Jasper

Why the name Jasper?

Well, it sounded like a proper British name. A good one to follow our distinguished Henry.

Peter had a friend in England who used to say, “Well, would you look at the size of that Jasper!” when he saw something interesting. It made me smile.

Besides, we think “Jasper” is a fun word to say. When you’re naming a dog, you have to test it out. Imagine you’re at the dog park and you’re trying to get your dog’s attention—what name do you want to yell out loud for all the world to hear?

One of our friends learned this lesson in a cute way. After months of lobbying by their young kids to get a dog, they finally caved. That was good. But then they let the kids name him. And guess what they came up with? Cuddles. Now the dad, who had dog walking duty, couldn’t imagine being at the dog park yelling, “Cuddles! Cuddles, come back!” So he nicknamed him Mr. C—a good compromise that preserved his neighborhood street cred.

Thankfully, Jasper was a name that fit the dog (and that Peter felt was appropriately masculine enough). Or Jasper fit the name. Anyway, it worked.

When we decided to get a puppy after Henry died, we were fortunate that a Vizsla breeder we knew from the D.C. area had just had a new litter. Henry used to stay at this breeder’s farm when we had to be away. He loved it. There were no kennels, just acres of leash-free fun and sleeping on the bed, not in a crate. The breeder knew the kind of dog owners we were and said she’d choose the right puppy for us.

Jasper was born on April 9, 2012, and we had to wait until early June to pick him up. The gap between those two months was never ending to us.

Jasper was so small, I used a $20 bill to show his size. Priceless.

Our apartment was silent without Henry, and we didn’t leave for hours at a time because there was no dog to take down for a little wander. We went on a couple of long weekend vacations to try to pass the time; one to the beautiful resort at Sea Island, Georgia, where instead of relaxing on the beach or kayaking in the river, we cried our eyes out about Henry. I felt sorry for the waitstaff; we’d take pains to explain to them we weren’t crying over the filet mignon. They were kind; we left big tips.

Another weekend we went upstate to Mohonk Mountain House and instead of enjoying the hiking, we kept thinking about how much Henry would have loved it.

We weren’t completely lost, though. Because we spent a lot of our time talking about our dog-to-be. That made us happy.

As the date got closer, our excitement grew. We were like kids counting down to Christmas.

Finally, on June 5, we got to meet Jasper.

We pulled up to the breeder’s home in a farming area of Maryland, and I dashed out of the car before it could come to a full stop. I barely said hello to the homeowners and went immediately toward the puppy pen in the living room. There were four puppies left, three females and Jasper. He was the biggest male of the litter, just as I’d requested.

“And he’s the sweetest one, too,” the breeder said.

She was right.

At the farm, the day we picked up Jasper. Our first photo together.

We visited with the breeders for a while and Jasper’s female siblings had a fun time ganging up on him out on the back porch. We didn’t want to leave but we needed to get on the road back to New York City before rush-hour traffic.

I held Jasper in my arms in the passenger seat. He was a little stiff, struggling against me like a baby that pushes away a stranger. But I had a firm hold. I wasn’t going to let him go.

Since I love a fountain Diet Coke, we stopped at a drive-thru before we hit the highway.

At the window I asked the clerk, “Do you want to see my puppy?” I held him up and she gave me what I needed—confirmation that he was beautiful. (Fast-food window clerks have seen it all!)

About an hour into the journey, Jasper gave up the struggle and let me cuddle him. I kept kissing his head.

And then I noticed something strange about his left ear. I looked at his right ear and then back to the left. I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks, but no. It was definitely shorter, and it looked like it had been cut into an arc somehow, like with a pizza cutter.

“Peter, did you see this?” I asked. He hadn’t noticed—probably because I hadn’t let him hold Jasper yet.

I called the breeder and asked if something was wrong with Jasper. She said she hadn’t noticed either, and with nine puppies to look after maybe that was true. But it was really obvious that he had one ear smaller than the other.

The day we brought Jasper home. It wasn’t until we’d had him for a couple of hours that I noticed that his left ear was smaller than his right.

We never planned to show him, so that wasn’t a problem for us. It was just so strange, and I worried about how it had happened and if it had hurt. (Years later, a fan sent me a photo of Jasper at four weeks old. She had chosen one of Jasper’s littermates for her new pet. In the picture, you can clearly see his left ear is shorter than the other. That was another example of connecting to a new friend on social media.)

But as with most unique attributes, Jasper’s mismatched ear eventually became his most endearing trait. He has no idea why we call him “Li’l Ear” or laugh when his ears flop inside out and one is so much longer than the other. When we take a photograph of him from behind, I love to see his lopsided head. He’s so perfect and symmetrical in every other way that the little ear rounds him out nicely. It gives him character.

The drive took about three hours. Jasper was unimpressed with the New York City skyline, but Peter and I never tire of it.

As you can imagine, Manhattan was a shock to our farm puppy. The first thing that went by us on the street was a screaming ambulance, the second a Harley-Davidson, followed by a stream of yellow taxis with honking horns. The noise followed us up to our living room.

Happy and secure puppies love to lie on their backs. Stuffed elephants too.

Jasper was spooked and ran behind my legs. I picked him up and calmed him. He got used to the noises pretty quickly, and now he doesn’t pay any mind to the sirens on the streets (but sometimes I still cover his ears). He seems not to mind the sounds of dropped garbage cans and construction trucks at 5 a.m. I wish I had his ability to tune it out.

