by Janet Elder
In fact, the park is seemingly always filled with people walking dogs along the promenade that runs next to the river. By fall, Rich and I were stopping people who had dogs of a certain type at the end of the leash—ones with moxie or that seemed especially sweet or playful.
Rich was by now so enthusiastic about getting a dog for Michael that he didn’t hesitate to approach strangers to ask about their dogs. We developed a list: beagles, Cotons, Labradoodles, spaniels, Westies, cockapoos. They were all under consideration.
In this endless parade of dogs, it was hard to miss how well cared for they were, and how beloved they were to their owners. The dogs we met in the park were just as likely to be companions for people living alone, widows, and widowers, as they were for bustling families with children. We met a number of young couples yet unable to commit to each other but who nonetheless, together, had committed to a dog. Some dogs sat right up on the benches alongside their owners watching the boats go by on the river.
Rich and I would go home and tell Michael and Caroline about the wonderful dogs we had just met.
I thought surely Michael would want a Westie. But, in the end, the decision was easy. He told us he wanted a toy poodle, just like Rocket, the neighbor’s dog he had fallen in love with years ago and who still lived three floors above.
We dreamed of and talked animatedly and incessantly about the puppy that would join our family after the long slog of treatments for stage II breast cancer came to an end. We window-shopped in our neighborhood’s many pet supply stores; Michael planned the spot in his room where his dog would sleep.
Despite my enthusiasm, a couple of times when I felt exhausted from the treatments, I started to second-guess myself about the dog. But a friend and colleague, Connie Hays, who was suffering from a form of cancer far deadlier than mine, urged me on. She had three kids and made caring for and walking a dog sound as time-consuming as taking out the trash. Knowing more about life than I, she wisely said: “You won’t regret doing it. But you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t.”
Connie was one of those women who was able to balance it all—work, children, a husband, and charity work. She skied. She cooked. She knit. She ran a marathon not long before she was diagnosed with cancer. She had even managed to write a book about the history of Coca-Cola based on her experience covering the company for The Times. She was tireless.
As she lay dying, she made her husband, John, buy me a book: The Art of Raising a Puppy, by the Monks of New Skete, a group of monks who live in a monastery in upstate New York where they breed German shepherds. From the quiet of their lives, they have created an all-consuming method of training puppies that is best characterized as firm and loving with no yelling. It is not unlike books on parenting.
I read the book cover to cover in one sitting. It left me less interested in raising a puppy than in going to live the monastic life in the mountains where time stretched eternally and patience was an instinct. The lessons in the book seemed unreachable for me. The whole process seemed to require reservoirs of time and patience, two things in very short supply in my life. Even the chapter on city dogs didn’t seem to consider the frenetic pace of city life. Our life was anything but placid. There must be other books.
Sometime in late October, with just a few weeks of radiation treatments to go, I called Lisa Cannarozzo, a breeder of toy poodles in Florida and the same breeder from whom the Simons had gotten Rocket. Serendipity played its hand. “I only have one little red boy right now,” Lisa said. As it turned out, he was Rocket’s half brother. It was meant to be. Rich would have to accept that we were going to have a little red dog, not a black one.
“He’s so affectionate,” she said. “He was born on July 5, so he’s still very much a puppy, and he’s just wonderful.” My own birthday is July 6.
Lisa sounded more like a proud parent than a breeder trying to sell me a dog. “He’s so smart, he can already hold it in all night,” she said. Then came the sell: “We thought he’d be one of our show dogs, but his ears are too big, which just makes him cuter, really. I’m not sure, though; I promised him to a family in Chicago. If you think you really want him, tell me right away and I’ll see about the other family.”
Lisa didn’t know that she didn’t have to sell me on his good looks. Being a show dog was of no interest to me one way or the other. For all I cared, he could have had no ears. It was the part about being so affectionate that mattered to me. I just wanted to be sure Michael was getting a dog who would love him back. By the time Lisa and I got off the phone, the Chicago family had been put off. “I’m not sure they were all that serious,” Lisa said. “You can have him.”
