by John Grogan
When we finally got the table stopped and Marley reeled in, just feet from the poodle and her mortified owner, I turned back to check on the boys, and that’s when I got my first good look at the faces of my fellow alfresco diners. It was like a scene out of one of those E. F. Hutton commercials where an entire bustling crowd freezes in silence, waiting to hear a whispered word of investment advice. Men stopped in midconversation, cell phones in their hands. Women stared with opened mouths. The Bocalites were aghast. It was finally Conor who broke the silence. “Waddy go walk!” he screamed with delight.
A waiter rushed up and helped me drag the table back into place as Jenny held Marley, still fixated on the object of his desire, in a death grip. “Let me get some new place settings,” the waiter said.
“That won’t be necessary,” Jenny said nonchalantly. “We’ll just be paying for our drinks and going.”
It wasn’t long after our excellent excursion into the Boca alfresco-dining scene that I found a book in the library titled No Bad Dogs by the acclaimed British dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse. As the title implied, No Bad Dogs advanced the same belief that Marley’s first instructor, Miss Dominatrix, held so dear—that the only thing standing between an incorrigible canine and greatness was a befuddled, indecisive, weak-willed human master. Dogs weren’t the problem, Woodhouse held; people were. That said, the book went on to describe, chapter after chapter, some of the most egregious canine behaviors imaginable. There were dogs that howled incessantly, dug incessantly, fought incessantly, humped incessantly, and bit incessantly. There were dogs that hated all men and dogs that hated all women; dogs that stole from their masters and dogs that jealously attacked defenseless infants. There were even dogs that ate their own feces. Thank God, I thought, at least he doesn’t eat his own feces.
As I read, I began to feel better about our flawed retriever. We had gradually come to the firm conclusion that Marley was indeed the world’s worst dog. Now I was buoyed to read that there were all sorts of horrid behaviors he did not have. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He wasn’t much of a barker. Didn’t bite. Didn’t assault other dogs, except in the pursuit of love. Considered everyone his best friend. Best of all, he didn’t eat or roll in scat. Besides, I told myself, there are no bad dogs, only inept, clueless owners like Jenny and me. It was our fault Marley turned out the way he had.
Then I got to chapter 24, “Living with the Mentally Unstable Dog.” As I read, I swallowed loudly. Woodhouse was describing Marley with an understanding so intimate I could swear she had been bunking with him in his battered crate. She addressed the manic, bizarre behavior patterns, the destructiveness when left alone, the gouged floors and chewed rugs. She described the attempts by owners of such beasts “to make some place either in the house or yard dogproof.” She even addressed the use of tranquilizers as a desperate (and largely ineffective) last measure to try to return these mentally broken mutts to the land of the sane.
“Some are born unstable, some are made unstable by their living conditions, but the result is the same: the dogs, instead of being a joy to their owners, are a worry, an expense, and often bring complete despair to an entire family,” Woodhouse wrote. I looked down at Marley snoozing at my feet and said, “Sound familiar?”
In a subsequent chapter, titled “Abnormal Dogs,” Woodhouse wrote with a sense of resignation: “I cannot stress often enough that if you wish to keep a dog that is not normal, you must face up to living a slightly restricted existence.” You mean like living in mortal fear of going out for a gallon of milk? “Although you may love a subnormal dog,” she continued, “other people must not be inconvenienced by it.” Other people such as, hypothetically speaking, Sunday diners at a sidewalk café in Boca Raton, Florida?
Woodhouse had nailed our dog and our pathetic, codependent existence. We had it all: the hapless, weak-willed masters; the mentally unstable, out-of-control dog; the trail of destroyed property; the annoyed and inconvenienced strangers and neighbors. We were a textbook case. “Congratulations, Marley,” I said to him. “You qualify as subnormal.” He opened his eyes at the sound of his name, stretched, and rolled onto his back, paws in the air.
I was expecting Woodhouse to offer a cheery solution for the owners of such defective merchandise, a few helpful tips that, when properly executed, could turn even the most manic of pets into Westminster-worthy show dogs. But she ended her book on a much darker note: “Only the owners of unbalanced dogs can really know where the line can be drawn between a dog that is sane and one that is mentally unsound. No one can make up the owner’s mind as to what to do with the last kind. I, as a great dog lover, feel it is kinder to put them to sleep.”
Put them to sleep? Gulp. In case she wasn’t making herself clear, she added, “Surely, when all training and veterinary help has been exhausted and there is no hope that the dog will ever live a reasonably normal existence, it is kinder to pet and owner to put the dog to sleep.”
Even Barbara Woodhouse, lover of animals, successful trainer of thousands of dogs their owners had deemed hopeless, was conceding that some dogs were simply beyond help. If it were up to her, they would be humanely dispatched to that great canine insane asylum in the sky.
“Don’t worry, big guy,” I said, leaning down to scratch Marley’s belly. “The only sleep we’re going to be doing around this house is the kind you get to wake up from.”
He sighed dramatically and drifted back to his dreams of French poodles in heat.
