this now, as I write: perhaps this is why he liked hiking so much. It was the only time he could legitimately tune me out.

“For Halloween,” I said. “We could put a little skull cap on him, and really baggy jeans that hang low off his butt. He could be a little ghetto dog.”

“I think that might be offensive,” Ted said. “A lot of kids from the projects play basketball in that park.”

“Well then how about Brittany Spears? We could get Wallace some of those big plastic tits and a shiny pink thong.”

“That’s not very original,” Ted said. “Everyone with a Brittany Spaniel has probably thought of that. Plus, Wallace doesn’t even look like enough of a Brittany to pass as one.”

Up ahead, we could hear that Wallace had flushed out a wild turkey. He let out a war cry and took off through the brush.

“It would be hard to keep a thong on him anyway,” I said.

Eventually—I don’t remember how—I came up with the idea of Dogatella Versace. It was the year Jennifer Lopez had worn that infamous, diaphanous, one-button dress to the Grammys. (And if you don’t know what dress I’m talking about, I can’t help you).

I like to think that the idea came to me in one great creative burst; a flash in which I saw the complete outfit: Wallace in a mini J. Lo dress, with a long blonde Donatella wig, and his white fur tinted to Versace’s creepy shade of tan.

Eureka! My heart began to pound and the area behind my neck began to tingle, as it always does when I have tapped into The Universal Source.

There were two obstacles to expressing my creative inspiration, however. One was convincing Ted that his son needed to be swathed in Versace, and the other was finding someone to make the dress. Fortunately, we lived in New York City, the land of oddball specialists, so the latter was a piece of cake. At any given moment, you could open up the Yellow Pages and find someone to sing opera to your geraniums while you traveled to Reykjavik; you could hire someone to sew mink to the straps of your seatbelts so that you wouldn’t chafe your chest. And you could find a handful of talented, expensive seamstresses who would custom make a dress for your dog. I found my doggie dressmaker, by providence really, on Manhattan Dog Chat. She just appeared one day in early September, answering a post from someone who had some extra upholstery fabric and wanted to make a little jacket for her “hard to fit” Maltese.
Immediately I called this woman and told her about my Dogatella Versace idea. “How big is your dog?” she asked me. And when I told her Wallace weighed seventy pounds she said, “Well, I usually only work with little dogs.” I felt myself getting defensive, and reverting into that hateful “Us and Them” mentality that, as a Buddhist, I try to not maintain: Us being big dog people (they are real dogs, after all) and little dog people.

Meanwhile, she was probably thinking I was insane for wanting a Versace dress for a 70-pound spaniel. A male spaniel with no effeminate qualities whatsoever. But because I was the customer, and because I offered to pay her a hundred bucks, we agreed that she would pick out some J. Lo-looking fabric and meet me at my apartment for a fitting the following week. “He’s really cute,” I said added at the end of our conversation, because Little Dog People love to use the word cute.

Ted wanted nothing to do with this. He tried to list all the reasons why I should not dress our dog in drag (i.e.: you’re humiliating him, you have better things to do with your time) but in the end he saw how excited I was about the project and how unwilling I was to back off. “When is she coming?” he finally said in resignation.

“Next Saturday. At three.”

“Well, I’ll just make sure I’m not around Saturday at three,” he said.

When Sheila, the dressmaker, arrived at the appointed hour, we were both relieved to find that we liked each other immediately. You never know with the Internet. She was a theater person, a costume designer, who made clothes for dogs on the side, because it was profitable, and because she loved dogs. “I used to have one,” she said, “but now I travel way too much.” As she talked, she measured Wallace’s ankles, and the length of his legs, and the distance from his neck to his tail. “Now, this will be the challenge,” she said, pointing at his privates. “We have to have the plunging neckline to mimic the dress, but it will have to fasten in front of his wee-wee. I’m just not sure it will hang right though.” She stared at Wallace thoughtfully, considering how his body would handle the complicated drapes of cloth, and I was glad Ted wasn’t here to witness this. The “wee-wee” comment would have sent him through the roof.

Wallace was a perfect fit model. I fed him liver treats throughout the whole process, so that he would stay still, and he didn’t try to lunge at Sheila when she leaned in too close to his head. I was so proud of his behavior, and of his progress as a formerly abused dog, that I started to get teary-eyed. “You’re like the mother of the groom,” Sheila said. “Or the bride, as it were.”

“It’s just that,” I said, wiping my eyes, “he’s a shelter dog, and he was abused, and whenever I see him interact tenderly with new strangers I am just so grateful.”

“Now you tell me,” Sheila said. “But he doesn’t seem threatening. It’s usually the little dogs you have to watch out for.”

I agreed. “They’re assholes.”

“Would you like me to take a picture of the two of you when I come back to fit the actual dress?” she said.

We hugged when she showed me the material she’d selected. It was perfect: sheer, green, bold, in a tropical pattern that mimicked the actual dress. Then I showed her the wig I’d bought, which was made of human hair and had cost me $50. “We mustn’t mention costs to my husband,” I said.

“My lips are sealed,” she said.

Then I told her about the Three Headed Dog Man.

“We’ll kick his ass,” she said.

I gave her cash and we arranged to meet for a final fitting in two weeks’ time.

In the meantime, I got a call from one of my mother-in-laws, who said she was going to be coming to New York for a visit. I absolutely love visits from my mother-in-laws (I happened to be blessed with not one but two dynamite mother-in-laws, who liked me despite the fact that I never cooked for their son/step-son, never wrote or called, never produced any grandchildren, and talked non-stop about my dog). But this visit was scheduled for the weekend of Halloween. I faced a true conflict. My manners, upbringing, and sense of general decency suggested that I should scrap the Halloween contest and act like a proper hostess. My mother-in-law was a sharp, sophisticated woman who, when she visits the city, likes to spend her time good restaurants and sample sales. But I’d already invested all that money into Wallace’s dress, and I couldn’t get the smug face of the Three-Headed-Dog man out of my head. “Do you think I could talk you into going with me to a doggie Halloween contest?” I asked her on the telephone. “It might be fun.”

“Sure,” she said. “We can do anything you want.”

Her graciousness did not put me entirely at ease, however. I worried that I was taking a risk with my reputation with that half of the family. In fact, years later, when Ted and I got divorced, I wondered if that particular weekend continued to come up in conversation, when the family sat around the dinner table discussing “signs.” As in, “we always knew that marriage wouldn’t work out; why, think of the time she forced her dog to enter a Halloween contest….”

Anyway, the big day of the contest arrived and I was nervous. My mother-in-law, had arranged to meet me at Tompkins Square Park so that she could do some shopping beforehand, and Ted had decided not to come at all. “I have to work,” he said, which I noticed was something he had to do whenever I had Wallace in costume.

He had to work on St Patrick’s Day, when Wallace wore a headband with sparkly shamrock antennae. He had to work on Easter (bunny ears) and the Fourth of July (flag hat). He was a hard worker, Ted, and that morning he apologized to Wallace for not being able to spend the day with him. “Someone had to pay for all your food,” he said. “And your clothing.
I was busy combing Wallace’s wig out. Then I combed my own hair.

When Wallace and I got to the park, the sky was overcast and the day was humid—an uncommon phenomenon for October. I was wearing a turquoise vinyl jacket to match Wallace’s costume, and the vinyl made me sweat. This for some reason made me cranky, and it was a mood I couldn’t shake. The whole vibe of the contest was off that year. Maybe it was the humidity, maybe it was me, but the dog run seemed less festive; less crowded. “There’s another doggie parade this year over in Chelsea,” someone told me. “All the drag queens are over at that one, I’m sure.” I felt a bit dejected by this—once again something better was happening someplace else, where I was not. And the best place to be is always Where the Drag Queens Are.

But then I got a good look at some of the costumes and felt better again. There was a Corgi transformed into a Hoover. There were two baby cocker spaniels dressed as a bride and groom. Then the Three-Headed Dog man entered the dog run and Butterscotch was dressed up as—get this—Dogzilla. I could hear Ted say, “How unoriginal,” and I couldn’t help but smile. Sure, it was a spectacular costume—he had created a twelve-foot, elaborately airbrushed Styrofoam tail, with spiky fins, savage scales, and moveable parts. But please. Even Aunt Mabel in Idaho could have come up with Dogzilla.

Two years had passed since The Happy Camper had faced the Three-Headed Dog. And Wallace was a completely different dog by this point. He was happier, and better adjusted, and the dog run no longer meant “defend thyself” to him; it meant Play. So the minute I took his leash off inside the dog run, he took off after a Border Collie and the two of them ran like mad. “Wallace!” I shouted. “Your dress! You’re ruining your dress!”

I told him to come but he wouldn’t listen to me. It took fifteen minutes to finally cornered Wallace and put him back on his leash. “Now stay still,” I said to him. “Sit!” His wig had been thoroughly dragged across the ground and was now tangled with woodchips and leaves. I told Wallace he was the worst dog in the world.

My mother-in-law showed up just as I was shouting at my dog about the state of his long blond hair. She waved to me from beyond the fence. Only dogs and their guardians were allowed in the run. I blew her a kiss and smiled. Wallace’s wig kept slipping off, and every time he moved his dress would shift sideways, and he’d step on the hem with his back paws. “Stay still!” I snapped at him. “When I tell you to sit, you sit!” There was irritation in my voice, and I looked around to see if anyone had heard.

The registration was about to begin. Butterscotch and his guardian sat placidly in line, both confident that they would win the contest.

Meanwhile, the Border Collie kept running up to us and biting at Wallace’s wig. “Go away!” I said to her, and to Wallace: “Stay still! When I tell you to sit, you sit!” But poor Wallace wanted to play with the Border Collie. He wanted to stalk squirrels. But I was convinced the whole “effect” of his dress would be ruined if he even lifted his leg to pee. So every time he tried to get up from his sit, I’d apply pressure on his shoulders and push him back down.

Years ago, I’d worked at a children’s fashion magazine and one of my jobs was to assist the art director on photo shoots. Once a month, stage mothers would arrive with their stiffly coiffed sons and daughters. I remember my shock the first time I saw a toddler girl wearing makeup and four-inch heels. Her hair had been curled a la Shirley Temple, and she was unhappy that day—perhaps because of the shoes. But her mother was even unhappier. She kept insisting to me that Kelly normally didn’t act so ornery, that Kelly knew how to be a good girl. “She’s just being very bad today,” the mother kept saying loudly and bitterly “Very bad.”

Now the line of dog-contestants moved, and Wallace stood up without permission and stepped on the hem of his dress. “Sit!” I snapped at him.
Then, suddenly, I saw myself: angry, snappy, perfectionist, dissatisfied.

I had become a stage mother. I had put my own needs before my child’s.

When the beginning of the contest line-up was announced, I couldn’t even look at my mother-in-law. I thought she might see the shame on my face and I didn’t want to see it on her face too.

The crowd roared with laughter when Wallace was introduced as Dogatella Versace, and they cheered madly when, later, he won first prize. Last year first prize had been a six-month supply of California Natural and a CD player; this year it was a $40 gift certificate to a new pet store. When we went up to the stage to take the prize, the judge hung a “Best in Show” medal around Wallace’s neck. It was brass with a red white and blue ribbon that made him look like an Olympian. As the crowd clapped and cheered, a newspaper reporter snapped our photograph, but I refused to tell him my name. I, who for years had told myself I had sought the spotlight, was suddenly ashamed.

As soon as the contest was over I took the medal off Wallace’s neck. Then I took off the dress, and the wig. “You were such a good boy today,” I told him, and then I knelt down and apologized for the beastly way I had behaved. “I’ll never put you through that again,” I told him. “I won’t even make you wear a birthday hat if you don’t want to.”

And so far, my promise has been good.

The medal still hangs on Wallace’s bulletin board, which hangs above his “feeding station.” I’d like to think he notices this medal every time the bowl of ground turkey and boiled potatoes is set down before him, and that he somehow feels wistful, or proud, but mostly he just gobbles his food rapidly. Grateful, perhaps, that he isn’t being forced to wear a wig.

Why So Many Couples Divorced after 9/11

2010-09-08T09:36:00.001-07:00

So here is an essay I wrote in the winter of 2002, when I was still numb from all the 9/11 horror. You can tell by the prose alone just how numb I was. I was so numb I didn't realize I was numb, know what I mean? ...Another thing I didn't realize while I was writing this essay was that, deep down, I had decided to leave my husband. There's an apathy in this essay that is VERY clear to me now, as I reread it. But back then, than January, it was hard to have clarity about anything.

The events of September 11th had that effect on a lot of people. A lot of couples I know--those that were on the fence about their relationship--either got married right away, or split up for good. Suddenly there were no longer any gray areas in relationships. You either wanted to be with this person for the rest of your life, or you didn't. In my case, I realized that I had been waiting for many many years for "things to get better" with my husband.

I spent the weeks after the towers fell watching them fall, again and again and again, on the television set (and in my dreams). I spent those weeks alone, because my husband, a television news producer, made the decision to spend his time at his job rather than with me. And that is fine. People make choices; people have priorities. But I felt surrounded by metaphors.

I tried to get this essay published in the usual places (New York Times, Salon, some travel magazines) but everyone passed. Perhaps rightly. But these days we self-publish even our worst shit, right (and I know that by saying that I am opening myself up to intense flames. But please be kind....). But at least this essay will no longer belong to me, once I press that "publish post" button. So here goes. And blessings, love, and light to all those who were affected by the events of September 11th. Which is to say: every last one of us.

=========================================================

All Rise

In the first few months following the attacks of September 11th, I was unwilling and unable to leave New York City. Like a child who has lost one parent, I found myself clinging needily to the surviving one, and in this metaphoric case, that other parent was Rudolph Giuliani. I wept with him at countless televised funeral services, I marveled at his composure and elocution at every press briefing he held. Thanksgiving passed (along with an opportunity to visit my husband's relatives in New Mexico) and then Christmas (along with an opportunity to visit my sister's country house in New Hampshire) and still I could barely get off the sofa because I didn't want to miss anything this man did or said.

He had become my symbol of hope and strength, my higher power, and I probably would have licked the sidewalks in the fish market section of Chinatown if he had asked me. So when he started urging us New Yorkers to get on with life and spend money; when he started appearing on those tear-jerking, I Love New York tourism commercials encouraging us to fly, I felt I no longer had a valid excuse to sit glued to NY1 and the Times' "A Nation Challenged" section. I had to obey Giuliani.

So at the end of December my husband I booked a last-minute flight to Acapulco, where some friends of ours had rented a bungalow for the week.

Normally when I travel, I make it a point not to pack t-shirts, or Nike Air Max running shoes, or anything that will peg me as a tasteless, fashionless, logo-obsessed American tourist, but this trip was different. The entire world had changed, and I was a refugee from a proud, fallen city, so into my suitcase went a Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt, an NYPD T-shirt, a baby blue, baby tee emblazoned with our famous area code: "212." As I packed I was reminded, of my summers during college, when I waitressed on Cape Cod and how my fellow waitresses recoiled every time we saw a car with the Empire State license plate pulling into our restaurant's parking lot. "Oh no!" we would say, truly aghast. "New Yorkers."

To us on the Cape, New Yorkers meant rudeness, obstinacy, and a huge sense of entitlement was heading straight for my table! And then I remembered how I used to recoil at the sight—or the mere mention—of Giuliani. How I loathed that man. And now, as I zipped up my suitcase, I found myself getting teary-eyed.

"What's wrong?" my husband said when he came into the room.

"We're going to miss Giuliani at the ball-drop on New Year's Eve," I said with a quivering frown. "We're going to miss the ringing of the memorial bells at six."

"In all the years we've lived here you've never once wanted to go to Times Square on New Years Eve," Ed said.

"I know," I said, holding back more tears. "But it’s his last public appearance as the mayor and I'm not going to get to see it."

"It's twenty-five degrees out there."

"I know."

"We're going to have a great time on this trip. We're going to have sunshine and water--"

"I know, but—"

"We're going to have a great time. And we haven't left the city since August. It will be good for us to get away."

"You're right," I said. "We've been needing a vacation for a long time." I pulled an “I LOVE NY” ski cap tightly over my head.

And soon, we found ourselves having been transported to Acapulco; indeed, to another world: one of aquamarine water and sand the texture of talcum powder, one of freshly caught fish and creamy piña coladas and non-traumatized friends.

As the four of us sat, fresh off the airplane, at a beach-front café, enjoying our drinks and the naked, foreign feeling of tank tops and shorts, I realized that here was a place I could actually not think about the WTC. I felt hopeful.

Winter, in the Northeast at least, makes you close in on yourself, seek refuge inside small apartments and sterile office buildings, and encase yourself constantly in a giant tortoise shell of North Face down. Here in Mexico, though, we opened up again like blossoming flowers. Sunlight warmed our skin; a breeze tossed the palm fronds of the thatched roof above; and rum, glorious rum, ebbed and flowed through our veins like the tide a few yards away from us, rum that loosed our muscles and unclenched our city jaws.

"Isn't this heavenly?" I said to our friends. They are a fun-loving, easy-going couple who live in California and travel like pros. They agreed that it was heavenly, and we leaned back in our chairs, and gazed at the bluer-than-blue sky, and into our vision came to rainbow colors of a parachute, attached to a parasailer, gliding noiselessly above the bay.

I fliched and gasped. The sight horrified me. He looked--this parasailer--like a person falling from the sky. He had--this man suspended in the air--the same rag-doll, caught-in-a-moment look as the jumpers caught in photographs those first few days after the attacks.

"Are you alright?" my friends asked. Without thinking, I pointed out the similarities between the parasailer and the WTC jumpers, getting teary-eyed as I spoke. Immediately I realized I had made a socially awkward mistake. My friends blinked and were left momentarily speechless

--and what could they say to a comment like that? Equating a parasailer with a burning mid-air body is not an association most people would make. Unless one is exceptionally morbid. Or a New Yorker. Suffering, I realized years later, from PTSD.

In the ensuing silence I turned my gaze away from the parasailer. I looked instead at the hundreds of brown heads bobbing in the water. At the rows of high rise hotels lining the Acapulco Bay. Each high-rise was painted a beautiful bold color—like chili pepper red or guacamole green, and each had mirrored windows that reflected the sky. Balconies lined each side of each building, and I saw that there were people on many of these balconies, leaning against their railings, admiring the view.

And then I saw in my traumatized mind that photograph from the Times of all those people hanging from the windows above the burning floors and then I got teary eyed again, and I hastily put on a pair of sunglasses so that no one could tell.

I was not in or near the World Trade Center Towers on September 11. In fact, I am so afraid of heights I have not been inside either tower since 1987—the one and only time I could be coaxed onto the observation deck. So what is it that holds me there now? What holds me inside top floors of the North Tower, with the 700 doomed Cantor Fitzgerald employees, at the windows, in that moment of indecision between burning alive or jumping to the most frightening of deaths? I don't know. And I guess I will never know because anyone who does know what it was like has disappeared.

But let's get back to the sunshine of Mexico: That evening—the eve of New Year's—the four of us dined at Las Brisas, a five-star restaurant on the edge of Acapulco Bay. We had to drive through seven gates manned by armed guards to get there and thus were giddy with expectation and irony by the time we reached the restaurant, and a team of valets swarmed around us to tend to our car. We were led to a beautifully laid table that was positioned between a sea wall and a tidal pool. The pink uniforms of the waitstaff matched the pink tablecloths and the giant bouquets of fragrant pink flowers. They brought us pink lemonade margaritas that matched the pink, sun-setting sky. A few margaritas later, we were greeted by a moon so huge and white it looked like something from a children's book. "It must be because we're so close to the Equator," my husband explained. But I preferred to think we were in the presence of something magical, a sort of Never-Never land untouched by the rest of the world.

The hours passed pleasantly, as we were brought course after course of delicious food and the waiters would never let our wine glasses get below half-full. All that wine, and the food, and the soft air and the huge benevolent moon, seemed to lift us a finger's breath above the table, so that we were suspended in that place of gastronomical happiness—a realm in which there was no World Trade Center, no trace of disharmony with my husband, and no ill in the world at all.

We remained there all evening until the countdown at midnight, when there was a cacophony of fireworks and noisemakers and the band played Auld Lang Syne. We all got out of our seats to hug and kiss and dance, and at the stroke of midnight, they released an enormous batch of silver balloons. They were just balloons, yes, but in that hour, in that place, they seemed otherworldly. They seemed to move in tandem and the way their metallic surfaces caught the moonlight as they rose and turned reminded me of a giant school of fish. Suddenly I was teary eyed again. "What's the matter?" my husband whispered. He had his arms around me and I had my back to him and we both watched the balloons in the sky.

"Those balloons must be for the World Trade Center," I said. "Don't you think?"

"I don't think so, honey," my husband said. "They're just balloons. I think they do this every year."

"But there are thousands of them," I said. "There must be three thousand one hundred and sixteen. For all the missing. Don’t you think?"

My husband must have sensed my desperation, because he kissed the top of my head and said, "I think you're right. I think there are three thousand balloons."

