How to Train Your Dad

by Gary Paulsen

  SP and Carol spent the next two hours—two hours of my life that I will never get back—looking for other so-called bargains and chatting with other customers because they are my dad’s kindred spirits while I sat in the truck looking out the window away from the sale ignoring SP’s inappropriate behavior. I ignored my dog’s inappropriate behavior, too (Carol had her own form of shopping that most people call shoplifting).

  Using the “ignoring bad behavior/positive reinforcement” routine didn’t seem to have any appreciable effect whatsoever.

  SP had still worked the garage sale and bought something we didn’t need and Carol had stolen a stuffed bunny.

  They had ignored me ignoring them and did not stop their bad behavior in order to seek my attention.

  My first attempt at training SP was a complete and utter failure.

  STEP TWO

  “But was it really?”

  Pooder and I were sitting down by the river after my first attempt to train my dad. I was dejected. “Complete and utter failure,” I had written in my SP experiment notebook, which I was annoyed to admit fit perfectly in the front pocket of my pink bibs.

  “How do you call it a failure?”

  “He went for the garage sale anyway,” I answered. “I gave him some positive reinforcement when he seemed to be giving up on the sale. When he didn’t, I ignored the peewadden out of him and the whole business of the garage sale and he jumped out anyway and started—well, bargaining—and the procedure didn’t work at all. I even tried to distract him with a bird. Didn’t even look. Total failure.”

  “Once,” Pooder said.

  “What?”

  “You did it once, one measly time, and even then it was mainly about being negative. You think a puppy would quit peeing or pooping on the floor after you ignore him once? You need to keep trying, give it another chance.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in any of this.”

  “Well, I guess I don’t. But if you’re going to try it, really work at this experiment, then I feel you should at least give it a serious effort. Am I, for instance, going to give up on the frog-altitude experiment? No. No, I will not. No matter the cost in time and effort, I will stay with it until we break the record.”

  “I don’t think frogs like record-breaking altitude experiments. Well, at least not the first frog.” We paused to look down and cover our hearts in memory. “I bet if he, the first frog, had been asked, he would just as soon have stayed on the ground. Made it a jumping contest.”

  “Already been done,” Pooder said with heaping scorn. “The record books are full of stories about jumping frogs. Nothing about altitude. And except for that little glitch when the harness slipped it would have been perfect.”

  “He dropped and splatted all over. It was gross and really sad. Asking another frog to risk his life would be cruel.”

  “Well, that’s not the point.” Pooder changed the subject. “The point here is to alter your father’s approach—for lack of a better word—his approach to living and problem solving. And one chance encounter is not enough.”

  And, of course, he was right. As we’ve discussed, he often is right. Unfortunately, when he’s wrong it can sometimes be catastrophic—like trying to get a frog to go where no frog has gone before or getting a wooden hoe handle across his backside as a Viking in a tomato patch.

  But mistakes aside, there was something to what Pooder said.

  The problem was, summer was the season for garage sales. And while going from one garage sale to the next gave me a lot of opportunities to use the new procedure on an old behavior that I wanted to break him of, I couldn’t figure out how to factor in better positive reinforcement.

  So I dutifully continued going with him, trying to find ways to introduce positive reinforcements and hoping he’d pick up on the being ignored part. Which I was not even that good at, to be honest.

  He came loping back to the truck at the next garage sale holding an old attaché case made of scuffed plastic-leather with the name CARLYLE written on the side in gold letters.

  “For carrying your schoolwork. Look, your books and homework will fit inside of it with plenty of room for a sandwich or banana.”

  “But,” I said, unable to keep ignoring SP and despite my best intentions to deprive him of attention, “my name isn’t Carlyle.”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Your uncle Henry had a dog named Carlyle so it’s like a family name. You can use it.”

  I did manage to hold my tongue when he dropped a giant clear trash bag containing wrapped bundles of pink washcloths in the truck after the next garage-sale stop. I didn’t even ask, but that didn’t stop him from bragging, “One hundred and seventy-five of them. They make perfect little towels.” I also didn’t say a word even after I found the hygienic challenge of wiping myself dry with an eight-by-eight-inch towel after my next shower to be very involving.

  At the next garage sale, and the next, SP not only didn’t notice my silence and adjust his incorrect behavior to once again seek my attention, he seemed to thrive on being ignored. Because: one hundred and fourteen individually packaged new toothbrushes. Or, as Pooder put it, “One for each tooth for the rest of your life.” And then: thirty-two 3XL camouflage T-shirts. “You can use them for camo-tents,” Pooder said. “Sit inside hiding while eating your sandwich and banana out of your briefcase and brushing each tooth. Seriously, Carlyle, I think you’re being too picky.”

  I kept folding T-shirts while he was talking. SP had learned from a woman at a previous garage sale how to fold shirts like little burritos so they stood up neatly in the dresser drawer. It was oddly soothing.

  But something had to be done. Clearly.

  Before I started answering to Carlyle.

  Time to read the rest of the pamphlet.

