It seemed like all Boo had to do to win his place in Lawrence’s heart was learn to pee and poop outside. Boo’s first winter with us in our dilapidated log house was a terrible one, with a bitter cold that only worsened his potty-training woes. Once the ice began to replace the snow, he didn’t want to be out there any more than I did, and when the flu season laid me up for a couple weeks in January, I didn’t get Boo out as often as I needed to. The other house-training issues—chewing on contraband items like shoes and the rug upstairs, or Boo’s attempt to electrocute himself with the vacuum cleaner’s cord—were all much more minor annoyances for Lawrence.
“He’s your dog,” he would remind me every time I suggested he participate in the freezing potty-training. All Boo’s humorous antics in the snow or while chasing the cats could not outweigh the potty issues, and eventually Lawrence began hinting that if the piddling, pooping puppy didn’t get it soon, he would have to go. My guarded optimism notwithstanding, Lawrence was still in full-out “I-don’t-want-Boo” mode.
I needed to move heaven and earth to get Boo trained. He had already been abandoned once, and I was not going to let that happen again. Moreover, Boo was not going to live his life as an outsider in his own family, as I had.
Underlying Lawrence’s reluctance was the fact that his medical recovery was just as stalled as Boo’s training. Lawrence simply didn’t have the energy to reach out to the little guy except in tiny gestures. Lawrence’s doctors still hadn’t found the right combination of medications to keep him stable enough to avoid multiple flare-ups, and as a result, he was weak and tired all the time. Sometimes these flare-ups were simply annoying for him, and sometimes they were downright life-threatening. One particularly harrowing afternoon at work, he noticed he was bleeding; the doctor insisted that he come in right away. The doctor’s office was over an hour away, but I was working in the city that day, so Lawrence had to drive himself. By the time he arrived, he was woozy and pale. The doctors took one look at him, realized he’d lost a dangerous amount of blood and admitted him to the hospital immediately, where he stayed for three days.
The ongoing question of when he would be sick enough to end up in the hospital again made it hard for Lawrence to focus on the little peeing and pooping machine and brought emotional consequences as well. Lawrence became distrustful of intimacy of any kind, emotional or physical, especially when it came to the little puppy, Boo. Having come so close to death and constantly fearing he might face it again at any time, Lawrence developed a powerful fear of losing loved ones, and his response was to distance himself as much as possible from everyone and everything. I felt the sting of this, but Boo the puddle-prone puppy got the brunt of it. From Lawrence’s point of view, Boo simply refused to learn his lessons.
Boo, however, kept trying as hard as he could to display his affection for Lawrence. Each evening when Lawrence came home from work, Boo bounded up to him with his happy open mouth, ears flopping and stubby tail wagging in a circle at lightning speed. No matter how clearly Boo’s body language said, “I love you,” though, he also usually managed to piddle on Lawrence while he was saying it. Any magic that Boo’s happy greeting could have conjured to win over Lawrence was literally pissed away. Tired of being peed on every evening when he came home, and nightly cleaning up of various other “mistakes,” Lawrence eventually stopped hinting and began overtly suggesting that we give Boo away.
It became a familiar scene in our home in those months. Lawrence usually began, “Damnit, these are my work pants,” then continued, “He can’t control himself. Hell, he doesn’t even know where the doors are. He just wanders around the house.”
Seeing Lawrence upset and angry, Boo usually slunk away and disappeared into the background to hide until things quieted down.
Lawrence continued the tirade: “Other people wouldn’t put up with this, and he’d have been dropped off at a shelter by now. I don’t see why we have to put up with it.”
I tried to explain by saying, “He’s still learning. Every dog learns at their own pace, and we have to support him.”
Yet, my reasoning did nothing to help Lawrence muster the strength, interest or patience to assist Boo with his potty-training. Every night ended with Lawrence saying, “This has to stop soon, or we have to find him another house.”
I was in tears much of the time, blaming myself for bringing this confused little puppy into a home where he was not fully wanted, where I struggled to get him to learn faster. It broke my heart to think of losing Boo, and I was starting to resent Lawrence for not wanting him.