Kismet. It was meant to be. The conversation with Lisa had a fated quality to it. This was our dog. This was the dog of our fantasies, the dog who had gotten my son through the scare of seeing me go through cancer treatments. I couldn’t wait to meet him.
From the time we told Michael he was getting a dog, he had been considering all sorts of names, discussing his list with his friends. He considered naming our dog Chip, after Chip Cody, the surgeon who had removed the cancerous tumor from me. He thought about “Spunky Overboard,” the delighted words of unknown origin he squealed when as a very little boy he sent Matchbox cars careening down a four-foot plastic mountain. “Gacky,” another possibility, was Michael’s imaginary friend who lived in the Central Park carousel when Michael was three. There was Zeus (the suggestion of Michael’s friend Jack), Kayak, Cisco, Skippy, Guacamole, and Tuck.
But once we saw our puppy on the Calisa Poodles’ website, Michael had no doubt that the sweet, doe-eyed, adorable, seemingly mischievous, auburn-colored puppy was “Huck,” a seeker of adventure, like Mark Twain’s immortal character. The whole family was in love.
In preparation for Huck’s arrival, which was to be over the Thanksgiving weekend, just days after my last radiation treatment, Lisa and I spoke endlessly. I soon realized that she and her husband, Joe, were themselves in love with our soon-to-be Huck and were having a tough time letting go of him. Lisa kept referring to him as her “love bug,” and I began feeling bad about taking him away.
I kept picturing Lisa and Joe in their home in Florida, surrounded by little red poodles, talking to them the way some people speak to toddlers. “Now let Daddy alone.” I started wondering what it was like to actually breed dogs. I think I had read too many of Michael’s picture books when he was a little boy. I assumed the dogs lived in a barnlike structure and Lisa and Joe lived in a house. Lisa straightened me out. “Oh no, we’re all here as one big happy family in the same house,” she said. “That little love bug watches TV with Joe every night.”
I sent Lisa a check; she sent me a long list of dog paraphernalia to buy in advance of Huck’s arrival—shampoo, dog nail clippers, chicken and rice puppy food, ear cleaner, doggie toothbrush, Pepto-Bismol, nutra-cal tube food, and a water bottle. At the bottom of the list of instructions, in capital letters and underlined in red marker, was the message:
ALWAYS HOLD FIRMLY! NEVER ALLOW
OFF LEASH IN AN UNFENCED AREA!
Lisa and Joe were caring, devoted breeders. I felt lucky we had found our way to them. It was only after all of the arrangements had been made that I learned of the world of rescue dogs from a friend. We probably would have adopted a dog instead of buying one from a breeder if I had realized it sooner. But still, I was confident fate had brought us to Huck.
We counted down the months, the weeks, and finally the days until Huck’s arrival. A couple of weeks before he was to join our family, on a bright day in early November, Rich, Michael, and I went out to visit Auntie Babs and her family in Ramsey, New Jersey. On our way, we stopped at The Dog Boutique in nearby Allendale to buy everything on Lisa’s list and then some. Michael picked out a bed for Huck, toys, several brightly colored leashes, bowls, and a sweater for the cold. He found a mat to put underneath the bowls that said “I love my dog.” His face aglow, his smile from ear to ear, his dimples seemingly more prono
unced than usual, he showed me the mat and said: “Isn’t this just perfect, Mom?” Michael was elated. So were Rich and I.
The day after Thanksgiving, Lisa put Huck in a crate and onto a plane bound for Newark airport. We had mailed her one of Michael’s socks to put in the crate, so he could get used to Michael’s scent, and to be a comfort on the plane ride.
Huck was scheduled to arrive at Continental’s Terminal C in the QUIKPAK office. Lisa warned us to resist temptation and not open the crate until we were safely home, lest Huck bolt from the crate and out of the airport. “They’re like little jackrabbits,” she laughed. “You gotta watch ’em.”
Flight 1410 left Sarasota at 11:05 in the morning. We left our apartment even earlier. Under normal circumstances, it is about an hour’s drive to Newark airport, but we were worried about the crush of Thanksgiving travelers.