After introducing him to the doormen, we went up the elevator to our apartment. I set him down and showed him his first toy, a little yellow giraffe. It was so sweet.

But only for a second. Because in the next moment, he looked at me with his dark blue eyes and peed on the rug.

“No, no, no!” I cried, and tried to take him over to the puppy papers.

He ignored those and soon peed again on the rug.

This was unacceptable—even in New York City.

I realized he had no idea what potty training meant, whereas Henry had been so easy to train fourteen years ago. Henry had only a handful of accidents in the house, and that was only when he was playing so hard he lost track of himself. I tried not to compare Jasper to Henry, but it was difficult not to. I sensed a long road ahead with more than a little dread.

Peter and I had a lot of discussions about how we’d manage to train Jasper in a high-rise. Peter promised me he would never complain about having to take him down to the street level to do his business, and he never did. But it was difficult.

We had about fifty yards from our apartment to the elevator. It took a while for the elevators to come. When they did, the car usually had to stop five to seven times before it got to the lobby. Then we had to get through the lobby and out to the street, avoiding people and taxis, before the puppy could pee. Now that’s a lot to ask of anyone, let alone a two-month-old puppy. You should’ve seen how I would scramble up to the apartment some days when I’d walked home from the studio. Yikes!

We tried all sorts of things to trick Jasper into holding it until we got outside. Peter would keep his mind off it by racing him down the hallway to the elevator, stopping often to tell him to sit, because we were told he wouldn’t pee if he was sitting.

That isn’t true. Jasper would sit and then a big fountain of pee would start (and that’s impossible to stop!). We were forever in the hallway trying to clean up the stains.

Jasper got to the point that he didn’t want to go into the hall because that’s where he got in trouble for peeing on the carpet. So then he wouldn’t pee in the apartment, but he didn’t want to leave, either. So we had to coax him out. We tried everything—food, squeaky toys, pleading, tickets to the opera… Often we had to give up and just carry him because we didn’t have time for tricks and games before he’d need to go.

One of my sweetest memories was watching Jasper hold on to his dad’s neck with his two paws and rest his chin on his shoulder as he was carried into the hall and down to the lobby. (I began to think that Peter was the potty training whisperer.) It seemed like Jasper knew he wasn’t able to get it through his little puppy skull and he was embarrassed. Which made him even more endearing.

Eventually, Jasper’s bladder grew enough to hold it longer so that he didn’t need to be hauled over our shoulders. But then I kind of missed carrying him around.

Potty training from forty-six floors up was a lot to ask of any puppy. Peter ended up carrying Jasper, because Jasper was reluctant to go into the hallway where he often lost control of his bladder. If he was carried, there was no problem!

Once I was in a hurry and decided I’d just try to carry him. I looked ridiculous, like I was lugging a forty-pound sack of potatoes… but I loved holding him and knew I wouldn’t be able to do it for much longer.

As Jasper grew, he needed more room to run. He was an active puppy. I loved how he’d make figure-eight obstacle courses for himself in the apartment, zooming from one room to the next, under the coffee table and around the rocking chair, into the bedroom and back. He ruined the loops on the handwoven rug, but we didn’t mind.

We’d sit in the kitchen and watch him go back and forth, grinning with the joy of seeing a playful puppy destroy our apartment. Peter’s theory is that puppies are so cute for a reason—if they weren’t, we’d kill them out of extreme frustration.

When the apartment was too small and he needed some off-leash running space, we’d go to separate ends of our apartment floor and call to him just with hand signals so we didn’t disturb our neighbors, and Jasper would sprint from one end to the next, getting all of his energy out. (Later we found out that a Vizsla’s top speed is even faster than a Whippet’s, thirty-six to forty miles per hour, respectively. Another bragging point, yet one that’s not necessarily an advantage in a New York apartment.)

There was also a doggy day care in our building. My grandfather would never have believed such a thing existed, but I think he would have approved. Heck, he may have even wanted to work there.

The doggy day care staff saved us. They’d pick up Jasper at 11 a.m. and he’d stay for the puppy and small dog hour and then again for the big dog hour. He was dropped off around 3 p.m., exhausted from all the finger painting. I kid—the dogs just wrestled for hours.

Doggy Day Care group photo on Jasper’s last day before we moved to the Upper West Side to be nearer to Central Park.

They also helped us with his training, taking him outside to do his business and practicing the basics with him. The woman that ran the day care had such a strong voice that I told Peter, “If she told me to sit, I’d sit!”

There were other advantages for a puppy living in an apartment. Jasper loved to ride on the luggage carts, and the doormen would fetch one for him so that we could give him a little ride around the lobby. And they’d give him treats every time he came in from a wander around the block.

Jasper loved to ride on the luggage carts as a puppy.

In the mornings, Peter would walk Jasper up to Central Park for its leash-free hours, and by the time he got back, he’d been gone two and a half hours. Our lease was coming due and we realized we needed to leave our apartment with a great view so that we could be closer to the park.

When we left that building, we offered to replace the carpet in the hallway, but they turned a blind eye to it.

“You’re not the only one with a dog up there,” the manager said with a wink.

And really, if peeing on the rug is the worst thing that happens in your New York apartment building, you got off easy.