I couldn’t make Lawrence love Boo. Only Boo could make Lawrence love Boo. But to get Boo to the place where he could do that, he needed confidence and to learn how to live in a world outlined by the social mores of humans. It had taken me years to develop confidence and a rudimentary understanding of life skills. Boo didn’t have years.
When I left home at seventeen to start college at Western Illinois University, it was the only choice I could make. At the time, I was engaged to a junior there who insisted I go to the same school, so I went to the same school. Mom, in an amazing moment of clarity, even altruism, immediately signed me up for a study-abroad program for my second semester (to get me away from my fiancé). It worked, and the transatlantic breakup left me free to follow another man to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I had been in the pre-law track at Western, probably subconsciously hoping to right wrongs by using the legal system to “fix things” (I still thought justice worked like it did in Frank Capra movies), but the pre-law track at UIUC was much tougher than at Western, and the reading was killing me. After several unsuccessful attempts to get help, I was sent to a specialist.
Following days of testing, Dr. Maglione explained that the reason I had difficulty reading was because I was dyslexic. At nineteen years old, I had never heard this term before. He said I was actually pretty smart (I scored well on the IQ test), but the dyslexia would always get in my way. He suggested I would probably be good at design, art or even creative writing with one of the newfangled computer programs that helped with spelling. Dr. Maglione also explained that I would never be a good reader—my shopping lists attest to that (“lettus, brocolie,” etc.)—but little by little, over the years, my reading has gotten a little better. Not too different from Atticus, who learned his “down” command at age nine. You can teach an old dog new tricks; they won’t be perfect, but they’ll still enrich the dog’s life.
A final piece of irony was that Dr. Maglione and my father were in graduate school together (“You look just like your mother” was the first thing he said to me when I walked into his office). I suspect the doctor did not call every testing student’s father after the test results were in and rebuke him for being an educator who let his daughter flounder for so many years without appropriate help. My mother, trying to justify this, explained to me that Dad had been worried about how it would look if the superintendent’s daughter was thought to be “retarded.” In order to keep up appearances, my parents decided not to tell anyone I was dyslexic, and they hoped I would “grow out of it.”
After the testing, I left for New York City to be an artist and eventually began a career as a bohemian photomontage artist. I had a couple shows, and people seemed to like my work, but I lacked the self-assurance to hawk myself to galleries. I managed, through happenstance, to land a job as a political photographer in state politics. This gave me stability, a steady income, an expense account and the opportunity to be goosed by Hunter S. Thompson at the Democratic National Convention (my boyfriend at the time managed to parlay an autograph from Thompson as an apology). I went to fundraisers, state hearings, political functions and then home every day to my tiny closet of a studio in the East Village (long before it was trendy) that I shared with my cat, Clousseau.
Like Boo, I was trying very hard to be the best I could in my new situation. And like Boo, my ability to mess things up stayed with me no matter how hard I tried, to similar, unexpected, comical effects. I was given thirty seconds to photograph the governor of New York State with a State Senate candidate. On lookout in City Hall Park, I jumped down from the stands where I had been perched and landed directly in front of the governor. As I motioned for the candidate to join us, I saw the governor’s bodyguards reach for their weapons.
“Governor,” I said, “you remember Andy, running for the State Senate? We just need a picture of you two together.” I got no response. Moving to stand next to Andy, the governor looked like he wished his guards would just shoot me. I said, “Please…you and Andy are supposed to be friends.” There was no change in their sour demeanors. “Buddies,” I said, and at this point it looked like everyone was in agreement that someone should get shot, “I need a smile! You’re supposed to be &%^$% paisans. For the *^&%^ love of God, could somebody give me a !#$@# smile?”
After the string of expletives, the governor’s face started to crack, and he clutched Andy in a tremendous shoulder hug, just as his smile reached from ear to ear. The security men tried to hide their smirks as they holstered their guns. After the picture, the governor grabbed my hand and said, “That was great.”