And so, stubbornly and drunkenly, while the rest of the crowd danced, we watched the balloons rising, and prayed three thousand times for the three thousand souls. I wondered, as one always does, where balloons end up. Do they pop? Do they disintegrate? Or would some child in New Zealand find them, washed up like anemones on the shore? We watched them soar past that impossible moon.

Six days later, when we returned to New York, I found a slightly different city. Giuliani was gone, the daily "Portraits of Grief" had been discontinued, and the sports section of the Times was no longer upside down. They had opened up a viewing platform right at Ground Zero and I decided to go there with a balloon. I thought it would be uplifting to see it soar above that charred spot. The wait took hours and my Mylar balloon (which said, I'm ashamed to say, said Happy Birthday on it,) lost quite a bit of its zest in the process. By the time I released it at the platform's railing, it barely took flight. It merely hung in the air in front of me for a few moments and then sunk rather dramatically to the ground. People around me were crestfallen—we all needed this little symbolic lift. "Was it someone's birthday?" a woman finally asked. Everyone was listening. I shook my head and said “not really.” I didn’t know how to explain. But in those days, people no longer needed explanations, because suddenly the whole world made no sense. We were all just looking at that balloon on the ground, bereft. Maybe death wasn’t like soaring at all, I told myself. Maybe death was just--death.

Then one of the rescue workers came over and picked the balloon up. You could tell he’d seen three weeks of horror but behind it all, there in his eyes, was pure kindness. “Whose birthday is it?” he said to all of us, in a fatherly way. A little girl said, “Mine” so he gave her the balloon. The applause was thundering. It soared.

Post-Nuptial Depression - And How I Coined This Term

2010-08-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought? I originally published this piece in Salon back in 1999, before the term "Post-Nuptial Depression" was commonplace. Turns out I was the one who coined the term! How's that for a claim to fame? :)
==============================================================
Postnuptial Depression

It's summer again, which means wedding season, which means thousands of clenched-teeth brides-to-be across the country are pacing their offices, living rooms or kitchens with a cordless in one hand and a bridal checklist in the other: Trial run wearing dress, shoes and lingerie? Check. Make sure extra bobby pins are in delicate seed-pearl evening bag? Check. Gifts for bridal party? Check, check, check. It's a niggardly, ruthless list and it's way too long, I know, but I have one more thing to add: Prepare for post-nuptial depression.

Maybe it was just me, but for about two weeks following my own wedding last June, I couldn't get out of bed. I felt overwhelmed, agitated and drugged. I could accomplish nothing but sleep. Granted my apartment is conducive to sleeping, what with its crib-like proportions, its lack of windows and the constant presence of a warm and cuddly dog, but this wasn't your regular sleep. This was an every-time-I-open-my-eyes-I-can't-face-reality-so-I-go-back-to-sleep sleep. And according to the Eli-Lily advertisements, this meant I was depressed.

But what on earth was I depressed about? I adored my new husband (still do), I was happy about our marriage and excited to embark on this new life. What was the deal?

Before I attempt to answer this question, I'd like to say I've always had a pretty casual (read: phobic) attitude toward marriage. I never pushed any of my boyfriends for proposals or diamond rings, never gave them ultimatums or moved out if I didn't "see marriage in the future." When I finally did get married, I was (still am) in my 30s, and had already turned down two previous proposals. I guess I've always looked at marriage as an event in my life, not the event.

But once you start to plan a wedding it slowly begins to assert itself as The Event and you have no choice but to bow down to it and pray.

After the engagement, not one day went by when I didn't imagine myself floating down the aisle in the Dress of my Dreams. But then I'd realize I didn't know what the Dress of my Dreams was, so I'd make notes to visit Wearkstatt and Vera Wang, Bloomie's and Bendels, all the thrift shops, Milan, and then I'd realize I didn't know what kind of aisle I wanted, or if I wanted an aisle, or even a church, with all its heady religious implications. So perhaps a Nantucket beachfront would do, if I only knew someone who had one ... but wouldn't all that sand ruin my satin shoes?

Knowing that I can be kind of a borderline obsessive-compulsive person, and because our budget was tight, my fianci and I decided to keep the wedding as simple as possible. There would be no band, no limo, none of that bouquet-and-garter stuff. There would be no video recording equipment and we wouldn't take our honeymoon until the fall. There would be no three-story cake because I knew if we had a cake I'd have to see and smell and taste every single wedding cake in the country before narrowing it down to maybe 10 and then I'd spend hours, days and weeks agonizing over which one to pick. Then, my fianci would say, "Just decide already," and we'd get into an argument and finally, just to settle the matter, I'd have to select any old $900 cake which, at the reception, would be gone, eaten by a pack of 4-year-olds, in about 60 seconds. No, there would definitely be no cake.

And you know what? The simplicity really paid off. We had a manageable number of guests (50 people), a manageable setting (a New England farmhouse) and unpretentious food. Because we had no fanfare, my husband and I could act more like guests at the reception, not vaudevillians. And, best of all, everyone seemed to have a good time, including me.

I was told by millions of girlfriends that I would not remember the day itself, but I remember every second of it. I remember waking up to sunlight and a beautiful blue sky (something blue!) and realizing I'd forgotten to even obsess about the weather. I remember spending the whole gorgeous morning getting ready with my sisters and nieces, applying eye shadows and lipsticks, pinning flowers into hair. I remember laughing as we tried to fit me and my dress into the back seat of my brother-in-law's old Taurus and checking my mascara in my compact mirror about 800 times as we drove to the church. I remember said mascara running down my face the minute I made eye contact with my father, who was waiting proudly at the entrance for me to take his arm. I remember the sharp, sweet scent of my bouquet as we "proceeded" up the aisle, and knowing that the bouquet in my hands was shaking, but not wanting to look down, and looking instead at the faces of aunts and the uncles, the grandmothers and girlfriends, and finally, him, all smiling at me, some with tears. I remember the profound beauty of the ceremony, most of which we had written, and the almost palpable vibe in the room as we repeated our vows. It was the energy of 50 happy people in sync with one another, all of us believing at that moment in the power of love.

So why, after all this perfection, did I spend so many days afterward feeling so depressed? Why did I feel like I had failed somehow? What was suddenly so alluring about my bed? I decided to poll some of my newlywed friends to see how they'd survived their weddings. "I remember waking up the next day and saying, 'That's it?'" my friend Anne said. She designs missiles for the government. "Twelve months of planning and now this, just your basic hangover?"

My younger friend Mary, a Harvard entomologist, had this to say: "It's like when, you know, you kill an ant while it's eating something and its jaws remain clamped on the food. That's how I felt after my wedding. Like my jaws were still clamped onto something." She rubbed her chin. "I had to go down to Chinatown and get herbs."

Melinda, an aspiring actress, said her reaction was identical to how she felt after the closing night's performance of a play, or at the end of a movie shoot. "After spending six months becoming a character, it's not like you can just abandon that person overnight. You need some time to adjust."

Hmmm. So, like, a bride is a character and putting together a wedding is like producing a film? I tested this analogy on my new husband, a producer himself.

"Um," he said, perplexed. "I think you were just tired. That was a lot of work."

My sister said, "Stop trying to analyze so much."

Would that I could. It's an extraordinary event, a wedding. And after it was over I got to thinking that my own life, in comparison, was, well, ordinary. The curtains had closed, the makeup artists and hair stylists had moved on to real clients and I was no longer a bride. I began to suspect that my wedding really was the most elaborate gala I'd ever attend. Never again would I be the center of attention like that. Never again would I be told how beautiful I look for six straight hours. Never again would I get to spend so much time conspiring with my stepmother, an extraordinarily busy woman I adore. Never again will I be allowed to throw away ungodly sums of money on a dress, a headpiece, a makeover. In other words, never again would I get to live a day in the life of Gwyneth Paltrow.

I've heard it said -- mostly by men -- that it's more stressful to be engaged than to be married. It's as though they are saying that it's more challenging to head toward an unknown than to be in the midst of it. And normally I would agree with this as I, too, stress out much more during the journey. But why the exception in this situation? Why did I not show any signs of stress until after I'd said my vows?

I'm thinking it was because of the planning. Planning, in some perverse way, must have helped to alleviate some of my stress. Granted, the planning produced small anxieties of its own, but nothing I couldn't handle. That bridal checklist, asinine as it was, provided a series of tasks I had to accomplish -- tasks that were logical and sequenced. As I moved through the list, it gave me a sense of accomplishment and forward motion that I guess my fianci didn't feel. Those not involved in concrete issues like what hors d'oeuvres to serve have more time to dwell on the abstracts. My soon-to-be husband, for example, walked around for months holding his head and saying, "My God! What have I done?" while I concentrated on Martha Stewart Living, which told me I must wrap fresh moss around my centerpieces to give them a rustic look.

It wasn't until after the dress had been put away, the moss donated to the compost and our bank accounts dredged that the searing reality of what I'd just done really hit me: I'd gotten ma-ma-married. I would remain married for the rest of my life. I think it was the enormity of this concept that kept me in bed.

"You could have avoided all of this post-nuptial depression stuff if you'd done one thing," my friend Judith, the med student, said over the telephone. I expected her to recommend a chemical cure like Zoloft or Xanax.

"You should have taken a honeymoon right away," she said.

Ah, yes, the honeymoon. I thought of all those advertisements in the backs of the bridal magazines showing vibrant, energetic, and incredibly evenly-tanned couples riding horseback or frolicking in the sea. The looks on their faces always suggest a smoldering passion, as if they'd just left the heart-shaped bedroom or are on their way back. Too bad there were always about 800 of these ads beckoning you to choose among 800 luscious destinations.

"I just figured having to plan a honeymoon on top of everything else would have added to the stress," I said.

"You could have used a travel agent," said Judith. "Don't you live in New York? Don't you people pay other people to stress out for you?"

"Well yes, but ... " I started to think of my friends' photo albums and realized their honeymoon pictures were nothing like the honeymoons of advertisements. No, they seemed to have spent most of their days passed out on beach towels. "Don't you just end up taking your post-nuptial depression with you to some place expensive?"

"Some place tropical," Judith said. "And of course you take it with you, but if you drink lots of piqa coladas, you won't notice it as much."

Let it be known: The doctor has spoken.

Should Dogs Attend Catholic Funeral Masses? Mine did....

2010-08-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve been to many a dog-funeral (including a Buddhist sukhavati for my own beloved dog Wallace...and I do plan to write about this someday, when I have the time), but never before have I brought my own dog to a funeral. Not until this week, that is.

It wasn’t like Chloe (the dog) was invited. Nor had a planned to bring her, but circumstances were such that I had to rush back to Massachusetts to make it to the service on time, and I had to bring Chloe, because I did not have time to find a sitter. I thought I would be able to leave her in the car during the service, or at least tie her up outside the church, with a dish of water, a marrow bone, and a copy of Cat Fancy magazine. But the church had no trees. And it was ninety degrees in the shade.

So I really had no choice, right? I must confess I was nervous about this decision. A) the funeral service had already begun by the time I arrived, which meant I risked walking in the wrong door, and finding myself at the front of the church instead of the back, thereby revealing to all the mourners my possible lapse in tact, propriety, and judgment. Churches are always confusing like that—especially old New England churches, which seem to have dozens of entrances and no signs.
So that was risk A.

Risk B was that the funeral was being held at a Catholic church, and if I recall correctly Catholics don’t believe that animals have souls, right? So would they allow a being without a soul into their chapels? Would they allow me, a Buddhist who sings Hindu and Sikh chants, and practices Native American ceremonies, and believes in One God/dess Many Paths? And who believes that not only do dogs have souls, but that some of them are more advanced than we humans? (I was raised Catholic, by the way, which by Law allows me to poke fun at this institution)

Well, there was only one way to find out. I put Chloe on a close “heel” and entered through the hallowed doors. If lightning stuck, I’d know dogs weren’t allowed at St. Joseph’s.

If lightning did not strike, and no clouds parted (revealing a hand pointing its finger of judgment at me a la Michelangelo), well, groovy.

Chloe is an exceptionally well-trained, well-behaved dog, by the way—I knew that would work in our favor. Plus, the woman whose funeral mass we were celebrating was a life-long dog lover. As was her husband, who had passed seven months prior.

We entered. And found ourselves at the back of the church. Excellent. No one noticed our entrance; the second reading had already begun and people were lost in their own thoughts—of Jane and all the goodness and kindness she had spread through the world.
I thought how Chloe was a good and kind being too. I thought of my best high school friend, sitting way up front, mourning the sudden loss of her mother. And of her father. And of her beloved, beloved dog Lydia, who had died in April. My friend had endured a lot of loss in the past seven months. And yet she sat up there with her shoulders straight and her spine erect and poised. She has always been a graceful woman. So was her mother. I said my silent goodbyes to Jane and Bill, and said a few prayers for my friend. I even said a few prayers for my long-departed dog Wallace, and asked him to keep an eye out for Lydia, who still might not be used to life beyond the beyond.
As I had this thought, my dog Chloe wagged her tail.
And the lightning did not strike.
This is when I finally cried—and how good and sweet life can be, and yet so sad at the same time. I guess you can’t have one without the other. Until you leave this world. Death didn’t seem so bad. Neither did life. Not with a dog by your side.

Anyway, I am starting to go off on mystical tangents when I am supposed to be writing about my dog.

After the service ended, we all stood, and the family filed out of the church, preceded by the priests. The first one swung an urn of incense back and forth, filling the aisles with the scent of frankincense. The second one walked piously, with his hands folded around his Bible. This second priest made a point to make eye contact with all the mourners and because I was at the very back of the church I knew I would be one of the last. My dog stood at my side, partially hidden from view. I worried again what the priest would think—if I had committed some grave cardinal sin. (I would have known this, perhaps, if I had paid attention in Sunday School, but who does that?)

I backed up a bit, as if to shield the dog from view. But then she sneezed. Incense does that to her. The second priest looked over, to find the source of the ground-level sneeze, and thereby saw my dog. She wagged her tail at him and moved forward to say hello. He smiled in a kind and loving way.

All God’s creatures, I thought.

My friend’s entire family smiled too as they passed. And I like to think that my dog brought them some sort of comfort on this day of mourning. That the dog reminded them of their own family dogs, of the dogs their parents had raised and loved. Of love itself. For that is what dogs are: love. On four legs.

So in the end, no one complained about the presence of my large furry spaniel. She was even welcomed to come to the post-funeral reception. There, the young grandchildren clambered about her, bringing her water and pieces of fried chicken, rubbing her belly, laughing at the way she squirmed and smiled when she wagged her tail.

It was heartwarming, to say the least. Especially when my friend’s 6-year old daughter, Clara, said to my friend: “Mommy, Grandma is with Grandpa in heaven now, right?”

My friend answered yes.

“And Lydia is there, too?”

“Yes, Lydia is there, too.”

“Good,” Clara said.

And it was good. She ran up to my dog and gave her a hug.

Sound Healing for Dogs

2010-06-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

This is a cross-post from my blog on thebark.com
http://www.thebark.com/content/soothing-songs-anxious-pup

Soothing Songs for the Anxious Pup
How sound healing can help calm your dog

For the past few years, I’ve been moonlighting as a sound healer and also a kirtan walla. (Kirtan is a lively form of call-and-response chanting that originated in India thousands of years ago). Because this is a dog-related blog, I won’t go into too much detail about the human benefits of sacred sound and sound healing; suffice to say your dog can benefit too.

Back in 1998, before I had even begun to study sacred sound, I happen to notice that certain music had an unusually calming effect on my dog Wallace. (Wallace is my former beloved Spaniel, known to many Bark readers as the star of Rex and the City.)

There we were, the dog and I, sitting in our cramped Lower East Side apartment on a swelteringly hot summer night, wishing we were on another planet--one with air conditioning and more reasonable rents--and listening, as a consolation prize, to “New Sounds,” excellent hour-long music program on WNYC radio.

New Sounds is one of those programs that really can transport you to another planet, because the host, John Schaefer, always manages to find such spectacularly, ethereal music--the kind that transcends time, space, and the mundane.
Anyway,the feature CD of that evening was Canticles of Ecstasy by Hildegard Von Bingen, sung by the vocal ensemble Sequentia. Hildegard was a twelfth-century German mystic who began receiving ecstatic visions at age three and was sent to a convent at age eight. There, she began composing angelic canticles, said to have been channeled directly from the Divine.

I noticed Hildegard’s magic immediately--not only in the way it seemed to pulse through my body with a pure white light, but in the way my dog reacted. He was a Setter as well as a Spaniel mix, which basically meant that he never stayed still--not even in sleep. He was constantly pacing, sniffing, snuffling, hunting, flushing, pointing, galloping, grunting or, at the very least, panting--in a way that could get annoying in a hot NYC apartment. In his sleep he would woof, flex his paws, twitch his nostrils, and sometimes even groan in frustration--at not ever being able to catch that rabbit, perhaps.

But once Hildegard started playing, Wallace actually lay down--he rarely did that. Then he placed his head between his paws and let out a huge, pre-nap sigh. He stretched, one leg at a time, and positioned his body in perfect repose.

He knew I was watching him. I often stared at him, because he was so beautiful, and because I didn't have much else to do in those days of stunted writing.
And I could tell he was trying to keep his eyes open in that way dogs do, when they want to take a nap but also want to make sure they don’t miss out on anything exciting I might do at any second.
But by Sequentia's third canticle his eyes had lolled back into his head and he was out.

An ecstatic trance, perhaps? Would he re-emerge from this slumber speaking in tongues? Or at least in Latin?

Meanwhile, Sequentia sang Spiritus Sanctus Vivificans Vite, the high soprano notes of ecstasy soaring up to the ceiling.

My dog slept an entire hour. His breathing was so deep and slow I could barely see his rib cage moving. He didn’t once twitch or woof. And his muscles were completely relaxed.

By the time the program was over, I knew I was on to something. I called my then-husband immediately and suggested he pick up a copy of the CD on his way home from work.

Our lives changed after that. We had more freedom to actually leave the apartment once in a while, without having to worry about our overly-anxious dog. Our neighbors got so used to the sound of Quia Ergo Femina Mortem Instruxit drifting sweetly into the hallways that they began to get worried if it wasn’t playing.

Wallace’s entire temperament seemed to change--slowly but surely--in the same way my temperament would change, years later, when I myself starting singing and composing my own ecstatic chants.

Funny where life leads us.

Funny that sometimes we don’t even realize we’re being led.

We’re too busy trying to find new ways to improve the lives of our dogs.

And in the process, we improve ours. Because somehow, in some convoluted way, the fact that I was able to observe the effects of sound healing on my dog led me, many years later, to practice on myself.

But getting back to dogs: In 2004, after Wallace had passed and my marriage had disintegrated, I found myself adopting a new dog, Chloe. She's that Spaniel pictured above, with one of her one-night stands. (We can't even remember that Boxer's name, but boy was he fun!)
ANyway, Chloe had extreme separation anxiety when I first adopted her. In fact, she’d already had five homes in the first six months of her life, because her anxiety was so bad. Inexperienced dog owners simply couldn’t handle her whining, barking, drooling, chewing, escaping, etc... But I knew I could handle her. Because I had experience. And marrow bones. And Hildegard.
I played the Canticles of Ecstasy for Chloe around the clock. And within two weeks her separation anxiety had completely vanished.

Fast-forward to the present, and here I am with the Calmest Dog on the Planet. Pretty impressive for a Border Collie mix, I’d say. People always ask me: How do you do it? And I give three answers: clicker training, holistic nutrition and sound healing.

I’d say, on average, I play sacred music about eight hours each day. I believe this music purifies the space, and creates healing vibrations that re-align both me and my dog on a daily basis.

Sound is vibration, and our physical bodies respond to vibration--whether you believe it or not. Fast-paced, frenetic noise will increase our heartbeats and make us feel, well, frenetic. Erratic music will make us feel erratic. But soft, slow, rhythmic music will calm us. Drums beat at certain cycles can lower the blood pressure and induce theta states of mind. You might be saying, “Well, duh, this isn’t rocket science,” but actually it is.

Science has now proven that certain sounds have healing effects on certain parts of the body. The yogis and sages have known this for millennia, of course, but it takes these Western doctors a while to catch up with things. Now these Western doctors are witnessing cancerous tumors going into remission from treatments with Tibetan Singing Bowls, and bi-polar patients reaching a point of equilibrium by listening to a sacred gong.

So why couldn’t a dog with separation anxiety benefit from soothing music?

Why not give it a try? It’s easy and your dog benefits greatly. I swear even my house plants look healthier from the nonstop sacred music.

My recommended picks of soothing songs for doggy snoozing are:

Canticles of Ecstasy by Sequentia
Gong and Singing Bowl Meditation by Scott Kennedy
Ultimate Om by Jonathan Goldman
Lalitha Ashtrotram by Craig Pruess
Atlantean Crystal Temple by Steve Halpern

My dog would second these opinions, but she’s currently asleep.

When a Man Pretends to Like Dogs to Get Into Your Pants

2010-06-26T08:50:00.001-07:00

This essay appeared in the Bark magazine in March 2009. Now that enough time has passed, I can admit that the Friend I referred to was my own self.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blind Date Faux Paw
Rule #1: You can’t fake dog love.
Lee Harrington | 31 Mar 2009
Does he or doesn't he really love dogs?

