You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (15 page)

It was the summer before Violet started kindergarten and we were doing lots of trips instead of camp—to my parents’ home on the New York/Vermont border, Mattie’s house in Montauk, and to visit my brother Matt in Washington, D.C.

Matt and I talked about the issue of a second child. He and his wife were going through a similar struggle. They had a child and felt like they should have another, but weren’t sure it was the right thing.

“Why don’t you get a dog?” I asked Matt. My mother and I spent a fair amount of time on the phone talking about how it was possible that Matt, who had been the dog kid in our family, was the only one of us who’d grown up not to have one.

“I can’t take the responsibility,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Walking it, feeding it,” he said, as if he were saying something that was very much harder than walking and feeding.

“You have a yard!” I responded. “Just open the back door and let it out!”

“We don’t have the space!” he said.

“How come you live in an entire house with a front yard and a backyard and you don’t have space, but I live in an apartment in the city and I do have space?” I wondered aloud.

“Maybe,” he said, “if we don’t end up having another kid.” (Before he’d had his first child, he had told me if that didn’t happen, he was going to get a Ferrari.)

Paul had to work, so he stayed back in New York with Bea. We were in a nice single-dog calm. Joy was putting pressure on me to adopt a dog she was fostering. An elderly gentleman by the name of Edgar. He had a medical issue that we were waiting to hear about, but Joy thought he was another Moses. Paul and I talked about it (with about the same ease as the kid issue). He wasn’t crazy about the idea; an old dog with health problems sounded like a lot of heartbreak, but I had long wanted to take in a senior. They were the last to be adopted; not many people were looking to get a dog who was in its twilight years. And the old ones always broke my heart. Once we heard what the surgeon said about Edgar, I’d revisit the discussion with Paul.

Two nights before we were due to come back to New York from D.C., Paul called. He said that Jane, the intake coordinator, had left a voicemail and that it was important. I called in and listened to the message myself—a ten-year-old Boston was dumped in the Brooklyn Center for Animal Care and Control (which made the one in Manhattan look like Club Med) by a family who said they could no longer take care of her because of their financial situation. She said she posted on the site and was waiting to hear if anyone could foster her, but in the meantime, could I pull her as soon as possible?

I called Jane back and told her I was coming home from D.C. on Monday and asked if they could hold her until then. She felt like that would be too late and said she’d left a message for a new member in Manhattan to see if he could get her and was waiting to hear back. I told her to call me when she heard. In the meantime, I went on the site.

The post was more personal and urgent than usual
:

I called her back and said I’d come home a day early. Since I’d still be coming back to Manhattan from D.C., if the other member could get her and let me pick her up from him, that would work better. I could hold her until we found a foster home. The other member agreed.

The next day I came home, kissed Paul hello, dropped Violet off, and jumped on a subway to the West Village to meet this guy. While I waited, I realized it was the exact same block where I’d picked up “Mr. Man/Chip/Shaggy.” It must have been some major meeting of doggie gridlines.

A guy was coming down the street with a small black dog that wasn’t a Boston. I didn’t remember reading that she was a mix, but clearly this dog was. She didn’t have a flat nose or any white markings and she had a long tail. She looked sort of Chihuahua-ish. Maybe this wasn’t the dog I was meeting. When the guy got closer he said, “Julie?”

He said her name was Precious and I recoiled. The very fact that a family would dump a dog they called Precious creeped me out. Then I wondered if she was named Precious because of her resemblance to Gollum from
The Lord of the Rings
. Either way, she didn’t respond to it so I wasn’t going to use it. I took her into a cab. She was so profoundly unresponsive that I wondered if she was dying.

When I got her home, I saw that Paul had placed a dog bed in the living room so she could have her own space away from Bea. Of course Bea had to keep sitting in that bed, and anywhere Precious wanted to go Bea needed to be, really, really badly. Violet was asleep and Paul and I were looking at her. Ten was conservative; I would have put her closer to twelve. She was old, and she was a mess.

“What do you think she is?” he asked.

“Maybe Boston and Chihuahua?” I guessed. She had Boston eyes and ears but a longish nose, no white markings, and a long tail. She would not look at us.

Her muzzle was gray, and it looked like she had at least the beginnings of cataracts. There were age warts in her fur, fatty masses, bald spots along her tail and behind her ears, and her teeth were rotten. I offered her food and she ignored it. She had some water and once we moved Bea she took over the bed. With her head down, she breathed in a way that sounded like a sigh, and went to sleep.

Paul and I were sitting at our dining-room table looking over at her and discussing the highlights of the weekend. Every so often one of us would say, “Well, she’s really no trouble,” and “We could foster her for a little while.”

The next day I made an appointment with a vet to get her teeth cleaned. The report from the shelter said, “Unable to locate spay scar and
very bad teeth
.” They had let her come to rescue without spaying her because she was so old. I posted her photo on the site with a short description and got loads of responses; everybody was just so glad to hear she’d been saved.

In the morning, Violet woke up and met her and asked what her name was.

“You can name her,” I said.

“What are some flower names?” she asked.

“Well, Blossom, Iris, Daisy, Rose, Wisteria, Bluebell,” I said.

“Bluebell!” she repeated.

“That’s nice,” I said. “Or Dahlia.”

“What does a dahlia look like?” she asked. And we Googled a picture.

“Okay,” she asserted, “Dahlia.”

Paul called her Black Dahlia after the gruesomely murdered Los Angeles call girl. Apparently her teeth were nasty, too.