I was doing the best I could, hoping that would be enough, but sometimes in the darker days of my life in the late eighties, trying to make it in New York, it felt like nothing would go right as I struggled to fit in somewhere. I managed to break an old, unhealthy habit of dating multiple guys at the same time, but I was still repeating other old dysfunctional patterns. I was desperately in love with a man named Prescott, hoping to spend the rest of my life with him. One day he would be infatuated with me and write me gooey love letters that would melt the most cynical of hearts. The next day he would remember he was ashamed of me for not being wealthy enough for his family, not Harvard educated, or not Jewish. He would tell me he couldn’t admit our relationship to his friends and would withdraw all his protestations of love. This hurtful pattern awakened deeper wounds of mine. It cut too close to the pain created by the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. It followed the same pattern of dysfunctional “love” followed by shunning, withdrawal, and feelings of shame and guilt. In my heart, it didn’t matter if my father was telling me, “Tell no one. It would hurt your mother,” or if Prescott was telling me, “I’m not ready to let you meet my friends,” or “You can’t come visit us in the country because my father doesn’t like you.” In both instances, I was being rejected by a family in which I desperately wanted to belong, and I was the one expected to carry the guilt and responsibility for Prescott’s and my father’s actions. All I could see looming was a lifetime of repeating these dysfunctional relationships, only to be shunned and rejected no matter how hard I tried to fit in and make it right.
Finally, after Prescott spent my birthday with his family but left me in the city because his father said, “I don’t want that woman in my house,” I treated myself to a nice dinner, went home, opened a bottle of wine, left a few goodbye messages with friends and turned the stove pilot light off.
My suicide attempt took a while—I suspect because I left the window open a tiny crack so the cat would be able to squeeze back in after I was gone—and thanks to two ex-boyfriends who were concerned by the messages I left them, I was whisked to the hospital just in time. I was locked in the “loony bin,” as my mother would have put it, for the New York State’s mandatory seventy-two-hour hold, but in reality, this was the beginning of the long dark trek toward sanity. No one visited except for Prescott’s sister, who was sympathetic, but it gave another reason for his parents to further reject me and think I wasn’t good enough for their son. I never told my family, as I knew this would have become another reason for them to tease and denigrate me, and firmly believing the rest of the world would be as harsh as my family, I never told most of my friends either.
After being released from the hospital I went back to my tiny apartment and my cat. Without support from friends (who thought I had just been sick for those three days) or professionals (I didn’t put too much stock in psychology at the time), I did my best to keep a positive attitude, but Prescott was still there, and my family was still looming. At least I realized suicide was not the answer and struggled to find another external solution. Traveling to London had gotten me out of a bad high school engagement, so perhaps traveling farther—halfway around the world—would break me of this horrible cycle of wanting to be accepted by people who never would.
I went to India to see an old college friend, but on a side trip to Kathmandu, I wound up lying passed out in my own vomit, half concussed from the blow to my head that happened on the “way down.” Crawling through the multiple puddles of vomit to the phone, I called for help. I had no idea how I’d gotten to the floor, what had made me sick or how sick I actually was. When the concierge arrived, he tucked me into bed, called a doctor and sat staring at me with a look that crossed the language barrier and clearly said, “Please don’t die on my shift.”
I managed to literally get the very last seat on a plane out of New Delhi before the new year and made it back to New York for Christmas Eve. Prescott swore he would meet me at the airport, but he never showed.
All I could think to do was go back to my family and, hoping for a miracle, try again. Still sick from Kathmandu, I booked a flight to Chicago on Christmas Day. When I called from the airport, Dad said, “Who the hell do you think is going to come pick you up on Christmas Day?”
It turned out to be just like other typical family Christmases. Dad and I had not been speaking for almost five years at that point, save for a few grunts of hello. When I asked my sister and brother-in-law if they wanted to get together while I was home, they told me they were too busy. On the bright side, Chuck was still in graduate school, so he would often be home for the same few days I was, and we would have our usual holiday movie festivals and do some tree trimming.
The second day into that visit, I had a 104-degree temperature and couldn’t move. The doctor diagnosed Campylobacter jejuni (a bacterial infection much like cholera), so at least we knew what made me so sick in Kathmandu. They gave me massive amounts of antibiotics, and I retreated back to New York City.
Life gives us recurring messages until we learn whatever it is we are supposed to learn—not unlike poor dog trainers who repeat their commands over and over again until the dog simply guesses or gets lucky. I could not even begin to guess what I was supposed to learn from the repeated messages of being continually unwanted—by my family and by Prescott’s. I was like the dog struggling to understand: Should I put my butt on the floor to make the choking stop? Should I lay down to make the choking stop? Should I bark, jump up, roll over—what, what will make the choking stop?