This story comes from a friend who wishes to remain anonymous on the off chance her former blind date reads this. (We are hoping enough time has passed that said Blind Date will no longer be Googling my friend). They didn’t hit it off, you see, because Blind Date committed the unpardonable act of pretending to be a dog person. He knew my friend loved dogs, and he knew my friend was attractive, and single, so he lied—-all in the name of trying to get into her pants.

We are not impressed.

The setting of the story: a holiday party, last December. My friend loves holiday parties, so she readily accepted an invitation from a man she barely knew. She had just moved to a certain rural town near a certain hip city, and had not, to date, made any new friends. She thought this party would be a grand and fun entry into her new life. Plus, the man claimed that he loved dogs.

The evening included bluegrass Christmas music, nutmeggy eggnog spiced with cognac, and cool hippy-types who wore their grey hair long. But let us fast-forward to the moment when Date invited Friend to sit next to him on a sofa near the fire. He patted a cushion, which prompted the host’s dog—a shaggy, little Wheaton-mix—to run over and leap onto the vacant spot.

Friend said: “How cute!”
Date? He pushed the dog to the floor.
Roughly.

As you can imagine, Friend made a decision right then and there never to see Date again. He tried to snuggle with her on the couch, but Friend snuggled with the dog instead. Date repositioned his body on the sofa so that his legs and arms touched Friend’s, but she kept moving further and further away, to the point where she was almost sitting on some fiddle player’s lap.

It was a long night for Friend. She’s typically not a grudge-holder, except when someone roughs up a puppy.

On the drive home, Date—perhaps sensing Friend’s disappointment—tried to regale her with what he thought were amusing dog stories: the time he tried to put his own dog to sleep and it took three days for the poison to kick in; the time a farmer shot his daughter’s dog and how he and the farmer ended up becoming good friends. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, but my friend found none of this funny.

(Date concluded the evening by telling Friend she had no sense of humor and that she needed to ‘loosen up,’ but that she was still a hot babe and he’d be interested in sleeping with her.

I love the ‘but’ part. As if being hot somehow made up for all her perceived character flaws.)

Anyway, quite a few novels and movies have been written about such scenarios—about men who pretend to be dog people just to get into a woman’s pants. But in those fictional accounts, the men usually end up falling in love with the dogs and everyone lives happily ever after. In this case, a true fraud was exposed. But my friend was at least grateful her date had exposed his true self before the relationship progressed any further. Dog love is not something you can fake. So fellas, don’t even try.

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Lee Harrington is the author of the best-selling memoir Rex and the City: A Memoir of a Woman, a Man, and a Dysfunctional Dog (Villard, 2006). Her novel, Nothing Keeps a Frenchman From His Lunch, is forthcoming from Random House in 2010. She is working on both the second volume of her Rex and the City memoir and a screenplay version of the first volume. Lastly, she is the lead singer of an all-female Who tribute band, Pictures of Lily, and, late at night she blogs about dogs at www.emharrington.com.

How to Get Your Dog Approved by those dreaded New York City Coop Boards

2010-06-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

Rex in the City XXIV: Board Approved

Originally appearing in Issue #41, Mar/Apr 2007

It’s always stressful to throw your first adult party, and it can be even more stressful if you have a really hyper, poorly trained (or rather, imperfectly trained) dog. It was the year 2000 and Ted and I had just moved to a 350-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn. This was a big step up for us, given that our previous apartment was only 300 square feet. You might be shocked at that number, but we were overjoyed to have a bedroom door that could actually close (or slam, as the case may be) because there were no bureaus or beds blocking the way. It was indeed cause to celebrate.

So we decided to throw a housewarming party. Now, long-time readers of this column may recall that, when we first adopted Rex, three years prior to this party, he came to us fear-aggressive, anxious and mistrustful of humans, one of whom had abused him cruelly. With lots of loving care and training, we managed to “cure” him of his aggressions, but there is one thing you can’t cure an English Setter of, and that is being an English Setter, which means exuberant and energetic— and in a 350sf apartment, “energetic” can translate into “hyper.” Plus, only one-third of our guests would qualify as “dog people”—the rest of them liked to wear black and keep their clothing fur-free.

My first thought was to send Rex off to doggie day-care for the morning. (Because we were now officially adults, we decided to throw a brunch rather than a big smoky keg party with Jell-O shots and bags of chips.)

But Ted, having been sent off to boarding school as a pre-teen, said this could cause undue psychological damage.

“How’s he going to know we didn’t invite him to our party?” I said.

“Dogs always know. Plus, he’ll smell the remnants of 80 people … and quiche.”

So the dog was invited.

Then something—an article in the New York Times, perhaps?—gave me an idea: Sedate the dog. Now, before you throw this magazine down in disgust and call me irresponsible, hear me out: people do this in New York, you see, when they need to bring their dogs before potential co-op boards for “review.” A co-op board, whose job it is to make sure that you are socially acceptable and financially secure, can reject you for any number of reasons—maybe your daughter’s tongue piercing would be more appropriate at a co-op in Tribeca than one on the Upper East Side, or maybe you are a world-famous entertainer who happened to have published nude photographs of yourself a few years back. And I’d heard more and more stories of people getting rejected because the boards didn’t approve of their dogs.

Then and now, dogs often get a bad rap in New York. Every week, it seems, the local papers publish articles on this-or-that bad dog doing such-and-such, and as a result, co-op boards have become more and more strict about what kinds of dogs they allow into their hallowed towers, or if they allow them at all. Board members worry that dogs will bark all day; pee in the elevators; jump on strangers; or, in the spring, when the rain is at its worst, shake themselves off right next to a famous socialite and ruin her $4,000 Fendi baguette handbag.

Whatever. We all know there is no such thing as a “bad dog.” Just a poorly trained or improperly treated one. But New Yorkers have learned to take extra precautions in their “dog interviews” with the co-op board. Elite groomers are paid hundreds of dollars to triple-bathe the dogs, administer hot-oil conditioners, spend an hour on the blow-outs and then spritz the dogs with special aromatherapy oils, like bergamot or lavender, which are said to lull board members into a state of complacence and well-being.

Or people will spend $1,500 for five one-hour sessions with a dog trainer who specializes in the dog interview. In these sessions, the dog learns to sit, hold a down-stay and shake hands with the president of the co-op board, all while counting out his/her guardian’s income with thumps of his/her tail (say, one thump for every hundred thousand).

Then there was the couple in Tribeca who had a rather nasty and very vocal Jack Russell Terrier who didn’t like shoes, and because most people in the lobbies of luxury co-ops wear shoes, he was constantly nipping peoples’ ankles. They knew they could not bring him to the interview because all the board members would be wearing shoes. And so, at the last minute, they traded their dog for an imposter, a look-a-like JRT from a different litter. This imposter licked the president’s face, shook her hand, then went into a down-stay and literally smiled and thumped her tail at each board member who spoke. They were unanimously approved.

What I found most shocking were the stories I heard about people sedating their dogs with Valium. I guess, if you can’t afford the $300-an-hour training fee, Valium is available for a few dollars (or nothing, if you steal them from someone else’s medicine cabinet at their first housewarming party). But still. I was horrified. I was horrified and yet a little seed had been planted in my head.

And I know it sounds awful and irresponsible to even consider sedating a dog for a party, but I was an idiot back then, and lazy, and had not yet discovered clicker-training, which works so well I probably could have clicker-trained Rex into donning a tuxedo and mixing drinks.

“You can’t give him drugs,” Ted said. “What kind of mother are you? He’s fine the way he is.”

“I know he’s fine. He’s perfect. This will make him more perfect.”

“But this isn’t a co-op interview,” Ted added. “It’s a party for our friends.”

“It’s just that not all of our friends love dogs the way we do. Besides, I’m not giving him Valium. I’ve giving him herbs.”

A friend had recommended Rescue Remedy, which she said was the vodka martini of the dog world. It wouldn’t sedate him, she said; it would just “chill him out.” They use it for dogs in shock, she said, and for those who are terrified of thunder.

Now, I’m a fan of chillin’, so I used myself as the test subject before dosing up the dog. Just a few drops in a glass of water, or straight onto the tongue, and lo, I didn’t feel drugged or sedated, just oddly blasé and unhurried. I felt I had discovered the New Age “Mother’s Little Helper.” In fact, I liked it so much I decided to give myself a triple dose for the party. (Things like hosting parties stress me out, and Martha Stewart’s magazine is to blame, because her level of perfection is one that I can never seem to meet.)

“Want some?” I said to Ted, half an hour before our guests were to arrive. I held out the little glass vial which was, I realized, the same size as a syringe. Ted shook his head. “Bad mother,” he said, in the same teasing voice he used when he said “Bad dog.” I placed four drops of the Mother’s Little Helper on top of Rex’s head.

We served what adults are supposed to serve at housewarming parties: white wine, tiny quiches, fancy sparkling waters and a gruyère fondue. And we also served up an uncannily well-behaved dog. He’d been to the groomer and smelled like lavender oil, and his fur was silky and oh-so-white. People kept commenting on how beautiful he was, and how sweet and calm. There was a $16-per-pound wedge of Spanish goat cheese on the low coffee table that he didn’t even bother to sniff, let alone scarf up. And he didn’t climb up onto the windowsill and bark at passersby on the sidewalk. He did not once try to jump on the furniture because it was more effort than he could expend. Mostly, he wanted to lie on the floor and receive his well-deserved belly-scratches. “I wish I had a dog like that,” one of Ted’s friends said, and I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t a dog like that, but I was feeling just so blissfully blasé.

Throughout the party, I’d notice Rex resting his head on the knee of my editor, or sleeping at the feet of Ted’s boss, and was pleased to see that he hadn’t slobbered on her shoes. In fact, he hadn’t slobbered on anyone, or jumped, or barked. And for the first time, I knew what it was like to have a mellow dog—to have the sort of dog a co-op board would approve.

“Didn’t people, in the olden days, used to give their children brandy to help them sleep?” I said to Ted after the party.

“Yes,” Ted said. “In their milk.”

“I am a bad mother,” I said.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Ted said. We took Rex to Prospect Park as a reward. The “remedy” had worn off at that point, and he was back to his hyper, happy, hunting-dog self. We let him off-leash and watched as he chased after squirrels, manically followed scent trails, crashed through bushes and leapt over rocks, and actually bit the base of an oak tree, seemingly determined to bring it down because there was a squirrel’s nest up there. “He certainly doesn’t seem to have a hangover,” Ted said. “Maybe I’ll try this herb myself.”

“Oh, you should,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly (because what wife doesn’t want to sedate her husband once in a while?).

Ted just raised an eyebrow and called for the dog. He came bounding back to us, covered with burrs and mud and panting with bliss. So much for the $70 trip to the groomer and the aromatherapy oil. He seemed positively delighted with himself and his condition. And we were delighted, too. “Perfect dogs probably get really boring,” I said to Ted.

“Perfect people, too.”

Years later, one of our guests became the president of our co-op board when our building went co-op. Rex didn’t have to go to the dog interview—he had already passed.

La Tarte Tropezienne (the pastry, not me!)

2009-08-19T16:16:00.000-07:00

In Search of the Perfect Tarte
by Lee Harrington

When I told friends I was going to spend four weeks in St. Tropez last summer, more than one of my foodie friends told me I must try the Tarte Tropezienne—which was described to me as a giant brioche filled to the heavens with a creamy vanilla custard. This sounded like a dream come true. As I child I loved pudding—homemade butterscotch pudding, or bread pudding, or crème brulee, were the best—but mostly we ate packaged pudding, the Jell-O Brand. I liked vanilla and my brother, ten months older, liked chocolate, and my father told us that as toddlers we would sit facing each other in twin highchairs and smear our respective puddings all over our faces, smiling in ecstasy.

So naturally, finding and sampling this so-called Tarte Tropezienne went to the top of my “list of things to do” while I visited St. Tropez. That’s what one does when one travels to France—you get obsessed with pastries. And wine. And bread. And olives. And cheese. Plus, we New Yorkers tend to become obsessed with finding “the best” (primarily so that we can go back and tell our friends at dinner parties that we found “the best” goat cheese or the best rosemary-and-olive fogasse or the best early-season figs. )

But getting back to my quest for The Best Tarte Tropezienne...

The first sample I managed to track down came from a street-cart vendor at a flea market in St. Maxime. There they were, stacked in neat rows behind a glass case, all perfectly round and golden. Tarte Tropezienne come in three sizes, small (the size of a whoopee pie) medium (one generous slice of the grande) and grande, a bulging behemoth pie the size of a dinner plate. I ordered a mini, thinking I could work my way up to the, if you’ll forgive the pun, grand finale. But I was frankly disappointed by my street cart tarte. The brioche was too sweet (they aren’t supposed to be) and dry, and the filling—in taste and texture—was more like cake frosting than pudding.

The good news is my second favorite thing to eat as a child was frosting, or better, a frosting sandwich, of the excruciatingly-sweet variety, the kind that came from can. When my father wasn’t looking I spread a big gob of canned chocolate frosting on two slices of Wonder bread and ate this for lunch. The St. Maxime tarte was not much more than my childhood frosting sandwich, so I wasn’t all that impressed. I assumed I had been duped—that the tarte wouldn’t be the “best thing I had ever tasted” as a friend had predicted. Or maybe I had simply made an error in judgment by sampling my first one from a street cart.

“Non, non, non,” my French hosts said when I told them I had abandoned my Quest for the Perfect Tarte after only one try. “Those street cart venders, they are no good. It is merde.” (The French always have strong opinions about their pastries.) They told me I must try the village patisserie in Grimaud. They told me that this patisserie, called, simply Le Patisserie, makes only one tarte per day, for the tourists. “All the slices would be gone by lunchtime,” they said with a smirk. I made sure I was the first in line at seven in the morning, so that I could receive the first slice. The filling of the tarte was perfect – a creamy, dense custard with just the right amount of sweetness. But the brioche was coated with confectioners sugar, and I kept inhaling the powder and choking every time I took a bite. Hours later, when I finally got a chance to see myself in a mirror, I saw that I had powder under my nose, like a coke addict.

“But of course,” said another French friend. “That village, it is not so sophisticated. And their bread is no good. A real tarte is glazed with coarse sugar. What you ate is an imposter.” They recommended the aptly named “Tarte Tropezienne”— a famous chain of patisseries, whose secret recipe for their brioche and custard is “protected” (the French word for “patented”). According to Albert Dufrene, the sales manager for the Tarte Tropezienne chain, the pastry originated on the set of Trouffaut’s famous St. Tropez film: And God Created Woman in 1955. A young baker named Alexandre Micka was the head caterer for the crew, and each day he made them a special cream cake that came from a recipe passed on by his Polish grandmother. As legend has it, Brigitte Bardot was so besotted with Mr. Micka’s cake that she insisted that he “protect” the recipe. But to earn “protection,” a pastry must have a name. Therefore Bardot christened the cake the “Tarte Tropezienne.” And thus the chain was born.

I invited my hosts to accompany me to the famous patisserie closest to our villa, but they, like many St. Tropez residents, admitted that they never partook of their famous local attraction. “The tarte is too sweet,” they said. “It is for the tourists.” But I was not afraid of sweetness, or of being pegged as a tourist, so I hopped on my Vespa and sped off to the nearest Tarte Tropezienne.

I was not sorry. This time I ordered the medium size portion – basically one quarter of a large-sized tarte. The brioche was perfect—moist and feathery, with a slightly crisp egg yolk glaze and a generous sprinkling of granulated sugar. But the filling—an inch and a half thick—was a bit too pudding-y for even this pudding fanatic. The Grimaud custard was better. But the Tarte Tropezienne brioche took first place. And, as with any burgeoning addiction, I had to keep going for reasons I can’t even explain. I was becoming more and more determined to find the Ultimate Tarte.

At the Hasselbach bakery in Antibes—an Alsatian boulangerie and patisserie on the Rue de la Republique, I found a heavenly tarte—with a moist, crisply glazed brioche and a perfect custard. Also in Antibes is the Au Palais de la Friandise—a famous Parisian chocolatier and confectioner who also have a store on the Champs d’Elysees in Paris. By then I had been in France long enough to know that there was a big distinction between a boulangerie/patisserie and an exclusive patisserie. The former served peasant bread. Enough said. The latter produced pastries and tarts and cakes that looked as if they had been prepped and shellacked by a food stylist. The Tarte Tropezienne at Au Palais de la Friandise was so perfectly round and shiny it looked porcelain. At 13 Euros, the Palais’ tarte was the most expensive I had encountered, but its rich, creamy, butter-colored custard proved to me that sometimes money can buy happiness.

Then yet another friend told me of yet another winner, in the old town section of St. Tropez, near the port. I thought if I sampled just one more I would be satisfied, and not gain too much weight. Here again I encountered the moist brioche, the heavenly custard and was starting to conclude, just as there is no such thing as a bad piece of pizza, on the Riviera there is no such thing as a “bad” tarte.

After seven straight days of Tarte-hunting, I had to face the fact that my jeans felt tighter. And that my stomach had developed a rather pudding-y pudge. It was all in the name of research, I told myself. I felt satisfied that I had achieved my childhood dream.

LOCATIONS:
Tarte Tropezienne:
Cogolin centre :
Rue Beausoleil - 04 94 54 42 59

Sainte-Maxime :
112 Avenue Charles de Gaulle - RN 98 - 04 94 96 01 65
et Marché Couvert - 4 rue Fernand Bessy - 04 94 96 75 34

Saint-Tropez :
9 bd Louis-Blanc - 04 94 97 19 77
36 rue Georges Clemenceau - 04 94 97 71 42

PLUS SEVERAL OTHER LOCATIONS IN THE VAR REGIOUN.WWW.TROPEZIENNE.COM

Hasselbach
Two locations:
rue de la Republique, ANTIBES

Au la Palais de la Friandise
50, rue de la Republique, ANTIBES

GRIMAUD
La Patisserie
4 rue de Foux

Postcard from the Ironman France Triathlon

2009-08-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

I am not a triathlete. I cannot even come close to being a triathlete, because of a physical limitation that forbids me from jumping up and down, or even standing for more than two hours at a time. (I have a rare and freaky spinal disorder that also affects my brain.) So I have always been somewhat jealous of supremely physical people. And also very intrigued. What drives an endurance athlete? I often ask myself. What would compel a person to compete in an Ironman?
I mean, I, too, saw Julie Moss crawl toward the finish line at Hawaii in 1982. And I am aware that her dramatic finish has actually inspired many an athlete to try the sport. But why would someone be inspired at the sight of someone incapacitated by self-imposed fatigue? I began to wonder: Are all triathletes insane?
Now, one could argue that a non-physical person such as myself can never truly understand the mind of the hyper-physical, and that therefore I shouldn’t even try. One could argue that I should just sit on my ass in front of ESPN and keep my mouth shut. But part of me believes that if I could understand what motivates and drives an Ironman triathlete, I could unlock some secret to the meaning of life.
In fact, I wanted so much to understand the triathlete that, back in 2001, I decided to base my second novel on a female triathlete training for an Ironman. I gave this character a sound body and a broken heart. And I gave the book the title Nothing Keeps a Frenchman From His Lunch, (which has nothing to do with triathlons and takes forty minutes to explain.)
Thus I began my obsession with triathletes—a field study of the species, if you will. I began to watch triathlons on television. I interviewed athletes. I subscribed to Triathlete magazine. My intrigue morphed into true obsession, and I now have a 500-page book. But as of last May I still had not participated in an Ironman, and that made me feel like a fraud (at least from a novelist’s standpoint). So I decided that the next best way to experience an Ironman would be to volunteer at one. So, I contacted the Ironman France race coordinators, explained to them (in my passable French) my quest, and was immediately hired as a volunteer. I also approached an editor at Triathlete magazine, who agreed to commission a piece based on my experiences as a volunteer at Ironman France. And thus I found myself, in June of 2006, at Nice.
Herewith is my experience, in three legs:
Swim
The first thing I noticed at the swim leg was not the otherworldly color of the Mediterranean, or the majesty of the grand Deco hotels that lined the Promenade des Anglaises; no, the first thing I noticed were the men. I’m just going to come right out and say it: they are gods. They are prime specimens of human perfection. All of the triathletes—the men, the women—looked so supremely healthy and pure and fit. Their impossible toned muscles had the perfect proportions of DaVinci’s Vesuvius, and their skin had the flawless, even tans of Ken. Here, I told myself, were bodies and minds free of clutter. Here were examples of what we could all become if we just put our minds to it.
I imagined that if I seized one of the men, and kissed him full on the lips, he would taste like the purest of spring water, the very Fountain of Youth, with just a touch of Gatorade. Lemon/lime. But I held back.
The swimmers had begun to line the shore at around 5:30 and at six, a DJ very suddenly began to blast rap music from about 16 giant speakers. The music was outrageously, uncomfortably loud. From what I could tell, no one was enjoying it. Most people blocked their ears. This made for an odd sea of spectators. The DJ kept shouting “put your hands up in the air” but no one did, because they didn’t want to leave vulnerable their eardrums.
More and more swimmers arrived, all of them I huddled closely together. The DJ was now playing a rap song that was particularly lewd. It didn’t seem appropriate for this event at all, but who was I to say? Maybe this was standard Ironman fare. Maybe the synchronized sounds of a woman’s moans motivated the swimmers. Maybe the volume helped wake everybody up. Or maybe it simply made everyone horny.
Then it occurred to me that maybe everyone already was horny, given the sight of 1100 sublime bodies pressed against one another in shiny black suits.
Maybe that is why hundreds of French spectators lined the stands.
Thankfully, the gun went off, and the athletes thundered into the water, a crush of multi-colored caps. Above them, a helicopter hovered—too closely, I thought, because the wind kept knocking the floats over, and the floats landed on top of swimmers, sending them off-course. A cameraman sat right in the door of the helicopter, his legs dangling off the side. I wondered what would happen if he fell in. And landed on top of the swimmers.
After about an hour, the first swimmer, Hervé Faure emerged. He was breathless, but showed no signs of fatigue. I thought: those rocks must be killing his feet. But swimming two miles seemed like a quick morning dip to these people. I hoped in my next life I would be a distance swimmer, so that I could too walk over rocks like a Hindu swami walking across coals. I hoped I’d be, like these athletes, impervious to pain.
Meanwhile, inside the transition tent, a volunteer slathered sunscreen onto Herve’s shoulders while more male swimmers sprinted past, stripping off their suits. I made a note to ask her how she had gotten that job.