  ROLLING IN THE GRASS

  Pooder says I should copy down exactly what the pamphlet says, but I’m going to keep paraphrasing what I took away from it (Pooder says that’s annotating the original text; I’m not sure that means what he thinks it means, but he’s being a lot of help here, so…).

  My next takeaway: Use distraction. According to the pamphlet, if a pup persists in incorrect behavior, it is sometimes necessary to suddenly replace said behavior by distracting the pup with something pup will enjoy doing. For example, throwing a ball or Frisbee, romping in the woods or at a dog park, rolling on his back in the grass. The pamphlet suggested I needed to get down on the ground and roll around with my puppy-in-training.

  That sounded good. So I tried. Not rolling in the grass. But I did start carrying a tennis ball in the truck and, the following weekend, when my dad pulled up at a garage sale, I jumped out and engaged him in a game of catch right there on a stranger’s front lawn.

  Or tried to engage him in a game of catch.

  “All right!” I said the first time he caught the ball, as if he’d just made a game-winning catch at the wall in center field.

  But all my positive exclamations only worked for a couple of tosses before the lure of the sale pulled his focus and he looked past me and saw a dinged-up bread machine and he was gone.

  Flat gone, before I even caught the ball he’d thrown at me.

  I didn’t think taking him to the park or rolling around on the grass (and we didn’t even have grass, it’s only mud outside the trailer) would work, and since the throwing-a-ball idea was a no go, I turned to the pamphlet again that evening.

  Then two things kicked in, which might not be fate but are so close to it I’m calling it fate anyway.

  Considering what came to pass, Pooder wants me to tell you it was Operation Outright Cowardice, but I think that’s a little strong.

  When we got home that afternoon I sat down with the pamphlet, read it again (Pooder says I need to confess that I only skimmed parts of it), and then tried to write in my experiment notebook, in my own words and in a very calculating manner focused on my own SP, rather than the generic and obviously much easier-to-train puppies the pamphlet
was talking about, what should come next.

  Carl: Try treats on SP!

  The pamphlet said if the distraction procedure didn’t work at first, you should tabulate other things you think your pup would like and substitute them when bad behavior surfaced, alternating them so they do not become boring.

  Something bad, something good, something bad …

  However, the pamphlet went on to say that if one desirable positive behavior becomes manifest (Pooder says I should write manifest here because it is a fancier word than common), it was all right to concentrate on encouraging that one behavior.

  Enter Dairy Queen, stage left, moving full speed ahead to center stage.

  But first, a pause.

  A pause for paws, and I’m sorry for the pun but Pooder says that when humor comes along like that you have to go with it. “Humor’s a lot like fate that way,” he added. “Opportunities to notice and enjoy things that are perfect are very rare and you have to pay attention and then jump on them.”

  The pause for paws has to do with Carol.

  I read in an article on dogs in some scientific book (okay, so my dad or Pooder read it and told me about it later, but I remember the facts clear enough as if I had read it myself) that the smartest dogs were border collies, that they were so smart it was sometimes difficult for people to stay ahead of them. The book described the case of a woman with a year-old border collie pup who came home after a day away to find her kitchen entirely filled with sheep. Only she did not own any sheep, and even if she did, she probably wouldn’t keep them in the kitchen. She later found out that the dog went to a nearby farm, on his own, opened the gates, “borrowed” the sheep, herded the flock back to his house, opened the door to the house, and put the sheep in the kitchen. Because he didn’t have any sheep of his own and probably thought that was sad but was smart enough to come up with a solution and steal himself a few sheep.

  Which is some crazy-smart dog, even the lady with the sheep in her kitchen admitted that much and she had to deal with all the wee and poo from the sheep on her kitchen floor.

  Good article. But then it went on to claim that pit bulls were not that bright, at least not border collie bright.

  Turns out they’re wrong. Dead wrong.

  What happened is that Carol started to smell a rodent, if not a rat like the ones that were living in the garage-sale recliner, then a pretty big mouse. About the third time I tried to keep SP away from a garage sale, I caught Carol looking intently into my right eye, the seat of human emotions, and a cheat sheet, if you will, for smart dogs trying to figure out their people.

  We were sitting in the truck making the first pass on the new sale when I noticed her staring into my eye, studying me. She knew something strange was going on, and by the time I had attempted to distract my dad from two more sales that day (Pooder says I need to tell you that it’s possible to go from sale to sale every weekend all summer long, which of course drove me right up the wall), she had pretty much figured things out.

  Not completely, but she knew, sensed, that I was trying to keep my father away from garage sales and deprive her of the opportunity to do a bit of shoplifting. And while she didn’t know exactly why, the fact that I was interfering with the whole garage-sale dynamic was enough to make her skeptical of my intentions.

  She loved hitting garage sales with SP, felt herself a true comrade in arms with him, and obviously believed they shared the pack mentality, I guess, so anything (that would be me) that got between her and her pack leader when they were hot on the trail of prey—in this case, garage-sale bargains and dog thievery—doubled her suspicion.

  And your suspicious pit bull is your alarming pit bull.

  The next time I tried to distract SP from a sale, I felt a nudge on my thigh, and I turned to face Carol.

  She was smiling at me.