I finally gave up on Prescott, although it took another year and a half until I finally gave him an ultimatum: commit or get out. He got out, and within the space of about six months in the late 1980s, I quit the Senate, started dating other men and began waiting tables at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. It was the perfect place for me to be surrounded by the old familiar dysfunction of drinking and drunkenness. A beautiful, dark, old wooden bar from the forties, it boasted a heritage of serving until drunk and passed out, a number of the members of the New York school of abstract expressionism: Jackson Pollack, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline and a few others.
I was back to being a bohemian artist on the Lower East Side. I worked on my photomontages daily before going to wait tables at night; I amassed almost three dozen pieces during that time. After the suicide attempt, I was ordered to undergo therapy, but I didn’t stay with it for long because of an ingrained family belief that therapy was for crazy people. The real reason I left therapy, I’m sure, was that the memories were just too painful. My photomontages were filled with images of confinement, dark shadows, women being used and abused, all cut by light streaking across other images like a knife. The art had become my therapy.
Clearly it wasn’t enough. It was almost three years after the suicide attempt before I was back into my old patterns, spiraling from one boyfriend to another. Three more relationships, a brief, badly broken engagement, and I found myself in another dark place that was too close to the edge. I stopped drinking alcohol after my suicide attempt, but even without drinking, I was near the precipice again.
I called an ex-boyfriend who was still close to me. When he understood how bad things were, he got worried and came by with a tarot deck to distract me. He opened up a door for me that night for which I will forever be grateful. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but I remembered the one from that night. In my dream I was at home in the family room with Gramma J, who had passed away five years before. The room was bright, brighter than it had ever been. She was making her usual Sanka in her favorite, old, stained cup and was exactly as I always remembered her: glowing, smooth, porcelain cheeks with shocking white hair and a mischievous smile. Stirring her Sanka, she said to me, “It’ll be okay.”
It had been three years since the last time I thought I needed to go home. When I woke up, I had an overwhelming urge to go home again.
This time, not only did Mom and Dad pick me up at the airport, but they also actually met me inside at baggage claim, which had always been too much of a burden for them before. It still makes me tear up to think about it—that act was so dramatically different from their usual behavior. Dad was quiet on the ride home—no insults, no interrogations, nothing. When I walked into the house from the garage, the light in the room was exactly like it was in my dream. The chills up my spine stopped me dead in my tracks. “It’s so bright,” I said.
“We just put in new fans with brighter lights a week ago,” Mom explained.
For the first and only time in my life, I told Mom about the whirlwind of dating trouble I was having. She was practically sympathetic and obviously relayed this information to Dad. He had been in recovery for almost a year at that point, and while Mom had given up on the Al-Anon meetings, Dad was still very much working his AA program.
At one point, when all was pretty quiet in the house, Dad came to talk to me. “Lees,” he said, “I have been going to meetings. It’s helped me a lot. There are meetings for family members of alcoholics, too.”
I was waiting for the insult, the judgment, the punishment, but they didn’t come. Instead, he said, “I did some things to you that you may not remember very well. You have probably tried to hide them.”
I felt a cold shudder all through my body, wrapped my arms tightly across my chest as I started to shiver and felt myself at the edge of hyperventilating. The flash of my bedroom and the light streaming in from the hallway pulled at me as if his words opened the door to those memories. My grabbing and holding onto myself was my attempt to shut that door again, but it couldn’t be shut. “You might want to consider going to some Al-Anon meetings,” he continued. What was to be gained by going to some meetings? I wasn’t sure about any of this, but what I did know was that this was not my father of old who was talking to me. He really did seem to care. He knew better than to try to touch or hug me for the entire trip. This beginning of repentance and suggestion of where to begin to get help was the greatest gift he ever gave me.
I gave Al-Anon a try and found many people struggling with their own addictions or, like me, the fallout from the addictions of family members. Rob and I had been friendly since before I worked for the State Senate. We kept in touch as friends, and ironically he was just beginning his recovery work in AA as I started Al-Anon. Although we broke one of the Big Book rules and started dating as we both began our recoveries, we ended up supporting each other through this period that took us up to Albany for a year, then back to New York City where Rob brought Atticus into our lives. That was when I truly began to rebuild my personal foundation and learn what unconditional love was.