Bike
My T1 was to go meet my motorbike driver, who was going to take me along the bike course. (I’d been warned that it might be a bit chaotic finding the driver outside Herballife Village. The French have a reputation for being charmingly disorganized (because everyone wants to be in charge), and the Nice Triathlon is still considered to be “very French.” I don’t know if they can ever live down the fact that, back in the 1983 race, the French gendarmeries—quite nastily, from what I heard—sent all the cyclists in the wrong direction at the beginning of the bike leg, forcing everyone to ride the course in reverse. Riders who had been training for weeks up certain hills and around specific switchbacks suddenly found themselves on an almost unfamiliar course. Then there was the fact that the aid stations didn’t have enough water that year, which resulted in a dehydrated and disoriented Mark Allen weaving across the finish. But the good news is the new race organizers, Triangle, are working hard to iron out the kinks. This year there was plenty of water and nutrition at the plentiful aid stations, and volunteers at every turn and intersection instructing riders where to go.
So, at Herballife Village, after trying to communicate with a lot of French men in helmets who were shouting and waving their hands in the air, I finally found my driver: a soft-spoken young man named Jean-Marc. This was his first time volunteering at the Nice Triathlon, and he had taken the job because he loved the views. Nice is famous for having one of the most spectacular bike LEGS in the sport, and, conversely, one of the toughest. My driver and I immediately headed north, toward St. Jeannet, and once we passed through St. Laurent du Var the roads led unrelentlessly uphill. I pitied the cyclists having to do these climbs.
Then I pitied myself, for my driver was going like 100 miles per hour, and I kept begging and pleading with him to slow down, but to a French man, driving slowly is on par with having yourself castrated. He accelerated around corners, weaved between cars and wide delivery trucks, and generally took my life into his own hands.
We zipped past the middle pack of cyclists, then the leads. We zipped past medieval perched villages with melodic names: Gattieres, Chateauneuf de Grasse. I wanted to lift my head and admire then, or stare in wonder at that aquamarine sea, but that meant I would notice that nothing but a two-foot stone wall separated me from a 250 meter drop. So most of the time I could only stare at the back of Jean-Marc’s helmet and pray.
I wondered if the triathletes were able to enjoy the views. Or if their concentration was such that an image of a medieval perched village where Keith Richards was rumored to have bought a château would have been too distracting. Would such an image pull their minds into the 11th century? Or would it remind them that they were only in St. Paul de Vence, and therefore still had another 140 kilometers to go? Time seemed to stand still in those distant golden villages. I wondered if time stand still for a person on a Category 2 climb.
By this time my driver and I had passed all the cyclists, even past Hervé, and I signaled for Jean Marc to slow down. He didn’t seen to understand the concept of slowing down. The point in a journalist following a race, I explained to him, was to observe the athletes, not leave them in the dust. Plus, I worried that we were freaking all the cyclists out, buzzing past them like that. I requested that we stopped in one of those tiny villages to take a break.
Then an inexplicable thing happened. We stopped outside a cafe, and I went inside to use the bathroom, and when I reemerged a few minutes later Jean-Marc, my driver, was gone. I looked for him and his motorbike everywhere. It seemed impossible that he would have ditched me—I was a journalist after all, and he had been hired to escort said journalist, but after half an hour of searching and pacing and asking other volunteers at the cafe if they had seen a large Frenchman with a bike and a helmet, I had to conclude that he really had left.
For the next few minutes the paranoid part of my brain started to list all the reasons why Jean-Marc had ditched me: Had I inadvertently insulted him somehow using my garbled French? Perhaps, in an attempt at friendly conversation, when I had asked him how long he had been a member of the journalist-driving-team, he misinterpreted my casual question as a criticism of his lack of experience. Or perhaps, in my garbled French, my question had actually translated into: “How long is your member?” Perhaps I had pissed him off by asking him to slow down. French men HATE being told to slow down, especially by American women. (I am allowed to say this because my mother’s family were French.) Perhaps I had clung to his stomach a bit too desperately and had caused him a mal a l’etomache. At any rate; I’d been abandoned.
Using a pay phone, I called the race organizers and one of my colleagues at the triathlon magazine and told them I’d been ditched by my driver. No one could quite believe it, and I had to repeat the story to several people, each one a senior to the former, but eventually it was concluded that another driver should be sent.
As I waited, I ate a Powerbar, I stood on the sidewalk and watched some of the strong, kick-ass women pass. I was thrilled to witness Katya Edwards cruising through the village, to thundering applause. At the press conference, the French moderator had held up a picture of Katya in a bathing suit, sitting on top of an elephant. He referred to her as “La Petite American.” But anyone could see that this woman’s talent was huge. The look on her face was calm and vacant, like that of a woman humming pleasantly while she arranged flowers. Her legs were like rocks.
Soon my new driver, Luc, arrived. His motorbike looked faster than Jean-Marc’s. I honestly considered turning around, going back to the safe flat ground of the Promenade des Anglaises, because I knew it wasn’t’ healthy for my already over-taxed adrenals glands to be producing any more fear-adrenaline. But then Mariska Kramer sped past, looking determined, and I realized the only way to cultivate courage is simply to be brave.
This time, I insisted that the driver go only 30 MPH. The experience was much more pleasurable. The air smelled of honeysuckle flowers and hot dry grass. Cows grazed at the roadside, and many of the villagers had seated themselves in little lawn chairs, offering polite French applause. In Gréolières, even the village priest had come out to cheer on the cyclists. As we sped past him, I couldn’t tell if he was waving or making the sign of the cross. But I imagined that the smiling presence of these villagers must be comforting to a lone rider, who is toiling along wondering why he ever thought to enter this grueling race.
At our slower speed, I was able to observe the riders: heads down, muscles straining, cycling shorts filmed with salt. I had the honor of seeing Marcel Zamora, Gilles Reboul, Francois Chaboud. I felt guilty passing them on the motorbike. They’d all look up at me, and attempt tired smiles, and I wondered if they wished they were me, sitting on my ass, having a very valid excuse as to why I would never, ever have to do an Ironman. And of course no triathlete would really think this. But maybe for a few seconds here and there, you question your decision to put yourself through such torture? When the aid station is miles away, and up ahead is the Col de Vence?
Anyway, the grass is always greener, because a few minutes later I decided I would much rather be a triathlete, battling this course for the next four hours, than be sitting on this motorbike. As soon as my driver saw the Col, with its terrifying Category 2 climbs and hairpin turns, he gleefully sped up again, cutting off a cyclist, on a corner, to pass a truck. This, I imagined, was why he had been volunteering at Nice for ten years. I entered the Realm of Terror again and clung to the sides of the bike with my thighs. I do yoga, so my thighs have some strength. I just hoped I had enough to hold on for the rest of the race.
By then]it had begun to rain, making the already dangerous turns lethal. “Has anyone ever died on this course?” I asked my driver, and no sooner had a said that than we saw a cyclist wipe out. Immediately Luc pulled over and rushed over to the fallen man. We were not allowed to assist him, of course, but the driver asked the cyclist, in French, if he was okay. The cyclist nodded, not seeming to notice the blood pouring out of a seven-inch gash on his leg. He took a swig of water and pushed off. Luc nodded in appreciation as the man rode away. “These people are alone out here,” he said. “We need to take care of them. We need to show them the right way to go.”

Run
My T2 consisted of being able to stand on two legs again and praise the earth. Luc dropped me off at one of the marathon aid stations, where I was to pass out cups of water and clap.
Now, I live in New York City, where the New York Marathon is treated like a block party that happens to be about 40,000 blocks long. Runners pass a funk band playing the theme from “Rocky” on Staten Island, then a bunch of drag queens dressed like Flo Jo in Bedford-Sty. In Manhattan, there might be a gospel choir singing about not giving up, or a team of flamenco dancers saluting you with little silk scarves. Many of the spectators wear costumes, and even some of the runners, too. I’ve seen a marathoner in a tuxedo and, last year, two Scottish men wearing kilts. We all begged of them to show us their undergarments, but they waved us off.
Anyway, this is what I am used to as an endurance-sport spectator: loud, louder, and loudest, and lots of New York accents. And day-glo wigs. The volunteers at this aid station put us New Yorkers to shame.
Consider the group of volunteers who handed out the different colored wrist bands to mark the number of times the runners had done the loop:
Little girls in pink t-shirts handed out the #3 bands; little boys the #2 blue. A group of elderly woman handed out the black bands--#1. And I wondered what the implication of that color was, considering the stereotypical use of pink and blue. Anyway, the girls in pink giggled any time they handed their #3 bands to a particularly sweaty and glistening Adonis. The boys in blue kept trying to slip the bands onto the runners’ wrists as the runners passed (rather than just handing the bands out), but the boys missed a lot, which meant the runners had to stop and lose a few seconds. The boys would then snigger and scold one another for dropping the bands.
My favorite volunteer at this station was an elderly woman named Octavia, with long grey hair and perfectly manicured toenails, which she had painted gold. She jogged up to each of the runners as they approached, jovially mimicking their gaits, and blew them kisses as she handed them their black bands. Her face was wrinkled—probably from years of sun and smoking—but her eyes were merry and young. She made each and every runner smile. Later, I learned that she was 72 years old, and that she had been volunteering at the race for three years. “My grandson is an Ironman,” she told me. “I come here for him.” I loved the way the French said “Ironman”—kind of revving up on the “r.” Octavia seemed to be the quintessential volunteer.
Further down, near the water station, three adolescent girls in knee-length IRONMAN FRANCE t-shirts handed out wet sponges and offered to spray the runners with a garden hose. “De l’eau, de l’eau!” they chanted. Their jeans were soaked to the skin and they wore no shoes. One particularly exuberant girl kept squirting the runners square on their faces, often into their eyes. Most of the runners laughed, but the girl eventually got scolded by Octavia when she accidentally blasted the “nutrition table” and soaked all the pound cake.
After two hours I had to sit down. My spine was done for the day (as were my volunteer duties). Meanwhile, some of these athletes would keep going for fourteen hours. I sat on the sidewalk and drank an electrolyte-replacement-beverage and watched the runners stop at the aid station to contemplate the soggy pound cake and then take a Powerbar instead. And I wondered why some of them were not running, or even walking at a slow pace. DID THEY NOT CARE ABOUT THEIR TIMES? On TV they are always running and gulping, but here, at Nice, the runners lingered at the buffet.
Then it occurred to me that stopping to eat was a very European thing to do. The French think it is gauche to eat while walking. They are appalled at how many Americans speed along the sidewalks, dodging around one another while they snarf down sandwiches and pizza or even Chinese food. With chopsticks.
And to drink a coffee out of a to-go cup? Encroyable.
Suddenly I admired the leisurely pace with which the athletes took refreshments. Such good manners. And such a perfect opportunity for me to admire their glutes.
It was after noon. The sun was now straight above us. The athletes cast no shadows, and the sky was so blue it seemed surreal. I watched the way the heat rose off the pavement in waves, and thought of how they said it was ten times worse at Hawaii. Again, I marveled at the masochistic tendencies of these folks. A German age grouper passed very close to me, leaning on a fellow countryman for support. I clapped wildly and told him he was doing great.
Now, I have had the privilege of doing a Native American sweat lodge with a Lakota medicine man. It’s possible to say that the heat inside a sweat lodge is even worse than it is at Hawaii. Yet I’d have to say that that sweat lodge was the most profound thing I have ever experienced. The heat, although unbearable, managed to cook away all my worries and emotions. It cooked away my past, and my future, and left me in the glorious Here and Now. I felt as if I had no baggage—just this moment; I felt like a pure and absolute human being—a human being as we are meant to be: a spirit inside a body, uncluttered with stupid thoughts.
That sweat lodge high lasted four hours. And then I had to go do laundry, and pick up my car at the garage, and agonize over the fact that my imaginary husband Viggo Mortensen had not yet called.
So I wondered: is this what a triathlete feels after s/he has swim 3.8 kilometers, cycled 180 kilometers, and run 26 miles? Are they willing to put themselves through nine, ten, seventeen hours of torture to experience that four hours of bliss?
Maybe it’s that the bliss for a triathlete lasts longer. If you do the math, and say that one hour in a sweat lodge equals 4 hours of bliss, that would mean then 14 hours of Ironman equals 56 hours. Or perhaps, dear readers, your bliss lasts a lifetime.
As I sat there, Emily Deppe jogged past on her sturdy legs. My own legs, particularly the adductors, were still trembling from having clutched the sides of that motorbike in terror. I was surprised that my biceps did not ache from lifting a digital recording device to record details. I shouted to Emily that she kicked ass, girl! And told myself that maybe strength and courage, fear and limitations, are all relative. Still, there’s a reason they use the word “humbling” a lot in all those triathlon books and magazines.
The helicopter was hovering above the finish line now, which meant the leading runners were closing in. I pushed myself off the sidewalk and limped toward the finish line, wondering if someone would mistake me for an Ironwoman. Um, no.
I have heard, again and again, that there is nothing like crossing the finish line at an Ironman, but I am here to tell you there is nothing like watching you finish either. I saw on your faces relief, disbelief, and abject joy. I saw an infant being passed into one man’s sweaty arms; I saw a group of French cheerleaders in fishnets practically pig pile a particularly hunky Austrian man. Then I thought I saw, in a flash, the Meaning of Life. I know this might sound hokey, but standing there at the finish, I felt I was part of your glory, even though I have never walked in your shoes. Or swum, or rode, or ran.
Next, a woman collapsed into her husband’s arms with tears of joy; another did a little victory dance. That DJ was screeching indecipherably in French. Then someone in an Ipswich shirt gave me—me!—a high five. For a moment I vowed not to wash that hand.
Eventually I had to tear myself away from the finish line. Same story: my spine. It was mid-afternoon at that point, and I knew the final finisher might not come in for another ten hours. Just thinking about that made me exhausted. There was no way I could make it in this sun for even another twenty minutes. And so, a bit sadly, and very guiltily, I turned around to leave. The sea was so spectacularly beautiful I wanted to take it home with me. I trusted its beauty would offer comfort to the remaining runners: its aquamarine waves were the very color of hope.
I looked one final time down the Promenade des Anglaises. There was Octavia, still going strong. The runners passed through an allée of saffron-colored Power Bar flags that waved upliftingly, like Christo’s “The Gates.” No, triathletes were not insane; they had grasped the very essence of sanity, which is to have no doubts.
On the train back to Antibes, with my head pressed against the window because I couldn’t hold it up, I thought of the people who were still out there, running, cycling, their skin salty from the swim. I thought of Julie Moss crawling toward the finish line. I thought of that famous Boston man carting his son on the bike course at Hawaii for seven hours with his wheel jammed. And I realized that all my complaints, all my problems and ailments, all that laundry and unrequited love, were really minor compared to what those athletes put themselves through. And maybe that was the point. If you can run an Ironman, there is nothing you cannot overcome. And the more Ironmen and Ironwomen we have on this planet, the stronger this world will be. Hats off to all of you.

The Original Rex and the City series, Part 2

2009-04-13T08:04:00.001-07:00

This installment appeared, if I recall correctly, in the December 2000 issue of The Bark Magazine

Rex in the City

Installment #2

New Yorkers have a reputation for being tough customers. They're hard to please, they accept nothing less than the best, and if they are not satisfied with the product, service, or condition upon delivery, they will return the item testily and demand a full refund. But what if the "thing" you want to return has eyes and ears and a full coat of fur and feelings?

Our local animal shelter told us the dog my boyfriend Ted and I chose to adopt in July of '97 was a twelve-month-old French Spaniel. Our vet later said he was more like a six-month-old English Setter. We suspected he was part crocodile--all snapping jaws and bulbous eyelids and a cold, unforgiving stare. But what did we know? Ted and I were clueless about dogs and it wasn't until after we brought one home that we truly realized this.

The first thing Crocodile Rex did when we led him across the proverbial threshhold of our apartment was snap at us. No blood was drawn, but he snapped in such a way as to let us know that he would not tolerate human proximity and that from now on he ruled this roost. Then he tried to wedge his 55-pound body underneath our futon--but in New York City one cannot expect such a thing as unused space. We're talking a three-hundred-square-foot studio here, with crates of winter clothing wedged under the sofas and dozens of shoe boxes Rubix-cubed inside a large trunk, which doubles as a coffee table and triples as a dining table if we ever have guests. Which we don't. Because we're too embarrassed about our apartment. So Rex found refuge under the computer table (which doubles as an ironing board) and hunkered down. He would not let us come within three feet of his bunker without showing his teeth.

"Um, I have, like, work to do on that computer," I said.

"I think it's going to have to wait," Ted said.

When we asked the vet how long she thought it might take Rex to "calm down," she had said, without irony: "about ten years."

Needless to say, we were not prepared for this.

We had come home from the shelter armed with a set of plastic feeding bowls, some dog food, a polyester bed, a book called How to Care for Your Shelter Dog and some nervous but sincere enthusiasm. We had rescued Rex from a life of concrete and cages, we had snatched him willingly from the jaws of death, and frankly we were proud of ourselves. This was the first "couply" thing we had done as a couple, and we hoped to meet each day with that exhilarating sense of togetherness and possibility. But there was one thing missing from the equation: Rex wanted nothing to do with us. Or other dogs. Or other people. Not even houseplants were safe from his wrath as the poor Swedish Ivy learned when it "dared" to brush its leaves against Rex's shoulders. If we so much as looked in that dog's direction his lips would curl and his back would hunch and the soft-looking patch of hair between his shoulder blades would rise and stiffen. "And he doesn't even use hairspray," I would tell my girlfriends, whispering into the telephone so as not to fuel his fire.

It was easy to be flip. Easier, I should say. Because at the other end of the spectrum was the realization that we had made a terrible mistake. But neither Ted nor I was ready or willing to admit that. Yet.

For the first few days, we reminded ourselves that Rex had chosen us-- he had practically begged us to take him home from the pound. And I believed that people came together, not by chance, but by subconscious intentions; I believed that paths crossed for reasons that you had to stick around to understand. Good Ted had come into my life, for example, at a time when I had sworn off all dysfunctional relationships, all poets and rock musicians, all liars and cheats and assholes. But why then had this asshole of a dog chosen me?

When I said I wanted a dog, I guess what I meant was the dog of my childhood. A loving, jolly husky who walked herself, would allow me to dress her up in my brother’s hockey uniform and would eat my unwanted Brussels sprouts. But at a deeper level I also probably wanted unconditional love and the wonderful, rejuvenating proximity to a high-spirited and happy being. How then had we ended up with the only dog on the planet whose love was conditional?

“It’s your fault,” Ted would say. We argued a lot those first few days. Hatefully. “You’re the one who insisted on getting a dog.”

“You picked him out!” I’d say back. “I wanted a puppy.”

“Oh, sure, a puppy that wasn’t house trained?”

Rex at least had that going for him.

"Well," I said. "At least a puppy wouldn't grind his teeth every night in his sleep as if he were sharpening them. At least a puppy might make eye contact and maybe give us a kiss once in a while. At least a puppy wouldn't pull my arm out of its socket every time we went out for a so-called walk!"

Rex clearly had never been trained on a leash before. Picture a large hill with an unmanned SUV resting at its top. Now, release the parking break and allow said SUV to roll unmanned down the hill. Now, try to stop the car from rolling by attaching to the bumper a six-foot leash of nylon. That's what trying to walk Rex was like. Plus, he seemed to be trying to escape all the time. "Part Houdini, part Crocodile," Ted would say when passersby asked what kind of dog Rex was. Escape was in his eyes every time we took him out of the apartment. It was in the way he looked frantically down every alley, through every doorway, into every window—is that my paradise? Is that my way home? Is it there? Is it there?