To our surprise, there was little traffic, and we were at the QUIKPAK office with hours to spare. For Michael, all of the longing of his young life, the craving to hold and to hug his own dog, was about to be satisfied by a five-pound puppy with big ears and a disposition nearly as sweet as his own. We paced. We squirmed in the stiff, plastic, unforgiving seats in the terminal, just outside the office. We tried to think of games to play to speed the wait. We played Geography and then I’m Going on a Picnic.
I started. “I’m going on a picnic and I am bringing chocolate chip cookies.”
Then Michael picked it up. “I’m going on a picnic and I am bringing chocolate chip cookies for us and a dog treat for Huck.”
Then Rich. “I am going on a picnic and I am bringing chocolate chip cookies, a dog treat for Huck, and watermelon.”
Back to me. “I am going on a picnic and I am bringing chocolate chip cookies and watermelon and um, uh, um …”
“A treat for Huck, Mom. You forgot Huck,” Michael admonished.
I don’t know if it was the excitement or the chemotherapy fog, but I was already losing I’m Going on a Picnic, and there wasn’t much in the basket.
Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there was a lot of activity in the QUIKPAK area. Rich turned to Michael and said, “Mikey, I think Huck is here.”
The three of us dashed into the small office. There, on the floor, was a red crate, plastered with stickers that said LIVE ANIMAL. And a handwritten one:
PLEASE DO NOT OPEN. I AM QUICK.
Michael fell to his knees, looked inside and started talking to Huck through the wire door. “Hello, Huckie,” Michael said softly.
Michael looked up at Rich and me with a smile as he said, “He’s so cute.”
I tried not to cry.
Rich said: “He’s yours, son.”
Michael turned back to the little dog inside the crate, pushing his fingers through the wire opening. Huck began licking Michael’s small fingers. “Good boy, Huck. Hello, Huckie. Good boy.”
A man in a blue uniform stepped forward and told me I had to sign some papers before we could leave. I managed to do so, despite the tears welling in my eyes. After I signed the papers, Rich picked up the crate. “Let’s take Huck home,” he said to Michael.
“I love him already,” Michael said, as he hugged me very tightly.
“I do, too, honey. I do, too,” I said.
And with that, our new family of four headed for the parking lot.
In the backseat of the car, Michael, with the crate next to him, talked to Huck all the way home. “Huck, wait ’til you see where you are going to live. You can sleep in my room.”
It was as though Michael had finally found the old friend he had been searching for all his life. He kept sticking his finger through the wire door, trying to get Huck, by now dehydrated and hungry, to take some food.
There was a lot more traffic going toward New York than there had been in the morning going the other way. We were stuck in the thick of it, crawling along the New Jersey Turnpike. Trying to follow Lisa’s exact instructions, we still had not taken Huck out of the crate. We had not yet been able to hold him, or, for that matter, get a really good look at him. Huck did not make a sound.
We finally pulled into the garage under our apartment building. Rich gingerly lifted the crate from the backseat, carried it upstairs to our apartment, and set it down on the floor in the living room. Michael sat right in front of it. I gave him an old towel to put across his lap.
I opened the door of the crate. Huck, still woozy from his plane ride, took a cautious step out. Michael tenderly picked him up in his arms and held him against himself.
“I love you, Huck,” Michael said. “You are such a good boy. You made it through the plane ride. You did it, Huck.”
I looked inside the crate and there, in the back of the crate, tied in a knot, was the white sock of Michael’s we had sent to Lisa weeks ago. It had to have been tough for this tiny creature, all five pounds of him, to weather the plane ride. He was stuck in the crate, alongside the baggage. It was so cold in the cargo hold of the plane that the airline did not want to take any responsibility for an animal being able to live through the trip. The carrier required the vet in Florida to sign papers saying the dog could survive in subfreezing weather.
In our apartment, when Huck emerged from the crate and into Michael’s waiting arms, he was wobbly and smelled as though he had either thrown up on himself, or urinated, or both. Lisa, in an effort to gussy Huck up, had doused him with some kind of perfume and put a red bow on his head.