As the first being who accepted me unconditionally, Atticus was the universe’s way of throwing me a lifeline. He taught me how to let myself be accepted by those who would and, when not accepted, to not care. Without him, my recovery would have plateaued somewhere in the middle of a dark place. Atticus also brought me to the dogs. Without Atticus, there would have been no high point to my recovery, no Dante, and no Boo.
It was easy to see from my own past how Lawrence was just displacing his daily frustrations onto Boo. Regardless of all my efforts, I did not know how to help Lawrence be more patient with the four-and-a-half-month-old Boo. Although it isn’t unusual for a twenty-week-old dog to still be working through some potty-training issues, there are usually some indicators that the dog is beginning to get it. Boo showed no indication of getting it.
“It’s like he’s doing it out of spite,” Lawrence said once.
“Boo is not making these mistakes out of spite,” I said. “He just needs extra guidance, acceptance and patience.”
“Well, can’t we speed his learning up?”
Trying to deflect to something amusing and change the topic, I said, “If Atticus could pee in front of Ramsey Clark, then what are some piddles around the house while Boo is learning?”
But nothing lightened the mood in the house, and Lawrence just said, “Boo ain’t no Atticus.”
I cried repeatedly into Boo’s soft, thick fur, hoping I could make him wanted in his own home. Lawrence loved Atticus and Dante with all his heart, but poor little Boo just couldn’t seem to do anything right. That struck me deep to the core. Boo had to be house-trained so Lawrence could focus on what was really frustrating him: his own medical condition.
I knew all too well the toll that medical conditions could take. I knew Lawrence was in pain, frustrated, angry and probably scared. I went through all of these years before as my joint pain had become severe enough to make sitting through a two-hour film so painful that I cried at the end of every movie I went to, even action thrillers. My social life was limited, my dog’s life was limited and it seemed like nothing would be normal again. Every night as I climbed up my loft stairs where Tara, Merlin and I would snuggle for the night, leaving Atticus staring up at me from the couch, I promised him that somehow I’d find an apartment I could afford with an elevator and room for a bed that he could share with me and the cats. I knew he had no clue what I was saying when I made him this promise, but it made me feel better because every time he would tilt his head in the same way he would when I asked if he wanted a “cookie.” He liked something about what I was saying. For years, my existence was defined by the limitations of pain and other symptoms: I had skin disorders, dry eyes, dry nasal passages and dry mouth, and my fingers turned white and numb for no good reason.
Although my diagnosis was always changing depending on the doctor I was seeing—mixed connective tissue disorder, lupus, overlap syndrome, fibromyalgia and laughably chronic double-jointedness—Lawrence had a definitive diagnosis, and while this offered a modicum of relief to know the exact problem, there was still the long struggle of developing the right treatment plan and learning to manage a chronic condition. I knew exactly how he felt, and I’m not sure I would have made it through those painful years in New York without the comfort of Atticus, Tara and Merlin. Atticus was there for me—always and without judgment. Looking back, I can see how important these animals were for maintaining my health, sanity and social skills. On so many levels, Atticus demonstrated the essential benefits of the dynamic human–animal bond. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was teaching me a powerful lesson about animal-assisted therapy.
Seeing how uncomfortable Lawrence was, I couldn’t help but think that if he would just open up to little Boo, he might start to feel better—to even heal faster. If only he would warm up to the little fellow.
Part of the reason I was so anxious for Lawrence to warm up to Boo was that of all the dogs, I was most like Boo, with our parallel lack of confidence and slow learning. As a result, I was continually turning inward to avoid judgment. It was this fear that kept me from ever going through a formal job search—I was always just in the right (or sometimes wrong) place at the right (or sometimes wrong) time. When it was time to leave Thunder’s Mouth Press, I was terrified of the prospect of job hunting, but once again luck intervened, and I managed to get a job through a friend of a friend whose friend had just bought a literary agency and needed someone to manage the office. I needed a job, and there was one looking me in the face. The agency had been through an earthquake of transition that left the office buried so deep in piles of paper that I had to work six days a week to get things organized. This was the first time since Atticus came into my life that I didn’t have him at my side throughout the day for support. Apparently I was ready to be on my own.