I have since heard many stories of newly adopted dogs running away. So much so that I now wonder if wanderlust isn’t part of these dogs’ personalities to begin with—if they, in human form, would have been the artists, the poets, the tortured souls. But where do they go, these runaway dogs? Is there an island off the coast of Maryland that they know of, run for and by dogs? Is there a Mecca inspired by a doggie guru, a wise old Schnauzer who could offer to Rex and his imbalanced cronies the meaning of Dog Life? Oh, I wanted so badly to help this dog, to help him find his Mecca, his inner peace. Because he was driving us out of my minds.

Every time we opened the door a crack Rex would try to wedge his way through it. Every time we removed our attention from him for one second, even just to glance at my wristwatch (Has it been ten years yet?), Rex would try to lunge out of his collar. Once, Ted unsnapped Rex's shackles at the entrance to our apartment building and Rex bolted, right onto Suffolk Street. We watched in horror as a one car skidded and another swerved and for a second I honestly wished that Rex would get hit by a car, because then our time with him would have been over, and we could have said we tried. And failed. But at least all this failure would come to an end.

Rex was not hit. We captured him and leashed him and led him defeatedly back to our apartment. Once inside, Rex turned his back to us and began to savagely hump his bed. He humped with the same look of urgency and need with which I used to smoke cigarettes. And chew gum. And drink wine. I realized that Rex was trying to erase something within himself; he was trying to dull some undullable pain, and I watched him with empathy as I dialled the phone.

We decided we should call the shelter and find out some specifics. If we knew where he had come from, we thought, and where he had been, and what kind of parenting he had had, we might be better able to work with him. But the shelter wouldn't tell us anything. Policy, they said. People tend not to adopt an animal if they know its history, the said. “But we already adopted him," I said. "We want to know so that we can keep him."

“Sorry,” I was told.

That night, Ted and I cried. We cried because we were tired and overwhelmed. We cried because we knew we were failures at responsibility and it was time to admit it. We finally knew that, if pressed, we were the types who would not meet challenges head on, or embrace them as they say; no, we were the ones who would back off in the face of challenge, tail between our legs, and run away. We were cowards.

And we even went so far as to ask ourselves if it weren’t in some way a sign of maturity to admit one's cowardice. If accepting ones limitations weren't in itself a sign of progress, a step forward. We were at a crossroads, Ted and I; at two paths diverged in a wood. And we were ready to take road cowards traveled. And Rex would go back to the pound.

“But I love him,” Ted said plaintively. It’s what he said whenever I said I wanted to call it quits and move out on him, because it should be pointed out that I was more neurotic than Rex. But I love you. Ted believed that love was the foundation on which all things—good and bad—rested. I believed love was light as a feather, something that could be swiftly blown away by the growl of a Hell Hound or the force of an unkind word.

“I just wish there was a sign,” I said, “some guarantee that it’s not always going to be like this.”

Rex at the moment was licking his penis. He glanced at me suspiciously, belched, and then went back to his licking.

“There’s your sign,” Ted said. “Nothing comes between a male and his penis.”

It was summer time, remember--one of the hottest summers on record. And in our neighborhood, the sidewalks absorbed the heat and the windows of the buildings beamed rays of sunlight right back at you. It was like being inside a tanning booth all the time. The heat made it harder to think clearly; to rationalize. So how could one make a logical decision when one's brain is liquefied?

Over the next few days I kept calling the shelter, thinking if I could just connect with the right person I could find out Rex's history. But they were firm in their refusal to offer me any information. One person did tell me that Rex had come from Sharon, Connecticut. But then she added: “If you can’t handle him, then why don’t you just bring him back?"

Bring him back? Of course this is what we had kind of decided, but to hear someone else voice this option was another matter. This shelter worker was lumping me in with all the other inadequate, ill-prepared, selfish, clueless people who callously adopt an animal, thinking only of their own shallow, selfish needs. Suddenly I was insulted.

"We'll give him a month," Ted said. "Okay? One month. And if he doesn't show any progress by then, well…"

Neither of us could say it.

That night we looked up Rex’s alleged breed on the internet. The Spaniel and Setter and Crocodile sites all stated that it was cruel to keep this type of exuberant hunting dog in an apartment. The word "cruel" really struck me. Rex had no more hair around his neck, because the choke collar had pinched it all away (think Epilady). He had to walk backwards out of the bathroom, because there was no room for him to turn around. Outside, our neighborhood was littered with chicken bones and junkie needles. Not even sleep could offer this poor puppy refuge. Instead of flexing his toes and woofing happily in his dreams like the normal dogs do, Rex would growl and grind his teeth.

"Maybe we should move out of the City," I said to Ted. "Or give the dog to someone who had a country house."

"Let's take him camping," Ted said. "Some fresh air will do us all some good."

That weekend, we drove to the Catskills, with Rex howling in protest the entire way. He did not stop until we had almost reached the campground and were passing Silver Lake. Suddenly it was as if all of us in the car saw in that lake the solution to all our needs: the need to be cool, the need to relax, the need to start anew. I could feel on my skin the calming sensation of the water and I could see myself swimming with Rex, his little doggie head bobbing above the surface. We headed to this lake as soon as we had set up the campsite: Ted and I in flip-flops, Rex on his Epilady leash. The sun was high and beamed off the water electrically. There were a few fisherman paddling in from an early morning trip. They nodded at us as we led the dog cheerfully into the water. It was a false cheer, in many ways--our voices were high-pitched, and hyperly enthusiastic, but we wanted so badly for Rex to swim. To prove to us that he could be doglike. And lo and behold he swam--a few frantic paddles that became more confident as he got used to it, as he realized he could float, and I said to Ted; "He's swimming! Look! He swims!" And as we hugged each other I let go of Rex's leash, thinking he'd continue to paddle.

But no. Rex saw an opportunity for escape and he took it. He took off. Like lightening, as they say.

Ted and I scrambled to pursue him, but in flip flops this was hard. Rex was gone a good twenty minutes before I spotted him in some far-off woods. He ran downhill, toward a creek and I ran after him barefoot, like an Indian brave. He zigged, I zagged, I shouted at Ted to head him off at the top of the hill, where both were now heading, and I saw, in a flash, as Rex disappeared over the hilltop, that he had a look on his face that I had not seen to date. It was a smile. A doggie smile.

Eventually Ted tackled the dog and literally scooped him up in his arms. He brought Rex to me as a farmer would bring a lamb to slaughter. Rex looked defeated and a little, well embarrassed, as if he had been emasculated somehow (edogulated). Ted deposited the dog on top of a large flat rock (a la the Balto statue in Central Park), leashed him, and told me to get the camera out of his backpack. "I want to take some pictures of him to remember him by," he said. "Because I can't take this anymore. On Monday we're taking him back."

I nodded. Ted was limping from having re-activated an old knee injury. I was limping from weeks of trying to stop the proverbial SUV from rolling down the hill. And then there was Rex's dog-smile. That got me thinking maybe he knew what was best for him more than we did. We are only human after all. He is Dog.

And so, sadly, we took pictures, and you can see in hindsight in these photos how unhappy we were. The three of us--young couple, young dog--posed with our hard stares aimed away from one another, locked in private disappointments. We looked like an album cover.

On the way back to the campsite, we walked along the road. Rex pooped on the pavement, which made me realize he hadn't done so on naked ground. "He must have been trained to go on a sidewalk or a street, don't you think?"

"He must have had that training beaten into him," Ted said. "Poor guy."

That night, in our tent, we slept fitfully. Rex was outside, tied up (we'd invited him inside the tent but he'd declined ferociously) and he paced around like, well, like a wild animal. "Who's ever heard of a dog insomniac?" Ted said, snuggling close to me, but I couldn't laugh. It seemed to me Rex was doing some serious thinking. I could feel it, the way you can feel a storm coming, or the moment you conceive a child. And as I dozed off, I could only hope that Rex, in some moment of truth, would realize that we kept chasing after him because we cared for him. Despite him. Despite ourselves.

And in the morning, as the sun poked through the tent screens and the swallows chirped, I felt a strange pressure against the right side of my body. The pressure of something large and warm. It was Rex, who had decided at some time in the night to lie against me. We were separated by a thin wall of nylon. "Ted," I whispered. "Give me your hand." Sleepily he complied and I took his hand and pressed it up against the outline of Rex's body. Ted smiled. And outside we heard a thump-thump-thump. "What's that?" Ted said, and I said, "I think it's a dog. A dog wagging his tail."

It was the best sound we ever heard.

The Original Rex and the City series, coming at you!

2009-03-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

Given that I have no time to write any new blogs (the novel is due in 3 weeks!), I thought I would post some old materials—The original Rex and the City columns, to be precise. These started appearing in the Bark magazine back in August of 2000—before the Bark had a website even. So none of these columns have appeared online.

As many of you know, these columns eventually led to the publication of my best-selling memoir (basically a fleshed-out version of the columns). But some readers have expressed interest in seeing the ‘originals.’ So for the next three months, I’ll be posting one column per week, in order of their appearance in the Bark.

Rex and the City –
Part 1): The Decision
On this particular summer Saturday, on this last day of life as I knew it without a dog, my first thought was: what to wear. I had planned to wear a pink linen dress, with a matching pink hat, but when I pulled said dress out of the closet I saw that there was a big stain on its backside. Gum or something. From sitting on the subway, no doubt. One of the great risks you take, in New York City, is sitting down.

“Find something else to wear,” Ted said. “And hurry. We’re supposed to be at Chad’s by noon.”

Ted was the live in boyfriend. Chad was our friend from Long Island friend who had been promising for months to take up to Lloyd Neck Country Club, one of the most exclusive clubs in the area to which he belonged. And finally, today, we were going!

But what to wear? Most New York girls in such crises will produce the old standby: the little black dress. I paired mine with a Wonder bra and platform shoes.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said to Ted. We lived together for the same reasons most couples cohabitated in New York City: because it saved us money and we got instant sex. Marriage, I suppose, was a p-p-possibility, if only another M-word could enter the equation on my behalf: Maturity.

“You can’t wear that,” Ted announced.

“Why not?”

“You can’t wear black to Lloyd Neck.”

“I can.”

“I’m telling you, you can’t. Just put on a polo shirt and those white shorts.”

“I don’t want to look dowdy.” I was twenty-seven and already terrified of such things.

“Who’s going to care?”

“I’ll care.” Deep down, I knew that Ted was right. But something in me that day didn’t want him to know I knew he was right. “Besides. This is the only thing I have.”

“You have a whole closet full of clothes.”

“This is the only thing that fits.” My voice rose a little at the end, and cracked, and Ted must have sensed that I was headed beyond reason, so black dress it was.

But when we got to Chad’s he, Chad, took one look at my get-up and said we wouldn’t be going to the Club. “I know of a great place in Bayville. It’s a clam shack right on the beach.”
On the way there, I stared out the window and sulked. We passed mansion after fabulous mansion, with stately oak trees and the fine green lawns. It seemed that most of the wealth of the world could be found on this slender, riotous island (one can’t help but make Gatsby references in these parts) and the fact that I was so close to and yet so far from it made me sulk. I had done it all wrong. And I cursed myself for not heeding the #1 rule of WASPdom: no cleavage. No black.
Later, Ted said I was being paranoid. That Chad simply didn’t feel like going to the club that day. “He’s like that. He changes his mind constantly.” But I knew better. Some people have gay-dar; I have snob-dar.
Lunch was a disappointment. The crabs tasted as if they had been soaked in formaldehyde and above our heads was a giant banner that said, WET T-SHIRT CONTESTS THURSDAY NIGHTS. Ted and Chad talked about old friends from college, but I wasn’t listening. I was too busy staring in horror at the sad, haggard-looking woman drinking margaritas by herself at the bar. She was smoking Kools and wearing—black.
It’s strange how the small, petty moments can be the ones that change your life. It was because of that woman, and because of my convictions that my life was closer to hers than it was to, say, Daisy Buchanan’s, that I decided, on the way back to the City, that Ted and I should stop at the animal shelter and look at—just look at—dogs. “We drove all the way out here,” I reasoned. “We might as well do something productive with this day.”
Dogs were something Ted and I had talked about haphazardly, in those moments when we got along so well we could giddily envision a future together. In our two years, we’d also talked about travelling, and moving to a bigger apartment, and getting a new computer, a new mattress, new careers, new lives, but so far none of those things had materialized. And so suddenly, there in that hot car, I decided I was tired of being an all-talk-no-action kind of person. I want to call myself on something. And call Ted on it, too.
“Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s look at dogs.”
At the shelter, we headed straight for the puppy section, but in doing so we walked past the adult dogs first. Thus we saw Rex. I want to say that there was a moment of Knowing, an instant bond, but, with me at least, this was not the case. He was a beautiful specimen, a white and brown spaniel, like one of those proud, haughty sporting dogs you see in English paintings. But a puppy he was not.

A volunteer approached us. She struck me as a perky high school student who hoped someday to be a perky vet. She carried a clipboard and wanted to know if we were interested in adopting today. “Oh, we’re kind of just looking around today,” I said, but Ted stopped and asked her about the Spaniel: how old was he was? Where’s he from?
She said Rex was rescued from a pound in Connecticut. He was about to be put down when North Shore showed up. “He’s only been here three days. Do you like him? Do you want to try him out?”
“Try him out?”
“Walk him. We have a walking room. We call it the bonding room.”
“Not yet,” Ted said. “Maybe later.”
We made the rounds of the adult section and fell in love a dozen times. There was Dudley, a sad black hound with an eye infection. And Scooter, a harlequin Great Dane. The volunteer followed us and told us how we should feel about each dog before we’d even had a chance to shake paws with them. “Oh, you won’t like her,” she said of a sweet-looking Border-Collie. “Too much work.” Then she pulled me by the arm and told me I had to meet Missy. “She’s epileptic!”
I didn’t want to see Missy but I went along anyway, helpless. “Missy’s owner loved her” she said, “but unfortunately she couldn’t keep her because she was allergic.”
We stood outside Missy’s pen. She was a sweet dog, yes, a sad, shivering mixture of shepherd and lab, but I didn’t see why I had been singled out as her potential owner. The volunteer hadn’t asked us any questions about our wants or needs, about our lifestyle.
“Do you want to walk her?”
I looked over at Ted, who was back at Rex’s pen. I muttered something about puppies.
“Puppies are different,” she said. “They’re so much work. You can’t bring them outside for eight weeks, they have weak immune systems, you have to be prepared. Missy’s --”
“Excuse me,” I said.
Ted decided he wanted to walk Rex, so the volunteer led us to the walking area, a glassed-in room of lacquered concrete. Once there Rex became frantic. He scrambled on the slippery floor and jumped up on every window, as if to see if escape lay beyond. Ted struggled to control him. He tried to get the dog to sit or heel, but Rex didn’t speak this language. Meanwhile, the volunteer took notes.
“He’s so nervous and skittish,” I said. “Is he okay?”
“All dogs are like that at first,” she said.
“Let me try,” I said to Ted, and the volunteer looked at my platform shoes. “Are you sure you know how to walk a dog?”
Yes, I knew how to walk a dog. During grad school I was a dog walker, thank you. And I grew up with dogs. This last part I told her haughtily. “Huskies,” I said. “My father mushed them.”
“Where are they now?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened to the dogs?”
“My father’s dogs? From when I was a child?”
“Yes, yes. Where are the huskies?”
“We gave them away,” I said. Ted started to pinch me.
“What do you mean ‘you got rid of them’?”
“My mother died. We had a new born baby in the house. My stepmother was afraid of dogs.”
She made another notation on her pad. “We normally don’t adopt out to people with a history of getting rid of animals.”
I was about to tell her that no one cared for animals more than I did, and how dare she, but Ted pulled me away, saying, “Puppy time!”
In the puppy room, I brought each heavenly one to my face, whispering sweet nothings, giving and receiving kisses. “I really like Rex,” Ted kept saying distractedly. “I mean it, I really do.”
Ms. Aggressive Sales Pitch came in as if on cue and told us someone else was interested in our Spaniel. “We’re thinking,” Ted said. “Can’t we think?”
“You have three minutes,” she said, and literally spun on her heels.
Ted followed her. He asked her if it would be okay, if we decided we wanted Rex, to come back pick him up on Wednesday. He something about wanted to get the apartment prepared.
“This is not a boarding house,” she snapped.
“We know it’s not a boarding house,” I said. “We’re simply not familiar with the procedures.”
“Look, do you want him or not? A dog like him will be gone by Wednesday, so you need to decide now.”
I was about to tell this girl to just, just, Gatsby off when something happened. Rex started barking. He barked as if he knew we were about to give up on him. He barked as if he knew he was meant for us, even though we didn’t know yet we were meant for him. Ted looked at me and said, “Should we do it?” And I said, “I guess,” and started to cry. It was like saying “I do.”
In the “processing center” we had to fill out more forms, swear on the Holy Bible that we were who we said we were, and promise that we had no intentions of selling the dog. We had to stand at the counter while they confirmed our address and called our three references, and then we were asked to sit in the waiting room for twenty minutes, ostensibly for them to fill out paperwork but really, we thought, to give us one last chance to change our minds. There, about three dozen other people waited. The room was filled with the smell of worry and second thoughts and fear. No wonder all the dogs were howling! Behind us, a Lloyd Neck-ish woman was called back to the interview area. As she stood, a cloud of expensive perfume rose with her. Minutes later she came out screaming. “I’m a donor! How dare you refuse me that cat? I’ve given hundreds, thousands of dollars to this place.” She told her husband to get his coat. “We’re leaving! They’re not giving us the kitten. Because they think it’s my fault Tuna got hit by a car! You’ll hear about this!” she shouted to the room in parting. And she left us all with the sickly feeling that we, too, would be denied.
“I wish I hadn’t told them about the huskies,” I whispered.
“I’m rethinking puppies,” Ted said. “Rex seems pretty messed up.”
But then they were calling our names and delivering the good news—we’re parents! And then they were giving us Rex, who pulled us out into the parking lot and tried to run away, and we pulled the dog toward the car, and he resisted, oh, how he resisted. God knew where he’d be taken this time, but he would not have it. No, he would not! As we wrestled him into the car, he literally howled the words, No, No, No and threw himself against the windows. I got in the back seat with him, to try to calm him down, but still he howled and scratched and hurled himself against the doors, trying to get out. As we got closer to the City, his brays got louder, more intense, as if he were saying: don’t take me into your nightmare existence! Don’t take me to where there is glass on the sidewalks and needles in the park! Don’t take me to your studio apartment—you don’t have enough space! Your windows face airshafts! No! No! Nooooooo!!
Ted kept looking at us in the rearview mirror. His eyes were disbelieving, glazed. “Are you okay back there?” he said.
“How could he have barked at us like that inside if he didn’t really want us after all?”
“He must have seen the future.” Ted said.
Ah, the future. In which Rex would be taken on four-hour hikes in the Catskills. In which a French baker who would treat him each day to the end of a baguette. In which I, who never cook, would be sauteeing him ground beef and potatoes, and tenderly analyzing the quality of his stool.
“But then why is he howling? Should we be worried, too?”
“I was kidding,” Ted said. “Don’t worry. We’ll make the best of this.”
And what did we know? We were just a young couple, trying to our best to conquer—or at least meet—the indomitable force of New York City. And now we were three. So we just drove on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the next day.

A Divorce, a New Country, A New Dog

2009-03-06T15:18:00.000-08:00

Dog Days in France
by Lee Harrington

After a year of losses, a writer experiences France through her new dog’s eyes
==============================================================================
France is famous for loving its wine, its food, and above all its dogs (which in my opinion makes that country the very nearest thing to heaven on this earth). So a few years ago I made the decision to set my second novel in the South of France, thereby granting myself to right to travel to the Riviera each summer under the name of “research.” This means that technically I could laze around the beach, and get soused on rosé, stuff myself with cheese, and then write it all off on my taxes. I consider myself a very fortunate person indeed.

But still, the idea of traveling alone kind of depressed me. It didn’t bother me when I was in my twenties, when I was more adventurous, but I had recently hit a milestone birthday, and had gotten divorced and then had to deal with the very sudden death of my beloved dog Wallace. My sorrow and loneliness felt wretched and eternal, to the point where I started to believe that being alone was a curse placed upon me at birth, perhaps as some negative karma from a previous lifetime, and therefore I just had to accept it, and deal.

But spending a summer alone in France—in one of the most beautiful places on earth—worried me in a way that I can’t explain. Would I be able to handle so much beauty with my mind so clouded with sorrow? Isn’t beauty meant to be shared?

Because I had no interest in staving off my loneliness with yet another man, I decided to get another dog, a rescue, whom I named Clothilde—or Chloe for short. And as soon as I met her I asked her excitedly if she wouldn’t mind spending a few months with me in a remote French village, but instead of jumping up and down in bliss and ecstacy at the thought of going anywhere, she merely wagged her tail. Just the tip of her tail—in that way dogs have when they are not sure whether they are supposed to be excited or not. Fans of Charlie Brown may recall that Snoopy would give a full tail-wag for Sally but only a tippy-tail wag for Charlie. So who can blame for feeling a little hurt, and paranoid. Did my new dog not like me? Or did she instinctively know that, as my second dog, she might not be as beloved as my first?