I knew the first order of business was to get rid of the bow, get him in the bathtub, and clean him up. At that moment, not everyone in our family found Huck irresistible. In fact, Rich was disappointed. Privately he said to me: “I don’t really find him that appealing, but we got him for Michael, not for me, so if he’s happy with him, then I’m happy.”
Michael tried to get Huck to play a bit, trying to interest him in some of the toys we had bought, but Huck was still shaky, still exhausted from his journey north.
I suggested we give Huck a warm bath. Michael was game and wanted to get in the tub with Huck. We pulled out some of the shampoo Lisa had instructed us to buy. We took the bow out of Huck’s now matted hair; Michael put on a pair of shorts and got in the tub. I handed Huck to him, and we carefully soaped Huck up and rinsed him off with the handheld showerhead. Wet, Huck looked so tiny, so vulnerable, and so utterly adorable. I wrapped him in a towel. Michael stepped out of the tub and immediately took Huck into his arms.
Just then the phone rang. It was our neighbor, a member of Rocket’s family, Emily Simon, and her cousin, Caroline Bronston. They could not wait any longer to meet Huck. They wanted to come right over. Michael was only too happy to show Huck off. Minutes later, they were at our front door.
The girls squealed with delight. “He’s so cute,” they said in unison. The three kids sat on the floor with Huck, petting him, taking turns holding him, and trying to get him to chase a ball or eat a dog biscuit. But Huck was so exhausted, he was not responding all that much. He seemed more like a very old dog than a young puppy.
That first night, we did exactly what Lisa had told us to do. We put Huck and one of his new toys in his crate, attached a water bottle to the crate, and said, “Good night, Huck.” We had set it all up in Michael’s room. Rich and I hugged and kissed Michael, said good night to him, too, and closed the bedroom door behind us. I wasn’t sure what would happen next. I assumed that in no time, Huck would start barking or whining.
Ten minutes after Rich and I left Michael’s room and collapsed on our bed, Michael appeared at our door. “I don’t think I can sleep with Huck in my room,” he said. “He makes too much noise when he drinks from his water bottle.”
I suppose Michael was so used to having his own room and having utter quiet when he went to bed that the presence of another being, let alone one who was slurping water, would take some getting used to. I thought that feeling would pass in a few days as Huck and Michael became inseparable. It did.
But that first night, we put Huck’s crate in the kit
chen and turned on a radio. He was perfectly quiet until about three o’clock in the morning when he started barking. As I am sure has been so for every other mother who suddenly finds herself with a puppy, being roused from sleep that way felt an awful lot like the 3:00 A.M. feeding of my child’s infancy.
I managed to find my slippers and robe and I stumbled into the kitchen. I felt so sorry for Huck in his crate, barking. Lisa had instructed us to tap on the top of the crate and say, “Quiet, quiet,” and then walk away. But what if he needs to go? I thought. I followed Lisa’s instructions, left Huck in the crate, and went back to bed.
Just as my head hit the pillow, Huck barked again. I put on my slippers again, left the bathrobe behind, and, with Lisa’s voice in my ear, went back into the kitchen, tapped the top of the crate and said, “Quiet, quiet, quiet,” and went back to bed, this time unable to sleep. I was waiting for the next round of barking.
It took another hour and Huck barked again. This time barefooted, I stumbled into the kitchen and opened the door of the crate. Huck came out and relieved himself on the paper we had put down on the floor. He turned around and walked back into his crate.
Tired as I was, I had to laugh. “Huck, Lisa was right, you are smart. I ought to listen to you,” I said. As I turned down the kitchen light, I realized I had already started doing what so many animal lovers do with their pets. I was talking to Huck as though he were a person with complete comprehension of what I was saying. As time wore on, the talking got much worse. I was only surprised that Huck didn’t talk back.
The next day, Huck seemed fully recovered from the plane ride and fully adjusted to his new surroundings. His personality started to emerge. He was lively and engaging and incredibly cute. He was always ready for fun. All of the new dog toys got a pretty good workout. Huck was cuddly and quite generous with face licks. He was an unusual combination of sweet and naughty. He wasn’t the least bit aggressive and was an insatiable affection hound. He’d instantly roll over on his back for just about anyone who looked like they’d stand there and rub his belly.