Busy cleaning house at the agency and setting up my new apartment (with an elevator), I had no time to think about a relationship until a year after Atticus introduced me to Lawrence. The delay worked out well for us. Lawrence was recovering from his own bad relationship and wasn’t convinced that he could risk such heartbreak again. Meanwhile, I was about as gun-shy about relationships as one could get and had finally accepted that I probably would end up being the crazy, spinsterish dog lady of 9th Street. We both had to take a leap of faith and step out of our comfort zones. We began flirting over e-mail, then we figured we’d try to have some face-to-face time. Within another year, we were married.
Our similarly twisted senses of humor and sarcasm worked to bring us together while simultaneously driving us apart. Knowing how tough it would be for us to have a reasonably normal relationship with our respective baggage, we entered couples therapy within the first year of marriage. I’m certain that’s why we’re still married, fifteen years later. When our therapist asked us to dispense with sarcasm for a month, we couldn’t find anything to say to each other for a week. We eventually succeeded, even though the next three weeks weren’t easy. We can make each other laugh, and we each understand what it is like to be afraid.
Lawrence’s biological father was brutal to him and his mother, and after his parents divorced, Lawrence lived with him, enduring the ongoing brutality for a couple more years. Lawrence rebelled and eventually was put onto a plane to Florida to live with his mother and stepfather. I believe Lawrence’s defiance saved his life because life with his mother and stepfather was a happy and supportive time that brought him no physical harm. He has always referred to his stepfather as his father and almost never mentions his biological father.
Lawrence and I are excellent examples of the fallout of punishment and abuse. He’s the dog who will fight back when being hung from a choke chain or shocked; I’m like the dog who simply shuts down and curls up, hoping to go unnoticed. We each spent time unlearning the dysfunctional ways that were taught to us as children, and we each knew all too well what harsh or inappropriate treatment can do to one’s abilities to trust and joyfully partake in life. I reminded Lawrence of this time and again when he became vexed with Boo and started to yell. We all yell at some point in our lives at loved ones, but yelling is not training. We have to listen to ourselves when we are teaching others—people or dogs—and if we are only yelling or stern, we forget our own humanity.
Lawrence and I were living on 9th Street and Broadway, the epicenter of NYU student partying on the weekends. With only Atticus, it was easy to avoid the students—out for a quick pee, and Atticus would want to get back inside. But once Dante came into our lives, the Friday and Saturday late-night walks were taken over by drunken NYU students.
“Wow, thashs a big dog,” a student would slur all over Lawrence, or “Doeshs that dog bite? Heh, heh, heh.” Each weekend evening I would wait, biting my lip, for Lawrence to return with the gory tales of the verbal thrashings he had offered the inebriated while out with the dogs, and eventually he began making noises about leaving the city.
Two episodes finally pushed us to leave my newly renovated, cozy apartment. One afternoon at the dog run, I tried to get Dante to wait calmly in the entry pen, but the best he could do in his excitement was a sort of hover-sit, where his butt hovered just over the ground like a race car revving its engines. Giving up, I opened the gate, and Dante launched into the air, flying over two people seated on a park bench.
I watched, screaming, “Noooooo!” Or maybe it was, “Look oooooout!” The two people on the bench in Dante’s low-fly zone looked up as the huge dog, with his boy bits and tail flapping in the breeze, just grazed their heads.
Laughing at that, Lawrence observed, “That dog needs more room to run.” I agreed but didn’t want to leave the city.
The straw that broke the camel’s back came one night when Dante broke out of his collar and ran loose down 9th Street—in the middle of the Holland Tunnel traffic. Lawrence scooped Atticus up midpoop and took off after Dante. Weaving through the traffic, Dante led Lawrence into the middle of 9th Street still carrying the shocked and confused white dog. A doorman from the building on the corner of 9th and University tried to clothesline Dante but ended up flat on his back. Lawrence shouted an apology as he ran by, Atticus still flying on his shoulder. Moving west across University Place, Lawrence lost sight of Dante as his tail seemed to be clipped by a bus. Lawrence finally caught up to him in front of the grocery store and was able to plant himself in Dante’s path. All three of them landed just outside the door of Gristedes—a two dog/one human pileup.