In any case, I now had a traveling partner. And I was convinced we would bond once she saw the beautiful beaches and meadows of France.
Now, any dog person knows that if you travel with a dog you are more approachable, more likeable, more willingly embraced. People assume you are a good person if you love a dog. But this was 2005, back when we had a greedy, lying idiot for a president. It was the time of “Freedom Fries” and the “Axis of Weasel.” The “president” encouraged Americans to boycott French wine. So I wasn’t sure if the fact that I am one-quarter French would excuse my being an American. What if people thought I had voted for Bush?

It was up to Chloe to earn me some points with the French. Luckily she is cute, and eternally happy, and to top it all, an epagneul francais. She is also most likely part Border Collie—she has those freaky Border Collie eyes, which reduce to pin points every time you bring the ball out—but I didn’t mention the Border Collie part at French customs, I simply said “le chien est l’epaguneul francais” and we were welcomed heartily into my adopted country.

We found ourselves living in a charming little town called Grimaud—a perched medieval village just north of St. Tropez. Its first stone had been set in the 1100’s and the village still carried many of the qualities of that by-gone age, where everyone knew one another, and large fortress walls both protected and sequestered the villagers from the outside world. No one—well, almost no one—spoke English in Grimaud, which seemed fitting for such a place. But I, at the time, had little faith in my French, and had assumed I would breeze through the Alpes-Maritime like a true American—one who expected everyone to be fluent in the Common Tongue.

But the Grimaldines were not fluent in American. Suddenly I was forced to tap into a portion of my brain that I hadn’t used since college, where I had taken French only to meet the language requirement for my B.F.A. And, although college was not that long ago, I have always assumed that that portion of my brain had been fried by recreational drugs. Still, I had no choice but to speak French. I needed provisions, after all. My dog needed her free bones. So we ventured into shops and stores, and tried to communicate our needs, and I found that with my dog in tow, the villagers were willing to tolerate—indeed, even work with—my faltering French. They helped correct my pronunciation. They taught me new and essential words. Mostly they cooed at Chloe, who clearly made them happy, and earned me warm and embracing smiles. They told her she was sweet and charming and asked her name. The nodded in approval when they learned that she had a French old lady’s name: Chlothilde, and offered her bits of cheese, and laughed when she jumped on their counters to receive her treat. She took the treats into her mouth so politely and gingerly she would not have popped a soap bubble. “What good manners,” they said.

Soon I realized that my college brain had not been fried—it was simply dormant, something that needed a great long, Rip-Van-Winkle-like rest after four years of staying up till sunrise and doing bong-hits right before class. I wouldn’t say I became fluent, but my days in Grimaud developed a certain fluidity, and inevitability, and made me think that if I was going to be alone for the rest of my life, and many lifetimes to come, at least
I knew how to say things like: I would like a pound of goat testicle, please, for my dog, and some entrails of baby pigs.

By our fifth day in Grimaud the dog and I had a routine: we’d rise in the mornings with first light—which in Southern France is a gorgeous, pale light, the color of brie—and then I’d throw on some breezy linen clothing, and we’d set out on our morning walk. Our walk took us first to the grounds of an ancient chateau, where Chloe would pee upon its hallowed ruins, then up to a small park which overlooked the village and provided grand views of the sea.

I sat there every day for six weeks, and the beauty of the view never failed to astonish me. The sea seemed to be made of diamonds, and the park always smelled of rosemary and sage and lavender. Chloe would zip around through the trails and brushes, latching on to this scent or that, flushing out a bird—some French bird I never learned the name of—and she would leap up and try to catch the gorgeous French butterflies, and it all just seemed so French, and then her new pal would arrive at the Park—a sublime Beauceron named Prince, and when I asked if he had been named after the “Artist formerly known as Prince” my new French friend really didn’t get, and I couldn’t explain in her language. But our dogs spoke the same language, so everything was fine. We would stand around and watch as the dogs frolicked. The nipped and bowed and barked, and threw their bodies against one another and clacked teeth, and then they’d chase one another—in joyous circles--around the giant wooden statue of Jesus on the Cross, in whose honor this park was named. France is a Catholic country, and Jesus faced the Chateau, because that way, it was said, the king could behold Him every morning, and remember to rule his people with an open heart.

So this is how I started my day: with kings and princes, dogs, a blue sky, and a new French friend.

After our walk we’d head down into the village for breakfast, making several stops along the way. First, we would pass an alleyway near the town chapel, where a one-eyed cat often lurked, and where Chloe went into fourth gear, pacing and panting and maniacally sniffing at all the cracks in the walls. She seemed certain that the cat would someday come out and surrender itself, and the way she wagged her tail suggested that she would never give up hope.

Next, we stopped at the Roman fountain at the center of the square so that Chloe could have a drink—an ancient, noble fountain into which the dog would climb, much to the delight of the men who gathered there in the mornings to play boules. In New York, they would have taken me and the dog off in handcuffs if she waded in a public fountain. And yet here, in France, my dog could refresh herself in full view of the gendarmerie—impeccably dressed policemen, in crisp, tailored uniforms, who laughed and smoked and asked Chloe if she had enjoyed le bain after she had come up to them and shook herself off. I don’t know why dogs always wait to shake themselves off until they are within two feet of humans, but the French didn’t care. Maybe they thought being showered in dog-water was good luck, just as they thought that stepping in dog-shit with your left foot was good luck. In any case, they seemed to know that a dog shaking water off itself was as natural as water itself. Dogs remind us that life really is about the simple things, such as taking refreshment in cool water and then shimmying it off.

Next, we walked down Rue du Marie—a cobblestoned street lined with bougainvillea and potted ferns. Every day, without fail, we would pass two fat Labs lying underneath a cool stone archway, munching on yesterday’s stale baguettes. Chloe always hoped that the Labs might share their baguettes, but when she approached they’d growl at her, protective of their crunchy crusts. The owner would stick his head out the door and apologize about his chiens mechant. But Chloe never gave up hope that the someday the labs would share their bread.

Next we’d pass under a stone arch, which led us onto another narrow cobble-stoned street that wound its way leisurely into the heart of the village. We’d pass two art galleries, a touristy shop where they sold soaps and pottery, but at that hour they were closed, and soaps hold no interest to a dog anyway. She had her nose trained on the boulangerie mid-way down the street. I made her wait outside while I bought my daily bread and she barked impatiently, knowing that if she kept on barking she would eventually get her fair share of the baguette, which was the butt end of it, the pointy, crunchy part the French call the col. And all the other villagers waiting in line would laugh of course, for what is more charming than a dog crunching on a col on a sunny summer morning under the blue Mediterranean sky?

Next Chloe would rush toward the boucherie. There, she would press her nose against the window, and wag her whole body with joy, until the butcher’s daughter came and out with a gigantic marrow bone—like, an entire shin. Now, a dog with a marrow bone has a certain look: eyes bright, tail bobbing, a brisk pace, eager to find a shady place to lie down and enjoy the treat.

And that place, for Chloe, was always the cafe. It was the sort of cafe you’d expect in a tiny French village: open aired, with wicker chairs all facing in the same direction: toward the street.

One thing I did not know is that, in France, it is uncommon for a woman to sit in a cafe alone. Often, waiters will hesitate to serve you, because they assume you are waiting for your husband. I did not know this custom, so for the first few days, I would sit there, flabbergasted, trying to get the waiter’s attention. Next to my table was a small Roman fountain, adorned with the stone face of a stone-eyed man who, I swear, looked just like my ex-husband. If he were here, I told myself, I would get served. But then again, if he were here, he’d be reminding me how much this vacation cost, and telling me to stop being a writer and get a real job.

Meanwhile, there was Chloe lying on the cobblestones beneath me, and the only thing that existed for her was that bone. Sometimes it felt to me that this dog and I hadn’t bonded yet. Maybe it was her independent Border-Collie thing. Or maybe it was me. Maybe I could never love another dog the way I had loved Wallace. And maybe poor Chloe knew this, and therefore contented herself with sleep and food.

After a few days the waiter figured out I was alone. Not alone in the existential sense, but that I was the American-woman-who-had-come-to-live-in-the-village-to-write-a-book. Cheerfully, he brought me my coffee and my croissant, and ask me all about New York, which he someday hoped to visit, and Chloe would lie at my feet, even though the chef at the cafe kept inviting her into the back kitchen, to sample the his boeuf de moutard and coq au vin. No, she had her bone, so she was content—as content as a child with ice-cream. I liked to think she was content to be near me.

We’d spend three hours at this cafe, me with my laptop, Chloe with that everlasting bone. In France, no one brings a laptop to a cafe—why would someone work during breakfast, or lunch, or at all?—so I knew of course I was exposing myself as an American. Indeed, French tourists often stopped and stared. But then Chloe would crawl out from beneath the table and begin to tool around the restaurant, looking for scraps. The gawkers smiled. Her behavior was so acceptable and natural that mine had to be, too.

So instead of becoming the subject of ridicule among the local folk—the laptop Americaine—I became a source of benign amusement. The waiter explained to the chef that I was working on a novel. The chef explained to the florist that I was recently divorced. The florist explained to the mayor’s wife that I was renting a small house near the Chapelle des Penitents, and that I liked to visit the Chapelle in the evenings, even though I was technically Buddhist. The mayor’s wife told my 80-year old neighbor that I meditate in that Chapelle, and my neighbor told me conspiratorially that she liked to meditate, too.

We shared a courtyard, Evelyne and I, and she was a painter, and drove a flaming orange Peugeot. She wore beautiful floral dresses, in feminine colors such as lavender and pink, and always tsked-tsked at me when I showed up in my Janis Joplin t-shirt and cut off denim shorts. “You must use your feminine powers,” she always told me. I have a tattoo on my right thigh of an Apache thunderbird, which is supposed to give me power in war. Did that count as a feminine power?

Evelyne lived alone. And yet her life was full and varied. She drove with the convertible top down. Chloe adored her, and the feeling was mutual, as Evelyne left her doors open all day, so that Chloe could tool around her house in search of the cat that had died years ago. Through Evelyne, I learned all sorts of cutie dog words. A do-do was a dog toy. A chou-chou was a pretty dog. When Chloe writhed around in the courtyard waiting for her belly-scratch, Evelyne would tell her she was the prettiest dog in the world, the sweetest, the most adorable. She told me I was lucky to have a friend like this.

Sometimes I worried that I was becoming a stereotype: the loner divorcee who adopts a dog in order to fill some emptiness, and who starts attributing to the dog all sorts of human emotions and powers. Soon I would be the middle aged woman who lets herself go; who stops dressing in a way that might attract a member of the opposite sex.

Yet, standing there in the courtyard with vibrant Evelyne and my silly, happy dog, I would feel connected to the universe in a way that is hard to explain.

Still, nights can be lonely in France. Perhaps it is simply because nighttime is an ending, and to spend a night alone is to remember all your partings and endings, all your shortcomings and failures. Each evening, at around ten o’clock, I would take Chloe out for our final walk through the village. We’d walk past the restaurants with their glowing white tablecloths and flickering lights: tables full of couples and families, talking, laughing, sipping wine. The women all wore frilly blouses. Then men all stared at them, rapt. Their wine glasses caught the light of the candle flames, and the air would be filled with the sounds of tinkling silverware and hushed, smooth conversation. These sounds echoed off the stone walls, filling the very night with a theme of some sort—a theme of togetherness, I guess, of completing another day. I felt like a ghost.

But Chloe broke this spell. Each time she trotted past the restaurants holding her latest do-do (a stuffed Santa Claus Evelyne had given her) all conversations would stop. We would be met with smiles and laughter. A waiter would call her over for a bit of steak frites. And people would speak to me in French about the dog, and comment on how pleased she seemed to be with herself, and what a lovely night it was, and ask: You are the American writer, yes?

“Yes, and I didn’t vote for Bush,” I’d say with a smile. “And neither did my dog.”

“Ah, bon, bon,” they would say, and wish me a good night. A bonsoir.

And so, with this blessing, we would walk on. We’d pass the Chapelle des Penitents and then the château, lit theatrically with giant spotlights. We’d pass a villa within which someone was always playing the piano, and then a long wall covered with brilliant pink flowers that only bloomed at night. Their scent was intoxicating, and as thick as a shield. Finally we’d pass three elderly women were always sitting on chairs outside their building, and they, of all the villagers, loved Chloe best. They were gentle, dignified Frenchwomen, who were now too old to stand, but not so old as to forego wearing frilly dresses and heels. They had the formal accents of Parisians, but all formality melted when Chloe covered all these women with kisses. Chloe would leap up onto their frail laps and muddy their dresses, and they’d laugh and playfully try to steal her Santa Claus, saying, ca n’est pas Noel.

To me they were polite and kind. They asked me where I was born, and how I liked the weather, and I would answer in my crisp French, all the while feeling an inexplicably yearning to crawl onto their laps. I yearned to tell them the larger stories—this loneliness, my divorce. I wanted to them how my dog had been hit by a car the day after I moved out on my husband, and how I wondered if he, the dog, had committed suicide, because he couldn’t bear to see us all live apart. I don’t know what it was about these women—I just wanted them to know. And yet I suppose they knew anyway. You can always see a story in a person’s eyes.

One night, as Chloe and I passed, the ladies invited me to join them. Touched, I sat, and Chloe settled in at my feet. For a moment, none of us spoke. We listened to the laughter. We smelled those flowers and felt that breeze. Above us the chateau loomed—a castle that had not crumbled in nine hundred years. Suddenly I realized we were all in this world together. We were all the same. Everyone just wants to be happy, as the Dalai Lama says. French, American, dogs, humans: all just want to be loved. I placed my hand on Chloe’s flank, and I could feel her little warm heart pounding through her ribs. She pressed her body into my leg and looked into my eyes. Don’t be sad, she seemed to be saying. The world is large and we are here. We are, we are, we are.

My Interview on Animal Talk Radio this week

2009-02-19T14:39:00.000-08:00

Blog for the week:
I did a fun radio interview yesterday on Animal Talk Naturally – one of the best radio programs out there concerning how to best care for our beloved pets.
Hosts Dr. Kim Bloomer and Dr. Jeannie Thomason have been so very suppotive of Bark magazine, and of me personally (sniff!). They promote my writing, my book Rex and the City: A Memoir of a Woman, a Man, and a Dysfunctional Dog; and most importantly we support the same message, which is that all shelter dogs deserve a good home—even the so called ‘unadoptable” ones. Love cures all.

In this program, Kim, Jeannie and I talked about how to successfully treat your dog holistically for Lyme's disease—using teasel flower essences and homeopathy. And how to avoid expensive, unnecessary visits to your Western veterinary practitioner. I am no expert on the subject by any means—but ATN wanted to interview me as sort of a ‘layperson’ – not a professional. Listeners are more apt to trust someone with ‘real life experience.’

It is our hope that pet owners nationwide—and throughout the world—will recognize how UNNECESSARY it is to treat out pets exclusively with Western medicines: antibiotics, vaccinations, and the like. There are natural alternatives, and people in this country need to realize we don’t need to be slaves to the pharmaceutical industries.
My dog was not only cured of Lyme’s Disease using flower essences and homeopathy; she is now naturally immunized against further infection.

Here’s a link to the interview here:
Radio Show: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/animaltalknaturally

Here, also, are links to Green Hope Flower Essences (for information on teasel flower)
www.greenhopessences.com
and to the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association
www.ahvma.org
and to a cool new vet in Charleston, SC:
www.sundogcatmoon.com

The Last Rex Column

2009-02-12T14:57:00.000-08:00

This is a cross-post from my final Rex and the City installment, which appears in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Bark magazine:

Farewell, Fine Friend

For the past few years, readers have been asking what has happened to my “Rex and the City” columns, and, more pointedly, asking what happened to the dog we called Rex (his real name was Wallace). Well, the truth is, he died. Almost six years ago. His death was sudden and tragic and traumatic and I cannot write about it in detail because it is too sad.
But, long story short: After five years of marriage, Ted and I finally divorced in 2002. It was the right thing to do, and we still love each other, but apparently Wallace did not think it was the right thing to do: He died the day after I moved out.

Ted and I had agreed upon joint custody of the dog, and the plan was that I would take Wallace for the first two weeks after my departure. I’ll never forget the sense of both excitement and sorrow I felt as Wallace and I drove off to my new cottage in Hyde Park. I remember looking at him in the back seat and telling him that we were starting a new life, in a new house. “You’ll love it,” I told him. “We’ll be happy together.” But that didn’t happen. My new life stopped almost as soon as it had begun. We arrived at the cottage late at night, and in the morning, he died. I hadn’t even unpacked.

I have since heard many stories about pets dying—suddenly, mysteriously, and/or unexpectedly—shortly after their humans separate. Who can explain this? Do he not want to live without us, his trinity? Did he feel his job on earth was complete? I still don’t know. All I know is that I felt that not only had I lost my dog—I’d also lost the only pure love I’d ever had in my life. Dogs are Love, period. Love on four legs. I cried every day for two years.

The sense of loss was all-consuming. The pounds fell off me, eaten away by anxiety and sorrow. Plus, what was the point of eating if there was no dog to lick my plate? For months I sank, crying during the day, and even in my sleep, for I dreamed of Wallace constantly, sometimes seeing him maimed, sometimes believing he was alive again. Then there was the guilt I felt for not protecting my dog, and the agony I felt at the fact that Ted totally blamed me. There was the anger at the man who had killed him—an anger turned into an obsession as I contacted lawyers and plotted all sorts of revenge. But none of this brought Wallace back.

Meanwhile, readers and editors kept asking when my next “Rex” column would appear. Believe me: I wanted to continue to writing about Wallace, because it would mean that, somehow, my beloved dog would live on. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be witty. I couldn’t write lite little stories about his cute doggie antics and comic dog-in-the-city episodes. Maybe next month, I kept telling my editors and myself. Maybe next month I’ll be “ready” to write about him again.

The Bark columns, to date, had covered only the first six months of Wallace’s life. I obviously had a lot to say about this dog. Sometimes one column might chronicle one short day in this dog’s rich and varied dog-life. I wrote about his first trip to Central Park; his first encounter with a man dressed like a hot-dog; his first experience being forced to dress like a drag queen for a doggie Halloween contest. I literally have hundreds of pages of notes about this dog (I’m talking more than five hundred!) and I would have been happy to write about him forever. Because I was writing about laughter and love. Anyway, that was all cut short when he died. It’s not easy to write about someone who wasn’t supposed to die. Not like that.

There was so much I hadn’t yet written about: Marrying Ted, spending five years arguing with Ted; watching the dog get sick every time I tried to leave; and then, finally. Then the accident; calling Ted; Ted arriving at the scene, sobbing; Ted falling to his knees before Wallace’s body, saying “My boy, my boy.” Ted refusing to allow me to touch him. Me telling Ted I was sorry. Ted saying “Get out of my face.” Ted later refusing to let me have any of Wallace’s ashes. Me eventually stealing a small portion of the ashes, which Ted still doesn’t know about ’til this day.

No, I could not write about any of this.

For time had stopped somehow. Sorrow, fear, and guilt kept me trapped. At one point I was so distraught I consulted an animal communicator. I guess I wanted someone to tell me that Wallace was okay somewhere, and that his death wasn’t my fault. She said this, and more. She said Wallace had come forth to be my helper. She said he had also come forth to learn two lessons: One was that people can be mean and the other was that people can offer unconditional love. (Boy, did he help me learn this, too). She also said—and this is what gave me the most hope—that Wallace would come back to me. As another dog.

Thus, I began my search. I began to spend hours on the Internet, trolling through dogs on Petfinder.org. I had a few set criteria. The dog had to be a rescue and he/she had to be either a French Spaniel (what I believed Wallace to be) or an English setter/Springer Mix (what Ted believed Wallace to be). But anyone who has ever but the words “spaniel” or “setter” into the search engine at Petfinder knows that hundreds of images will come up. On any given day I might see 324 cocker spaniels, 276 Springers, a handful of Brittanys, one King Charles mix and four Clumbers. “Setter” brought up hundreds of English, Irish and Gordon Setters. I wanted them all. (French Spaniels never came up because they just aren’t that common in the States.) I would search until the sun had set and the house was dark and there was nothing but me and a blue screen and 798 spaniels. I felt, in many ways, like some kind of porn addict, trying to find true connection in a lonely world. But for months no connection came, and I remained dogless. And empty. (Note that in all this time I never searched for a man!)

Rumi once wrote: “do not grieve for loss because everything you lose comes back to you in a different form.” The problem was, back then, that I wanted Wallace to come back to me in the exact same form. This can be an obstacle if you’re trying to adopt another dog. Every night I looked into the eyes of a thousand dogs and ask, “Wallace, is that you?” But I couldn’t find him, which left me bereft. Plus, how do you pick a new dog? Especially if you believe your previous dog was perfect and irreplaceable?