We took her to the vet, a new vet. I was at the point where I’d been to just about every vet on the Upper West Side and I had a reason to dislike each of them. This was one I’d gone to with Otto years before, but had stopped because every time I went back, the vet who’d seen him before was gone and replaced with a new one who’d also soon be gone. But I had taken Sherlock there for his eye and I really liked the guy who examined him.

Unfortunately, even though it was only a month later, he was gone, too. So they gave me to the newest victim: a young, enthusiastic vet named Dr. No.

I didn’t have a huge amount of faith in her, but she seemed very willing to bring other vets in to look at whatever she wasn’t sure of. That was good enough for me. I’d had a similar experience with a pediatrician. I didn’t mind a doctor who wasn’t the slickest diagnostician as long as he or she utilized other doctors who were.

We talked about the spay issue. She went with the Brooklyn shelter’s “cannot locate spay scar,” and talked to me about having her spayed. She told me that although Dahlia wouldn’t be able to get pregnant at her age, for health reasons it would be a good idea to spay her. I told her I’d talk to my rescue board about it. It was very costly and possibly dangerous. In the meantime I wanted to get her teeth cleaned. For that she needed to take a series of blood tests to make sure it was safe to put her under anesthesia. She did them and the next day called and said she forgot one and to bring her back; they wouldn’t charge me for another office visit.

I wasn’t surprised. This was what I’d come to expect from veterinarians in New York City. They all charge a fortune and appear to enjoy every opportunity to do more for more money. They surpass the human doctors I use in expense, except they don’t have the continued training that human doctors have, so they’re frequently testing unnecessarily or just wildly guessing wrong. A vet’s misdiagnosis killed one of my dogs, and though I know and love many vets who’ve saved dogs, none of them has ever saved me any money. When Beatrice needs shots, I take her to my parents’ vet in the country. Office visits in Manhattan range from $60 to $90 for just walking in the door. At my parents’ vet, an office visit is $13, and last time I went, they said Bea was so small they only charged me $7.50. Imagine that! Mind you, before I take any of my fosters to the vet, I present them with a letter from Northeast Boston Terrier Rescue that goes something like this:

I’ve brought this letter to several vets for several dogs and not a single one has actually given consideration.

For just the blood tests, the cost is close to $400 and we were not even done with those yet. One more. But no charge for the office visit because she’d forgotten it. What a sport!

I shuttled Dahlia back and forth. She remained in her dejected state. In other news, Violet’s kindergarten was about to begin and the new principal had instituted a mandatory uniform policy, even though it was a public school. Violet had to wear a light blue shirt and a navy blue jumper or long skirt. My daughter would only wear pink and purple, and this, she pointed out to me, was blue and blue. “Boys’ colors!” she complained. I was thinking of writing to the governor for a reprieve.

When Dahlia’s blood work came back, something wasn’t right. Liver functions were off, and there was some blah blah about enzymes. The vet asked for urine so she could further test. I got the urine and dropped it off, and it was still not conclusive, but she had an idea of what it could be. She told me to watch and see if Dahlia’s belly looked bloated, or if she was eating more or peeing more. I told her I’d watch and asked her what she thought it was. “Cushing’s disease,” she said. She listed the symptoms, which included the bald spots and the fatty growths, and said it was something that frequently occurred in older dogs. It seemed pretty likely. The vet just needed me to get the first urine of the day. Well, that would be tough, I said, since lately the first urine of the day was on my carpet.

“Okay,” she said, “just do the best you can.”

I looked up Cushing’s disease and found out that it has to do with the pituitary gland malfunctioning, creating an excess of blood cortisol. In effect, the dog is being poisoned with too much cortisol and cannot rely on its own feedback mechanism to regulate the blood cortisol level. The good news was that it was treatable; the bad but somehow very unsurprising news was that the medication was extremely costly. Big shockaroo.

So I had my miserable daughter who hated her uniform, as well as her new glasses and her new school, and my old foster who now most likely had a disease with a fancy name. She would sneak-pee outside, camouflaging her moves so I wouldn’t know she was peeing until after the puddle was there and my would-be sample went running down the sidewalk. Occasionally she peed in a sitting position, so as soon as she started to sit I jammed the cup under her. Nada. Sometimes I got lucky enough to get some pee on my hand.

I felt very sorry for Dahlia, but I wasn’t in love with her. But someone else in the family was. Violet would sit by Dahlia in her bed, set up tea parties for the two of them, and sing long, made-up songs about Queen Dahlia and the magical fairies of the enchanted wood. She read Dahlia books and selected videos for Dahlia to watch. Paul and I looked on, trying to figure it out. Dahlia was the least charismatic animal either of us had ever come across and yet Violet saw her as the belle of the ball.

My concern was that because of her age and her looks, no one was going to see her photo on Petfinder and say, “I want that warty, bald, cateracty, fatty-tumorous canine of indeterminate breed, pronto!” She just wasn’t a cover girl, except maybe for
Modern Maturity
’s dog edition. I put on my Francesco Scavullo hat and started snapping pictures of her. She was pretty much always in that bed, so I moved it around to get different backgrounds and improved lighting. One of her messed-up teeth sort of hung out of the side of her mouth, so I tried to get her to look the other way. After two hours and twenty pictures where she looked exactly the same with not much behind the eyes, I quit. I e-mailed the best ones and wrote what I hoped was an emotional plea to a potential adopter.