(Years later when Lawrence would be frustrated with Boo, I would remind him that Dante had some rough edges in the beginning. Lawrence would counter by saying, “Yeah, but he was house-trained in a month.”)
Lawrence pushed to leave the city, and I dug my heels in until he hit on the one point with which I could not argue: Atticus was aging. He was almost nine, and because he recovered just a few months earlier from an almost fatal illness, we were keenly aware of his mortality. The first promise I made to Atticus was to give him a home where he could go out whenever he needed to, where his outings were not at the whim of my painful knees and where he could sleep in the bed next to me. The 9th Street apartment had fulfilled that promise. The second promise I had made to him was that he would one day have a grassy area to play—9th Street couldn’t offer him that.
Online we found a rundown log house in Putnam County. It was in our price range but much farther from the city than I had hoped; we would both be commuting on the train. I absolutely hated the house; everything had a poorly stained or completely unfinished wood surface. But we ultimately had only two months to make a contract, close the deal and move, so with no other choice, we bought it.
The first time I took Atticus and Dante out for a pee at the new house, they didn’t know what to do with all that grass. When I suggested they just pee on the green stuff, they looked at me as if it were a setup—an episode of Canine Candid Camera, perhaps?
Lawrence’s concern about Atticus’s need for a country place to retire was not completely self-serving. He loved Atticus and Dante as much as I did, worried when they were sick and took them to the dog parks in spite of his distaste for interacting with that many people at one time. When we took a trip to Paris, he missed them so much that he wrote songs about them. Perhaps it was the locale that made him think back to his college days in Paris when he co-opted the tune to Edith Piaf’s “Milord” for “Who Are My Two Puppies?”:
Who are my two puppies?
That would be Attapooch,
And with his brother Dante,
They’re two big goofs.
They like to run and play.
They like to bark all day.
But when they get sleepy,
They can’t stay awake.
They like to chase the cats
To give ’em heart attacks,
But when bedtime comes,
They’re two big bed hogs…
How could the man who sang songs about his dogs through the streets of Paris not warm up to Boo? I just had to have faith.
We moved in July, and by the end of August, I found what I had spent over a year looking for in New York City. I had seen what Atticus could do for other people’s emotional states at work and for mine at home. Now I had Dante, the friendliest, goofiest dog in the world, who loved everyone he met. I knew he’d be perfect as a visiting dog, and here it was, in the PennySaver in Putnam County of all places, an ad for an animal-assisted therapy class starting in Mahopac. I signed us up immediately.
Dante was ebullient and happy but completely untrained. He sat after a couple repeated commands and walked pretty well on leash, but those skills barely cracked the surface of what he needed to go visiting. Luckily for me, Dante was a fast learner; I had to work to keep up with him. Testing day came, and in spite of all the progress we’d made, we failed miserably. I was in tears, and Dante was shaking at my side, feeding off my stress. The woman who organized the class, Diane Pennington, was just starting an organization called H.A.R.T. Programs (Human–Animal Relational Therapies). She was committed to increasing the number of visiting teams and took pity on me. She offered some suggestions, met with me once or twice, and I read everything I could find while we practiced. I offered to help Diane with the next class in exchange for her letting Dante and me participate without a fee. She agreed, and my training career was born.
Teaching an animal-assisted therapy class was an odd way to start a dog-training career. I didn’t realize it then, but animal-assisted therapy training is the college level of dog training. When the class finished, Dante and I were up for our second round of testing. We passed. The evaluator, amazed at the progress we’d made since our last test, went so far as to tell me I had a knack.
At last I had the words to describe what Atticus did for me and what I hoped Dante could do for others: animal-assisted therapeutic activities through the human–animal bond. In March of 2000, Dante and I began visiting with adults with developmental disabilities.
But a year later, in March of 2001, after Dante’s glorious triumph over the Pet Partners’ (formerly Delta Society) evaluation, I was convinced that I was the worst trainer in the world because I still couldn’t get my six-month-old puppy to stop peeing and pooping in the house. I was struggling on every level to find Boo acceptance in his own home, to find a way to help him learn and to know what Boo was here to teach me.