There were a couple of near misses: Polly, the sweet, half-blind Pit Bull mix who had been found stabbed and starving on the roof of an apartment building in Brooklyn. Arnold, the droopy-eyed Bassett I met a shelter in Hyde Park, N.Y. Café, an actual French Spaniel who had been relinquished by his guardians, a young couple who had divorced; neither wanted to keep the dog because he reminded each of the other. I never met Café—he was being fostered by a breeder in Montreal, Quebec—and yet to this day, he stays in my mind. I’m pretty certain he was meant to be my dog. And it would have been good karma to pick up a new dog right where my old one had left off. And yet I could never manage to “find the time” to drive up to Canada.
In 2003, I came very close to adopting an English Setter who looked exactly like Wallace, but my application was denied. (It took about six months to recover from that rejection.) I once even found a dog named Rex! Rex was being fostered at the very same shelter at which I had found Wallace years before. This Rex—a Great Dane puppy—had mischievous blue eyes, and I immediately wanted him. But others had already expressed an interest—a young couple from the city. I watched them as they discussed whether or not they should get this Rex. In my eyes, they were Ted and me all over again, trying to figure out whether to follow their minds or their hearts. I sent them a silent blessing and drove off.

Around that time, I was approached by an editor who wanted to publish a book version of the columns. I was thrilled! Publishing a book had long been one of my dreams. So I spent months writing an expanded version of the columns, carrying the story through my divorce and Wallace’s death. “Umm, there’s a problem,” my editor said. “We want a happy ending. We want you and Ted to be married, and we want Rex to be alive.” She asked that I end my memoir in a different place, namely, at the moment Ted and I got engaged. This felt wrong. “I wanted a happy ending, too,” I told my editor. “But it didn’t turn out that way.”

“No one wants to read a book about a dead dog,” she said. (This conversation took place two years before Marley and Me was published—the bestselling memoir about a dead dog :)

And so, because I did not trust my own instincts, and because I trusted this editor, I agreed to cut my life story in half. It took several months to write this half-memoir, and in that time I stopped searching for dogs on Petfinder. Part of the reason was that I was living in a cottage in Woodstock that had no internet service. Part of the reason was I felt icky about not being able to write the truth, which made me feel like a bad person, which made me feel I didn’t “deserve” another dog. But I think the main reason was—and it feels shameful to admit this in a dog magazine—I had started to enjoy the freedom of not having a dog.

This is what I did in my time “between dogs:” I traveled. I spent six months working as a decorative artist at a Buddhist retreat center in Colorado. I spent one summer at the Byrdcliffe artists’ colony in Woodstock, and another glorious summer at Edward Albee’s artist colony in Montauk, a hip seaside town that has no leash law. Every morning, I’d ride one of Albee’s rickety three-speed bikes down to the surfer’s beach and watch dozens of dogs frolic on the shore. (I called this “getting my dog-fix”). Back in the city, I went on countless dinner-and-movie dates with friends. In my dog days, I’d have skipped the movie because I would have felt guilty about leaving Wallace alone in the apartment for so long. But now, I was “free” to a certain extent. I never had to get up four times in the night to take my diarrhea-boy out in the middle of a snow storm in February. I never had to risk getting poop on my hands if my plastic bag happened to have a hole in it. I never had to worry about smelling like dog drool or if my dinner guests were going to find white hairs in their food. All I had to do now in life was take care of myself and I definitely had more time on my hands. I could stay out for six, eight, ten hours. But to what end? What price freedom? I still had no love, and no warm body weighing down the bed at night (note again that I am not referring to a man).

I missed having a dog most during my morning walks. Wallace had introduced me to that best of life habits, and I am happy to say that I kept it up even without a dog. But it always felt wrong. How could I walk without a dog when there were so many needy dogs out there in need of fresh air and exercise? Only a Bark reader will understand how guilty I felt at walking sans chien, and also how it was neurotic it was that my two opposing forms of guilt prevented me from getting a dog. There was the guilt about not “saving” Wallace versus the guilt against not saving a new dog. If you’re Catholic or Jewish and a dog person, perhaps you will know what I mean.

Anyway, the lesser guilt won out, and I began a new dog-search in earnest. Oddly, once I began trolling through Petfinder again, my Wallace dreams resumed, and I would wake up sobbing every morning. I saw the same gruesome images over again. The dream-me was helpless; the dream-me tried to scream, but no sound came out. Nothing but guilt, guilt, horror, horror. I finally consulted a therapist, who said I was showing classic signs of Complex PTSD. (Hey, I’m a complex person.) This therapist advised me to consciously replace the traumatic images with happier ones.

It wasn’t so hard to come up with a happy memory of my dog. There were thousands, millions. There was one for every second of every day of the six years Wallace lived at my side. Watching him eat made me happy, watching him sleep made me happy, watching him kiss Ted sent me into the higher planes of joy. I mean, come on, I managed Here is the image I chose: it was a sunny day on Cape Cod, just a few months before Wallace died. We were walking on a deserted beach—with a sky so blue and sand so white it hurt your eyes. I hadn’t officially left Ted yet, and the question of whether to leave or stay weighed heavily on my mind and heart. But Wallace seemed beyond that question. For hours, he leapt into the surf, frolicked in the waves, and barked at the inert shells of horseshoe crabs. When gulls flew overhead he’d spring into the air, trying to catch them, and when a tern came along he tried to catch that, too. The tern, unperturbed, zipped and zoomed low along the shoreline, its wings positioned like those of a fighter jet. Wallace delightedly pursued the tern at top speed. The funny thing was that, instead of flying off to safety, the tern continued to zip back and forth along the shore. It seemed to be playing a game with my dog. This went on for hours. I’ll never forget the sound of Wallace’s paws splashing in the wet sand, or the look of pure joy on his face as he chased his friend the bird. He seemed to know that I was unhappy, that I was on the verge of making a life-changing decision. Both he and the bird seemed to be telling me: joy is the means, not the end. I remember thinking on that day that Wallace had never looked so completely and jubilantly alive. I remember thinking that everything would be okay if I left Ted.

So I began to practice holding that image in my mind. Daily. Soon I began to cry less and laugh more. Soon, I was even able to say the word “dog” without sobbing. Mostly, I began to forgive myself. I began to remember that, to his dying day, Wallace knew I loved him. And I knew he loved me. No life can be more complete than that. To love and know love.

Fitzgerald once wrote: “There are many kinds of love, but never the same love twice.” He was talking about a girl, of course, but I believe the same applies to dogs. I also believe that, just as we change, our idea of the perfect dog can change too. I now know that I can never replace Wallace, but I can expand upon the lessons we had learned together.

So I am happy to report that I have found a new love: a French Spaniel mix named Chloe. She is perfect. There’s a long story behind how I found her—or rather, how she found me—but I shall save that for the future—my dog-filled future. And, even though it is hard to say goodbye to Wallace and goodbye to my column “Rex and the City,” it must be said and it must be done. For saying goodbye to one love is the only way to open up to another. So: goodbye, dear Wallace. And hello, dear Chloe. Perhaps this is the happy ending my editor wanted. It was there all along.

2009-02-10T08:02:00.001-08:00

Thanks to all the readers who have been emailing to ask where I have been and what I have been up to. Sorry to not keep in touch!

I’ve finally emerged from the Meher Center, where I spent a few weeks meditating, praying, and learning about the Avatar Meher Baba. It was Pete Townshend who first told me about Meher Baba, years ago, and I finally went to the center after Baba appeared to me in a dream this summer. I figured that was a clear sign that I had to go.

Anyway, I stayed in Pete’s famous cabin, saw beautiful sunrises every morning, and spent a lot of time walking on the beach. It was magical but also intense in a way I can’t explain. I will write about this later, when I have processed things more.

Speaking of writing, I am just about to hand in that dastardly novel, NOTHING KEEPS A FRENCHMAN FROM HIS LUNCH (and am thrilled with this fourth and final draft) and have already started work on my next book, a memoir about the year I spent living at a Buddhist retreat center. It’s very similar to Eat Pray Love, but the thing is I started this book in 2002 - six years before Liz Gilbert started writing hers. So no one can call me a copy cat. Just a woman who spends seven years revising her books. It’s rather inconvenient.

Plus, my agent said “no one would want to read a book like that.” Now everyone I know is writing memoirs about their spiritual journeys into yoga, gurus, etc.

My agent also said no one would want to read a memoir about dogs. This was a few years before Marley and Me. Another interesting topic…

But what I find uncanny is how similar my life story is to Liz’s. I too left an unhappy marriage and decided to go on a spiritual retreat on a whim. Basically, I was so unhappy with my abusive mate that I became suicidal and had to get myself out of New York City before I jumped from the window of my office at Zoetrope. So i went to the Buddhist retreat and learned about Buddhism and meditation and it saved my life. But I’ll save this all for the book. This blog is already too long as it is.
So that memoir is next on the list. And I am also getting ready to shop the Frenchman manuscript around for film rights. They say my chances are good, and I was very clever in that I wrote in parts for Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, and Ian McKellan. And no, the story is not set in Middle Earth. It’s set in the South of France.

I met Viggo years ago, fell in love, and was heartbroken when the feelings weren’t reciprocated. He did kiss my dog a few times, so right now that is my best claim to fame. Orlando loves dogs, too, so we’ll see if my dog Chloe can make out with him as well. Another notch in the collar.

On the music front, I am still working on assembling an all-female Who tribute band. Things are going slowly b/c I am not in NYC at the moment, and b/c I can’t find a female drummer who can play like Keith Moon. I have met a lot of technically skilled, ass-kicking drummers, but the band needs someone who is slightly insane. Keith always pushed his playing to the very limit of ‘out of control.” Yet he kept it in control and was a master timekeeper. We need that. If you know of anyone, please send an email.

I miss NYC so much I ache, but I love being on the beach in Charleston. I love the sunrises and the smell of salt marshes and the soft breezes and the sounds of sea birds. I am definitely an Aquarius and an Atlantean.

Although all my psychic friends in Woodstock feel I am one of the Pleiadians. I am open to anything that might explain why I am the way I am.

So that’s all for now. I return to NY in May, start teaching in June, start gigging in July. Oh, I can’t wait!

The Marrow Bone Incident

2009-01-08T10:27:00.000-08:00

For the New Year, I have resolved to get Pet Insurance for my dog Chloe, who doesn’t look like a troublemaker or act like a troublemaker, but who has—in the four short years I’ve had her—racked up several thousand dollars in veterinary bills. (Ask me about the time she ate a river rock and had to have emergency surgery).

I love this dog. But sometimes, in the dead of the night, when I am feeling financially challenged, I ask myself: can I afford her?

Of course! I’ll always find a way. I am hoping Pet Insurance will be that way. I have hoped that for years. It’s just that, for the past few years, I haven’t even been able to afford pet insurance. It’s a cat-and-mouse game for sure—try to save up enough money for pet insurance, only to blow all that saved money on lacerated paw pads. This is a long topic for another day—one that I am sure millions can relate to—but today I am writing about The Bone.

For, yesterday we had to make another trip to the vet—this time because Chloe had an inch-long marrow bone ringed around her lower jaw.

Yes, yes, it’s my fault for letting her have the bone in the first place. Yes, yes, the torn ACL is my fault, for letting her off-leash to chase rabbits. The torn toenails, chipped teeth, lacerated paw pads...all of these can be seen as my fault, because I allow my dog to run in the woods, and play, and leap over fallen logs, and plow through bramble bushes. But this too is another topic for another day. A big one. Do you let your dog off-leash so that he/she can get quality play-time, stimulation, and exercise? And put them ‘at risk’ for injury? Or do you keep your dog confined and/or leashed, and keep him/her safe but undoubtedly frustrated and bored? A big topic, right?

Getting back to the marrow bone: what dog doesn’t love a good marrow bone? Especially on a blustery Northeast Atlantic day, when the winds are gushing at 60 MPH and the rain sounds like machine-gun fire? What dog doesn’t love a bone when he/she has been condemned to strictly-limited exercise, meaning three short pee-walks per day, because of a recent rabbit-chasing incident that resulted in a torn ACL and two $250 trips to the vet? My dog Chloe, that’s who. She loves her marrow bones, and I love watching her enjoy them.

Yesterday, however, while I was in the kitchen making ginger tea, I heard a yelp, and a helpless little whine, and I rushed into the living room to see what was wrong. There, I found Chloe with the bone-ring lodged around her lower jaw. It was hard not to laugh—she had stopped whining and was looking at me with a completely perplexed look on her face, with the bone shaping her mouth into a goofy smile. And don’t be mad at me for laughing because everyone who has experienced this tells me they laugh too. And take pictures. And videos. And post them online. I did not do that. Instead, I knelt before the dog, and stroked her head, and told her I would help her get the bone off.

But the bone was wedged behind her canine teeth, and I could see no way to slip the bone back over them, and off. This is why Chloe yelped, I surmised: one hard crunch had forced the bone behind her teeth. Poor baby. As I inspected her mouth, and turned her jaw this way and that, she kept her head still and wagged her tail. She even tried to kiss me, too, but her tongue was, um, obstructed.

I’m not a mathematician. I have problems with spatial thinking, too. But still, I kept analyzing the bone, and its position, to see if there was any possible way it would slip off. To the best of my limited knowledge. It looked as though Chloe’s teeth were a quarter of an inch too long to make this possible. Plus, the bone fit perfectly around her jaw—hugging my dog’s contours as if it had been custom made. There was no way I could get the bone off without causing my dog pain. And there was no way I would do that.

Still, I spent an hour twisting and turning the bone this way and that. Every few minutes I would conclude that I needed to take her to the vet, and then I would consider the costs of such a visit (I had just paid rent, so I was a bit strapped), and then I would resolve once again to try to solve this myself, at home. I prayed to St. Francis. I went on the internet, where I found all those pictures of all those other silly dogs with bones ringed around their lower jaws. Each of these dogs, in the end, had to be taken to the vet. None of the posters offered any solutions. Just a comic description of the episode concluding with a trip to the vet, where the bones were alternately sawed, cut, or drilled off. All the dogs I read about had to be anesthetized for the process.

Now, I’m not a fan of anesthesia and I am not a fan of anesthesia bills. And this latter thought made me feel like a bad person: How could I put money before the welfare of my dog?

My family thinks I am crazy for putting my dog first. They have always questioned my decision to live as an artist, which in my case really does mean hand to mouth. And their further question why I would sacrifice my own trips to the dentist to make sure that my dog got her horribly-chipped incisor repaired. I have a few reasons, and whether they are logical or not is really not important.

Guilt is one reason. And love is the other. I feel as if my dog and I have a contract. When I adopted her, and rescued her from a life of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. I made a vow. I mean I made a verbal vow, like an oath from the days of old. I vowed to always to take care of her. To keep her safe and warm and healthy and fed and—if I could manage it—happy. You may call me a crazy dog lady if you wish. I certainly fit the stereotype: I live alone, I’ve sworn off men (one abusive marriage was enough), I’m childless, and therefore I treat my dog like a child-substitute. By this I mean I nurture her and worry about her. Chloe is the only being on this planet that I am ‘responsible’ for. I need to learn how to nurture in this lifetime. I need to know that I can take care of another being.

So.Back and forth it went. I spent another twenty minutes of trying to calculate—geometrically—if/how I could wedge bone off my now-patiently-drooling dog. I tried to lubricate the bone with extra-virgin olive oil. Nope. Arnica gel. Nope. It wouldn’t budge. I looked at my checkbook, to see if I could afford another trip to the vet. Nope. Back to the olive oil. Nope. It finally got the point where poor Chloe had had enough, and she crawled off into the closet to avoid me, with her tail between her legs. At that point I had a small meltdown (How had my life come to this? Why am I so pathetic?) and then called the vet.

[I just wouldn’t eat for the rest of the week, I reasoned. Or go to the homeopath. Or get my hair cut, as I had planned to do as a treat for myself on my birthday. Chloe was worth it.]

Now, I am in South Carolina for the winter, and can tell all sorts of stories about how the vets and the dog people ‘down here’ differ from the ones ‘up there’ where I am from. But that would make me sound like a New York City snob, which I guess I am. It’s in the blood.....

Let’s just say that when I called the nearest veterinary practice, and told them that my dog had a marrow bone ringed around her lower jaw, and that I needed to find someone who could cut the bone off, the receptionist said, “You mean you want us to cut off your dog’s jaw? Hold on while I ask the vet if he can do that.”

I didn’t hold.

The next vet I called was able to comprehend that I needed to have a marrow bone removed from my dog’s jaw; not the jaw itself, so we made an appointment and I was there within an hour. The first thing I heard as I entered the waiting room was the terrible, piercing howl of a dog in pain, but let us not talk about that, or about the fact that the dog’s owner was currently in jail, or that the poor man taking car of the dog in the interim could not afford to get the dog’s nails clipped, which was why the dog was now suffering from embedded toenails....no, this is yet another story for another day.

Now, this was one of those veterinary practices that filled its waiting room with advertisements for pharmaceutical products. There were pamphlets for anti-anxiety pills, anti-depressants, anti-shedding, and anti-bark sprays on every table and windowsill. There was a slick mobile hanging overhead, dangling cardboard images of large fleas and ticks, which were interspersed with packets of toxic flea and tick preventatives. There was even a TV mounted in the corner, showing, again and again, some kind of pumping animal organ—I don’t know what—crawling with worms. The screen intermittently flashed to an image of and the pill that was going to prevent this. Next to a long row of bagged dog kibble was a poster advertising the latest anti-itch pill. That to me was a great irony, because in my mind, it’s the crapola commercial dog food that causes the skin allergies in the first place.

Places like this, I am told, tend to try to jack up your vet bill with pharmaceuticals, so I prepared myself.

Plus, I now considered myself an expert on marrow-bone removal, given that I had spent 40 minutes on the internet reading about it. I told them that I needed to have the bone sawed off, that I refused to have my dog anesthetized, and that I wanted to be in the room while he did it. He resisted, saying that he wanted to take the dog into a back room so that he could shoot her up with pain killer, but I insisted. I am a New Yorker after all, and we must uphold our reputation of being pushy, obnoxious Yankees. Plus, I am a crazy dog lady. Why not let it all hang out?

“I want to be with her,” I said. “I am going to apply acupressure to one of her calming points so that she’ll stay still.”

“Acu-what?” the vet said.

“Acupressure.” (Inside I was thinking: why the hell did I leave New York?)

Confused, he and the vet tech stepped out of the room to discuss my proposal. In the meantime, I started to think about this pain-killer thing. Chloe would not need a pain-killer—I knew this instinctively. Not unless they planned to saw her jaw. But what about that poor tortured dog I’d heard howling when I first walked in? Different story.....she’d had an impacted toenail. But, I asked myself, do people get pain-killers for clipping off stuck wedding rings? No! What else might these vets try to sell me?

When the vet returned, I told them I needed to see an estimate before they did anything. Sure enough, there was an extra $150 worth of painkillers, penicillins, antibiotics, and some other pills I’ve never even heard of but I knew were not necessary. I pared the bill down to two things: Office Visit; Removal of Foreign Object. I felt proud. I also vowed this year to stand up for myself.

“Ready?” the vet said.

Ready. I had already dosed Chloe with Rescue Remedy, and had been acupressuring her Governing Vessel for the past half hour. So she was ready, too. Patient, trusting, and mellow as you please.

I had expected the vet to come equipped with saws, drills, rubber gloves, and a headlamp, the way a dental surgeon might. Instead, he came forth with a pair of wire cutters, such as you might get at Home Depot. He sank to his news in front of the dog, who rested calmly on the floor. I thought about that howling dog-in-pain again, but put it out of my mind. St. Francis was on our side. I held the dog, pressed her calming points, and was about to whisper “it will be all right” when—clip! The vet clipped, the bone snapped, and it was all over. Chloe did not even yelp.

“That was brilliant!” I said, truly impressed. “What kind of tool did you use?”

“Just your basic pliers,” he said.

As I said, I am single, and I live in New York, which means I do not own a wrench. Or a screwdriver, or a hammer. But I do have an entire storage bin full of ‘dog supplies.’ So I will add a pair of marrow-bone-clippers to this collection. I can’t tell you how excited I was about that tool. I finally understand why men get so excited about such things.

Anyway, I now have a few new resolutions as a result of the bone incident:
- Get veterinary insurance
- Get people insurance
- Take care of self (You never know when the world will need you), take care of others
- Write more articles; thereby making more money.
- Finish novel, thereby pulling in the 5-figures owed to me by my publisher upon submission.
- Use surplus writing money to have Chloe’s teeth checked out, and perhaps surgery for torn ACL
- Get wire cutters ($7.99)
- And make sure that all the bones I give Chloe from this day forth will not fit over her jawbone.
- Pray that all sentient beings everywhere have happiness and are free from suffering.