  I choose to call it smiling, but the truth was she was displaying an absolutely extraordinary amount of ivory.

  It seemed like her whole head was made of teeth.

  Add to the teeth, a deeply chilling sound.

  Not a growl, exactly. More a gurgling, throaty whine, a mixture of eagerness and threat, like she would hate to have to go completely medieval on me but if it had to happen she wouldn’t altogether mind.

  The sound, combined with the display of teeth, made my spine go soft and the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I had been reaching for the door handle to get out and try to lead SP away from the sale, which I had done previously, but Carol looked at my hand, smiled, and then peered intently into my right eye while extending the claws on her paw that had been resting on my thigh until she nearly drew blood. I dropped my hand away from the handle. I swear she nodded her approval.

  In the interests of staying alive and unmaimed—I’ve seen Carol crunch a small board in two with one bite when she’s just playing—I headed back to the pamphlet for more feedback and additional training ideas.

  It was important, according to the pamphlet, that if the SP—and presumably SP’s semi-weaponized pit bull—did not respond to the distract/substitute principle, you should use a shock treatment of intense positive reinforcement to regain SP’s attention before continuing in a more subtle way. Pick something SP loved to do and try it for a relief period.

  And there were few things my father liked better than Dairy Queen, the one place guaranteed to get him to dig into his pocket without first asking if he could trade some handyman work for a couple of milkshakes and a cone for the dog. He almost enjoyed spending money at the DQ and I was all about capitalizing on what worked. If I could get him in the habit of frequently spending money on delicious soft-serve, it would be a quick leap or a slippery slope to other purchasing endeavors.

  Happily, but not surprisingly, Carol was of a like mind. Perhaps her favorite treat in the whole world—next to shredding a skunk that’s bent upon killing our wandering chickens—was taking a whole Dairy Queen cone in her mouth and then squeezing her jaws shut around it. Squeeze might not be the right word. It was more of a chomp—a gleeful two-thousand, six-hundred pounds per square inch, lightning-slam chomp—on a defenseless Dairy Queen cone, which projectile-squirted vanilla soft-serve ice cream through her lips so she could joyously, slowly, lick clean her drippy muzzle and sticky nose.

  I had discovered yet another training tool, thank you to the good folks at DQ, and I began to use it at once.

  And it worked well.

  For a time.

  Loosely following the pamphlet, I engaged in a system of alternating procedures. What seemed to work the best was two negative approaches—i.e., ignore SP after two incorrect incidents—followed by one positive approach—i.e., suggest Dairy Queen—and while I didn’t see any immediate lessening of my father’s drive to make what I thought of as mistakes, at least I was gaining some semblance of control over SP. At least that’s what I wrote in my experiment journal: Some semblance of control has been noted.

  * * *

  Saturday morning at the breakfast table I initiated one distraction technique, trying to get my father to play catch with me by telling him that I was thinking of going out for a summer league baseball team—which, believe me, was miles from my mind. He agreed and we got our mitts and went to the park where we tossed the ball for an hour or so under Carol’s watchful gaze.

  Then, when we took a break, I could see him getting that look in his eye that always meant an afternoon of garage-sale trolling.

  So I improvised and I suggested we take a trip to our town’s nature center, which my father liked almost as much as Dairy Queen. And where, coincidentally, it was impossible for him to buy or barter for anything that would embarrass me or nearly ruin my life as long as I kept him away from the gift shop or snack bar at the visitors center.

  An added benefit is that Carol could come with us, as long as we kept her on a leash. After burning a few hours of Carol pulling us along paths through meadows and woods looking at trees and shrubs and flowers and keeping her well clear of the duck
pond to avoid stimulating her killing instincts, we got back in the truck. I thought it might be time to head home and put our feet up for the rest of the day when I noticed Carol start to look hard into my right eye with her upper lips quivering above those sparkling, shredding teeth.

  So I asked SP to take us to the Dairy Queen. Carol relaxed, SP enjoyed himself, and another fashion disaster for yours truly, involving clothing or straw hats or flirty bottom bibs, was averted.

  When I reported to him later, Pooder said it wasn’t me training them as much as it was Carol training me, and I suppose it could be viewed that way. You could say she was training me to take her to Dairy Queen every time I had worked on two negative attempts to correct my father’s behavior. You know. If you looked at it that way. Which I totally do. I mean, it was a dog-training manual, and Carol was a dog. She got it quicker than SP.

  This was right about the time Pooder decided to become a professional golfer.

  Thing is, he’d never played golf. Didn’t know much about it. But his father had been flopped on the couch sipping evening wine watching a golf tournament, and Pooder locked in on the game. And the potential riches that came from mastering the sport.

  “Think about it,” he said. “You hit a little white ball into a hole in the ground, and once you can do it better than other people, you make a crap-ton of coin. How hard can it be?”

  “It’s maybe not that easy,” I pointed out. “I read that an accurate definition of golf is a good walk ruined. They say it’s so frustrating at times that many people have had heart attacks from the stress.”

  “Because they weren’t prepared. You just have to get some clubs and whack the ball around for a while until you get good at it and there you go—more coin than you know how to use.”