On Music, Vibrations, and Meher Baba

2008-12-09T11:11:00.000-08:00

I just posted this stream-of-consciousness on my Who Forum site, and I thought I would plunk it down here, too.
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I have inspired to start this thread by reading and responding to so many other threads in this vast, rich forum. For some reason, in the past few days, the same topic started to come up in various threads, which is the topic of music and vibration. (Obviously Pete has been talking about this for YEARS--it almost seems to be his main reason for being on this planet at this time, to teach us about vibration.)

Also, it’s quite possible that these subjects have been discussed before. I am fairly new to www.thewho.com and was not even aware of the Lifehouse Method at the time it was taking place. (I was sequestered off at a Buddhist retreat center at the time). Anyway, if this a repeat topic, I apologize. But I imagine that the new Wholigans might appreciate is, as well as the old!

Like most of us, I have been a Who fan for more than one decade. Their music has brought me great comfort, joy, solace, and great, grand feelings of connectedness and vitality—especially when I was young.

I wrote this in another thread but, I was an incredibly lonely, isolated and morose adolescent. (Weren’t we all?) At times the only thing that brought me out of this state was music—especially the music of the Who. Something about Pete’s dead-on, yearning lyrics and Roger’s brutal and honest voice helped me. I felt as if I understood them, and I felt that they understood me. You all know what I mean.

But looking back, I realize something much deeper was taking place. In a word: vibration. By listening to the Who’s music, and loving it, and taking from it, and giving back, I was taking part in a vibration--the very vibration of the band. Pete’s keen intelligence and his despair at being Separated; Roger’s aggression and the tenderness he hid behind it; Keith’s majestic lunacy; John’s solid wryness. And of course their f—ing instruments. Good Lord! All that was in my adolescent room with me.

Another thread in these forums is discussing David Hawkin’s book “Power Versus Force.” This excellent book, written by a scientist, talks about how each human emotion carries with it a vibration—some are high; some are low. Negative emotions such as sorrow weaken us. Higher emotions such as acceptance strengthen us, and raise our vibrations.
(This particular thread also included discussions of Meher Baba, but more on that later). And music, quite obviously, can affect our vibrations too.

Of course, as an ignorant adolescent, I had no idea what a ‘vibration’ was. I remember once reading an article in which Pete tried to explain “Tommy” and I was like: what is he talking about? All I knew was that I loved “Tommy”—especially the triumphant See Me,Feel Me/Listening to You suite--and that I always felt better after listening to it. I felt new and cleansed and whole. Then I’d have to go downstairs for dinner with my family and feel like crap again. Anyway, in Hawkins’ terms, The Who were taking my low-caliber vibration of, say, grief (which calibrates at 75) and raising it to a level of, say, anger (150). I found Quadrophenia to be a great album to stir up some righteous anger!

I don’t want to go on too long here. But I am fascinated with the subject of vibration. It is fun to finally be able to grasp some of Pete’s concepts on both an intellectual and experiential level. (And I don’t think I could have grasped any of this without having turned to a more spiritual path when I entered my thirties.....plus, I believe that Pete is a being from what Meher Baba called the Fifth Plane of Consciousness, but that it totally another thread.). I would love to hear about others’ experiences.

For about a year now I have been a kirtan walli. That means I lead a group of people in a series of ecstatic chants, in which we repeat cosmic sounds, and the names of the divine. It’s a completely blissful experience, and much of the bliss comes from, of course, vibration, as we combine universal notes with sacred sounds. (Ask me about it.)

Recently, I also formed an all-female Who tribute band called “Pictures of Lily.” And I have to say that the experience of singing the Who songs is very similar to that of kirtan. It’s a different energy sometimes—a very male energy, I’d have to say. But it is energy and it is vibration and it swirls around and around and it is glorious.

All this has made me realize that the vibration of the Who is all of us. I’m not trying to sound grandiose here, but each time we listen to a Who song, and love it, and jive to it, we add to its vibration. I have a completely new understanding of songs like “Join Together” and “Pure and Easy.” Brilliant!

So this brings me back to my original point. Which is to open up a thread on the vibration of the Who’s music, and how this has affected your own vibrations. Are there any songs that have been particularly evocative for you? Can any of you musicians elaborate on how the vibration of a C-note differs from that of, say, an F-sharp?

SMART DOG, THE WHO, AND THE ELECTION

2008-11-04T07:20:00.001-08:00

The title of this post shall be: SMART DOG

Today is Election Day, and I happen to be in DC for the momentous occasion. I came here for another momentous occasion—to see The Who, and they were so good I cried. It is touching to see two men in their sixties—two men who admittedly used to loathe one another—communicate with such love and respect on the stage. Plus, they fucking rock.

Imagine the experience of seeing Pete Townshend, dressed casually and almost frumpily in black jeans and black t-shirt, still bending down to machine-gun the lucky fans in the front row. His “I am going to kill you with my music” stance had a certain stiffness to it, and I miss the way he used to wiggle his cute butt in his white stage pants during “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” But, man, he’s Pete. He’s a guitar god.

Because I meditate a lot, I am used to getting eighth-chakra chills in the presence of beings with high vibrations (which is the best feeling in the world for hopelessly low-vibration folks like myself), and I must say I got chills throughout much of this concert. It wasn’t just the musicians—who I could tell were channeling glory. It was the fans: old, young, in between; entirely white, mostly male. But God love the grey haired woman who came in with a walker and was later seen standing in the aisles, walkerless, and shaking her booty to “Sister Disco.” It’s things like that that give me chills and make me cry. I love being in the midst of happy people, who add to the channeling of glory.

I could go on and on about the Who, but this is supposed to be a dog blog, not a rock blog. SO the final thing I shall say is: go listen to Tea and Theater from Endless Wire. Or better, go listen to it live. Roger is a cuddle muffin and Pete is a wise old sage. The formerly bare-chested, angry spokesmen of discontent have come full circle into contentment. Bliss.

Back to the SMART DOG:
As I said, I am in DC—or rather, Bethesda, Maryland, in a neighborhood called Friendship Heights. I am staying in one of those incredibly posh, gargantuan apartment complexes as big as Rhode Island, and as exquisitely landscaped as the Mandarin Hotel in Hawaii: I’m talking trellises and topiaries and wisteria and cupolas and tennis courts and pools and exotic trees and pansies galore and bricked paths, stone paths, fountains, streams, koi ponds. Having just come from New York, I am in shock. We don’t have parquet in the East Village and we don’t have marble paths. Don't get me wrong: I love bohemia. But here it's like the Seventh Realm.

The apartment belongs to my former mother-in-law, whom I adore, and whose generosity to me knows no limits, but I must confess it feels a bit strange to be here. The ghosts of my pasts here are strong and negative. I feel myself being pulled into a stage of regret and guilt and thoughts of what might-have-been had I been stronger then, and I wish I were strong enough to resist this pull, and remain focused in the present, and try to like myself..... I should have brought sage. But my car is so jam packed I left behind my sage, candles, and incense.
Not a Bethesda thing anyway..

Anyway, the only drawback to staying in such a posh pretty place is that the whole district teaming with Republicans. As many of you know, I spent the last four years “country-ing” in Woodstock, New York, where there are like six Republicans and they never get incited to any of the cool parties so I have never actually seen one. But sometimes I see their bumper stickers on cars parked outside CVS, and see that they are quite dented up, and wonder a bit about what caused that.

Here in Friendship Heights the cars are not dented—and they seem to get washed every day. I walk past them each morning as I take my dog for her walk—past the large houses with their brick driveways and beautiful plants and trees. The dog sniffs at each house, trying to find the perfect place to poop, for these things, in the dog world, are quite serious. Her entire future and social hierarchy seem to rest upon this choice, so I respect her wishes. We dawdle. We consider this sidewalk or that. On a street called “Harmony,” we actually pass a few Obama/Biden signs, and I feel pleased. I feel harmonious. Then we come upon a Tudor mini-mansion with a McCain/Palin/Satan sign. I feel disharmony again. And the dog stops suddenly, circles around the sign a few times and deposits her waste. I pick it up of course—to not do so would be undemocratic. But it seems to me that I have received a sign. The world will change for the better. Obama is winning. Truth is winning. Compassion is winning. Dogs know this. Dogs have always known. And hey, Pete and Roger know it too. Blessings to all on this fateful day.

How Does One Become a Rock Star?

2008-09-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

How the heck does one become a rock star? Or even a musician of little fame, but perhaps some critical success? Can anyone out there tell me?
Because I am going to try. Gosh darn it yes I am.

(Today, Sunday, is a no-swear day for me, so you won’t be getting any f-words in this post.)

Here is what I have done so far to launch myself on this musical path (all of which will be elaborated upon, in my lengthy convoluted way, in upcoming blog posts):

1) Finally convincing myself, after trying for a few decades, that my parents were wrong about me, and that I am not the most annoying, shittiest singer on the planet;
which let to:
3) getting over my crippling shyness about singing with others (I joined a gospel choir in Harlem)
which led to
3) getting over my crippling shyness over singing as a back up singer (I sang with the Revelons at CBCB the week before CBs closed),
which led to
4) Attending the fab-u-licions Ladies Rock Camp In New York City (this very long essay will hopefully be appearing in Oprah Magazine soon!),
which led to
5) finally realizing my dream of singing lead in a band (the rocking, babe-o-licious Wrex Abroad),
which led to
7) dreaming of forming a real band,
which led to,
8) really really wanting to do something about forming a real band, instead of just dreaming about it (I’m forty, for f—k’s sake),
which leads us up to where I am at the present moment, wondering on Sunday in September what I do next.

I have been writing songs, believe it or not. I’ve written one a day since Ladies’ Rock Camp. Most of them are along the lines of Robert Smith—so depressing you have to lift the needle off the album after the third one, for fear that you might rush off to slit your wrists. But others aren’t bad. And for me to say that a poem of mine is ‘not bad’ is quite a leap, for no one is more critical of my work than moi. I am hands down the nastiest self-critic out there.

Anyway, I have now written three ‘concept albums!’ One of which is eight songs dedicated to my eight male muses, who were members of my all time favorite bands.
Another of which is the suicide album (a sure hit :)
And a third about karma.
Any takers? Any leavers? Any lovers of leaving?

Anyway, I must say that the songwriting process (as it were00I have no idea what I am doing) has been gloriously fun. Much more rewarding than writing memoirs or novels. Writing books has sucked all the life force out of me. Working with an editor who doesn’t really get my work has been debilitating. But still, I wrote and wrote and wrote and worked and worked and worked and struggled and struggled and cried for the past four years. Every morning I did this. From 11 – 2 (sorry, that’s ‘morning’ for me, you lovely office drones). Devotedly, even though it was killing me, I devoted the best part of my day, and the best part of me, to my books.

After Ladies Rock Camp, I changed that. I decided that maybe I’d be a less miserable human if I devoted the best part of my day to music. To something that gave me life. To something that got me excited about the future. And baby, it worked. With each song I write, I feel a sense of accomplishment that carries through the rest of the day. And sure, it might be grandiose (my songs might suck after all), but it feels good nevertheless. I have even started dreaming about my muses: Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, and even, once, Meher Baba—they come to me in my dreams and tell me I am doing the right thing.

When I was writing the first draft of my novel, I had only one visitation, from Mr. Henry Miller (who, honestly, I have never admired, as a human or a writer of prose.). I was staying at my agent’s country house at the time—the phenomenal and godly and wise Lisa Bankoff—and we had been talking about one of my subplots (a pregnancy scare), and Lisa said, most astutely, “Pregnancy is not a subplot.” And then, that night, in my dreams, Henry Miller waltzed in with his big round glasses and said, “Lost that subplot.” Just like that. Thanks Henry.

Anyway, I am way off-track. I am trying to become a rock star. If Henry Miller has any advice on that, I welcome him. Otherwise, I am reaching out to the cyber public. To the myspace friends and the facebook acquaintances and the people who accidentally came to this site because they googled “Jimmy Page.” (Sorry, guys, it’s just me, a woman who has sworn off swear words.)

Send me a manager. And I’ll send you angels on high.

.

Dreaming of Pete Townshend, Part I

2008-09-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

I suppose if I were to confess to anyone that I frequently dream of Pete Townshend, here would be the place. But don’t worry—it’s not that kind of dream. No sex, no drugs, not even rock and roll, really. He’s just a presence really—one who fills the room with peace, love, and a sense that everything is all right.

Sounds like Christ, eh? Is this what they mean when they call rock stars gods?
For years I have wondered...

After these Pete dreams—which tend to happen two or three times annually—I wake up feeling blissful. I wake up feeling loved. I wake up feeling as if some real connection has been made, and I wake up wanting to maintain that connection for the rest of my life.

But then, after a few minutes, the grim reality would set in: that I was alone, seemingly unloved, and Mr. Pete Townsend—the man with whom I felt so intimate in my dreams—had no idea who I was. And never had and never would. What a terrible feeling!

(I had similar dreams about a man named Tony Stacchi, with whom I went to high school, and upon whom I always had a secret crush. I haven’t seem him since high school But this is another story.)

Getting back to the Pete dreams: in 2004, I finally consulted a therapist. Not about my Pete dreams—believe me, those were the least of my “problems.” Those dreams were pleasant, and gentle, and if they left me momentarily mystified, well, I wasn’t going to complain. No, this therapist was helping me recover from childhood trauma. She was a saint, that woman—so compassionate and wise—and once I started to discuss my Buddhists, Pagan, Jungian, and Native American beliefs, she told me she also happened to specialize in dream therapy. “I don’t tell that to all my clients,” she said with the smile. “Not everyone is open to that.”

So I told her about Pete. I told her the love I felt from him, and with him, in my dreams. “He’s wonderful,” she said, “I love him, too.” (For a second I was jealous. Because I wanted to believe I loved his music and connected with his lyrics more than anyone else on the planet, thank you very much.)

But anyway, I told her that sometimes Pete and I sang together. Sometimes we sang his songs; mostly we sang songs that I had written, that I couldn’t remember when I woke. Sometimes he encouraged me, and told me I had a good voice. Sometimes he would hug me—not in a sexual way. More of a maternal/paternal embrace—something I have rarely experienced in this lifetime. I would close my eyes and just absorb this love.

My therapist listened with a beautiful smile. “Everything in a dream is a representation,” she said. “What do you think he represents?
Music, of course. Singing, playing guitar, writing incredible, magnificent songs. He represented self-expression, channeling anger, channeling pain. He was an artist who could transmute those negative energies of anger and sorrow into something beautiful, the way the Buddhas are said to do.

“He’s encouraging you to make music,” my therapist said.

I loved this interpretation. And it made perfect sense. All of my life I have wanted to be a musician, but my parents discouraged that from the start (another long story for another day). Basically they told me I couldn't sing for beans, and could I please turn that crap-ass music down?

Now, in my dreams, I was getting encouragement from one of the people I admire most in the world. How cool is that?

The pure, almost celestial warmth and happiness I felt in his presence was simply Music was calling me back, the way they say God calls you back, i suppose.

This goes back to the question above: Is this what people mean, then, when they call musicians “gods?” Because they have the capacity, through their words and music, to call us back to a better place? Because they make us feel less alone?

It would be fun to find the person who coined this term (God of Rock) and get his/her opinion. But I’d argue that, yes, that is the role people like Pete have served on the planet. But this is another big topic I suppose.

What I can say for certain is that, in my reality, in the Jungian context of my dreams, Pete absolutely serves as an archetype. He is Music, embodied, in a half human/half ethereal form.

Would he be flattered, or appalled, to know this? Only he can say....
(Part of me wants to believe that his appearances in my dreams are true visitations; that he has traveled astrally across oceans and continents to give me—sad, special, talented, weird me—a reassuring hug.)

Regardless of what this all means, I shall thank Pete, again and again, for this role he has played in my waking life, and in my sleeping life—the world of the subconscious, the world of gifts from beyond. It took several years, but I finally got the message:

Sing, girlfriend. Reclaim your original self. Let it be pure, and easy. Amen.

Wayne Dyer offered to endorse my book!

2007-11-21T10:06:00.001-08:00

Back in April 2007, the wonderful Dr. Wayne Dyer offered to endorse my book, Rex and the City: A Memoir of a Woman, a Man, and a Dysfunctional Dog. I'd been explaining to Dr Dyer that I wanted this book to help abused and abandoned dogs, by telling an honest story of what the experience of rescuing a dog can be like, and he, without my prompting, immediately made an offer to endorse it. What an honor, as he is a man who always keeps his promises! And he's a real animal lover, too. (He calls himself a "cockroach rescuer."). So I feel quite lucky.

Anyway, the vernerable Mr. Dyer is currently on tour promoting his own, stellar book called Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life. In this book, Dr. Dyer offers his interpretation of the Tao, and it really *will* change your life. In phenomenal ways.

Adopting a dog will change your life too, but Lao Tsu has about two thousand years on me! So I shall defer to my elders. And send out strong waves of gratitude to Dr. Dyer. If anyone hears him mentioning my book, please do let me know! Merci.

My Own Personal Book Burning

2007-11-14T11:43:00.000-08:00

REX AND THE CITY: A MEMOIR OF A WOMAN, A MAN, AND A DYSFUNCTIONAL DOG now out in paperback!

I'm not one to toot my own horn, and I consider that a big fat flaw, especially these days, when books sale based on hype more than they sell on the quality of the actual book. But whatever. I need to be more proud of my work. No more of this I'm-too-shy-I'm-not-good-enough crap. If I don't promote myself, no one will.

So here goes. Four months* ago the paperback version of my memoir, Rex and the City, came out to critical acclaim! I've gotten excellent reviews, and people are actually reading it!

*Yes, four months ago. In this day and age, in which everyone who's anyone (and even everyone who's no one) has a blog, you find that most writers let their readers know about such things in advance. But I was too depressed this summer to get very excited about such things as my very own paperback book launch. That's another story, one I won't bore you with here.

What did I do to celebrate the launch? I set a copy of the book on fire. This has nothing to do with imbalanced hormones, or pyromania; rather, I saw it as a lovely and symbolic way to "let the book go." I literally wanted to see the book transform to ash and smoke and float off into the cosmos. I felt it had a better chance of reaching readers this way.

If you are a Buddhist, or have read any of Wayne Dyer's book, or practice something called "non-attachment," then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're none of the above, well, just chalk this all off to the fact that I live in Woodstock, New York, and that we do that sort of thing all the time here. There's always something being burned in this town--and not just spleefs! I'm talking ceremonial burnings. Just last week I was invited to a bonfire hosted by a fresh divorcee, and we were encouraged to bring items to burn from relationships that "no longer served us."

Anyway, it just so happened that the day my paperback book was released - June 23, 2007 - was also the day I handed in the first draft of my novel, NOTHING KEEPS A FRENCHMAN FROM HIS LUNCH. Right now I'm wishing I had set that baby on fire as well, but that is another story, one I won't bore you with here (but rest assured that deep depresssions and writers' deadlines seem to go hand in hand).

We waited until the sun went down, which in June was after 8 pm, and then my friend Greg torched up the bonfire and my friend Lilly cracked open the bottle of Veuve Clicquot. We sat on stones surrounding a great outdoor firepit, underneath an enormous, starry, mountain sky. I made a little speech about REX AND THE CITY - how I wished it well, how I encouraged it to move on and out into the world. This book is a memoir, so it will always be part of me--a literal chronicle of my life. But still, I felt it was important to separate myself from it, to not be attached to its outcome, to not worry about who's reading it and who isn't. So I set my book into the fire. Oddly, it didn't catch right away. It just sat there, nestled in the flames, kind of like a passenger settling in before a long flight. {terrible metaphor, i know, but i am taking a medication right now that seems to produce nothing but stiff sentences and bad metaphors}

So while my book sat on its pyre but did not burn, I talked about Wallace - the dog about whom I wrote this book. I thanked him for being in my life, and for being the inspiration for this book. I thanked him for giving me so much love. I didn't go too overboard with this speech, because dear Wallace is dead, and I didn't want to make my bonfire audience too uncomfortable. They are all dog lovers, my friends, but not necessarily the types to make weepy laudatory speeches about their dead dogs four years after the fact. So I kept the real sentiments to myself.

I kept this missive to myself, also: the fact that I silently asked Wallace to watch over the book, this book that now finally had caught on fire. For some reason I felt that this transformation from book to smoke and ash would somehow make the book more accessible to Wallace--or rather, to his spirit. (Call me crazy, if you wish. I have been called better, and worse. ) Wallace had been cremated, after all, and now Rex and the City was being cremated, too. Ashes to ashes. I silently asked Wallace to help this book along on its mission, which is to spread the word about the importance of helping abandoned and abused dog.

So the book burned, and the Veuve Clicquot went down smoothly, and a young man named Clayton played the drums. You could actually hear its echo in the nearby mountains.

In the morning, I returned to the firepit to see what remained of the book and, yes, to collect some ashes to keep in an urn on my mantle. ( I find that sort of thing amusing, and it gives my family plenty to talk about, so why not?). My book, my first book, my little REX AND THE CITY had been reduced to a fine white powder, as soft as talc. The only thing that remained was about two inches of the bookcover--and it happened to be the illustration of Wallace's face. I took this as a good sign. That I was being watched over. And that a force larger than me was watching over my book. I bid it Godspeed.