It was around this same time that we also learned not all Labs are created equal. The breed actually has two distinct subgroups: English and American. The English line tends to be smaller and stockier than the American line, with blockier heads and gentle, calm dispositions. They are the favored line for showing. Labs belonging to the American line are noticeably larger and stronger, with sleeker, less squat features. They are known for their endless energy and high spirits and favored for use in the field as hunting and sports dogs. The same qualities that make the American line of Labs so unstoppably superb in the woods makes them challenges in the family home. Their exuberant energy level, the literature warned, should not be underestimated.
As the brochure for a Pennsylvania retriever breeder, Endless Mountain Labradors, explains it: “So many people ask us, ‘What’s the difference between the English and the American (field) Labs?’ There is such a big difference that the AKC is considering splitting the breed. There is a difference in build, as well as temperament. If you are looking for strictly a field dog for field trial competition, go for the American field dog. They are athletic, tall, lanky, thin, but have VERY hyper, high-strung personalities, which do not lend themselves to being the best ‘family dogs.’ On the other hand, the English Labs are very blocky, stocky, shorter in their build. Very sweet, quiet, mellow, lovely dogs.”
It didn’t take me long to figure out which line Marley belonged to. It was all beginning to make sense. We had blindly picked out a type of Lab best suited to stampeding across the open wilderness all day. If that weren’t enough, our specific choice just happened to be mentally unbalanced, unwound, and beyond the reach of training, tranquilizers, or canine psychiatry. The kind of subnormal specimen an experienced dog trainer like Barbara Woodhouse might just consider better off dead. Great, I thought. Now we find out.
Not long after Woodhouse’s book opened our eyes to Marley’s crazed mind, a neighbor asked us to take in their cat for a week while they were on vacation. Sure, we said, bring him over. Compared with a dog, cats were easy. Cats ran on autopilot, and this cat in particular was shy and elusive, especially around Marley. He could be counted on to hide beneath the couch all day and only come out after we were asleep to eat his food, kept high out of Marley’s reach, and use the kitty-litter box, which we tucked away in a discreet corner of the screened patio that enclosed the pool. There was nothing to it, really. Marley was totally unaware the cat was even in the house.
Midway through the cat’s stay with us, I awoke at dawn to
a loud, driving beat resonating through the mattress. It was Marley, quivering with excitement beside the bed, his tail slapping the mattress at a furious rate. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! I reached out to pet him, and that sent him into evasive maneuvers. He was prancing and dancing beside the bed. The Marley Mambo. “Okay, what do you have?” I asked him, eyes still shut. As if to answer, Marley proudly plopped his prize onto the crisp sheets, just inches from my face. In my groggy state, it took me a minute to process what exactly it was. The object was small, dark, of indefinable shape, and coated in a coarse, gritty sand. Then the smell reached my nostrils. An acrid, pungent, putrid smell. I bolted upright and pushed backward against Jenny, waking her up. I pointed at Marley’s gift to us, glistening on the sheets.
“That’s not…” Jenny began, revulsion in her voice.
“Yes, it is,” I said. “He raided the kitty-litter box.”
Marley couldn’t have looked more proud had he just presented us with the Hope diamond. As Barbara Woodhouse had so sagely predicted, our mentally unstable, abnormal mutt had entered the feces-eating stage of his life.
CHAPTER 19
Lightning Strikes
A fter Conor’s arrival, everyone we knew—with the exception of my very Catholic parents who were praying for dozens of little Grogans—assumed we were done having children. In the two-income, professional crowd in which we ran, one child was the norm, two were considered a bit of an extravagance, and three were simply unheard-of. Especially given the difficult pregnancy we had gone through with Conor, no one could understand why we might want to subject ourselves to the messy process all over again. But we had come a long way since our newlywed days of killing houseplants. Parenthood became us. Our two boys brought us more joy than we ever thought anyone or anything possibly could. They defined our life now, and while parts of us missed the leisurely vacations, lazy Saturdays reading novels, and romantic dinners that lingered late into the night, we had come to find our pleasures in new ways—in spilled applesauce and tiny nose prints on windowpanes and the soft symphony of bare feet padding down the hallway at dawn. Even on the worst days, we usually managed to find something to smile over, knowing by now what every parent sooner or later figures out, that these wondrous days of early parenthood—of diapered bottoms and first teeth and incomprehensible jabber—are but a brilliant, brief flash in the vastness of an otherwise ordinary lifetime.
We both rolled our eyes when my old-school mother clucked at us, “Enjoy them while you can because they’ll be grown up before you know it.” Now, even just a few years into it, we were realizing she was right. Hers was a well-worn cliché but one we could already see was steeped in truth. The boys were growing up fast, and each week ended another little chapter that could never again be revisited. One week Patrick was sucking his thumb, the next he had weaned himself of it forever. One week Conor was our baby in a crib; the next he was a little boy using a toddler bed for a trampoline. Patrick was unable to pronounce the L sound, and when women would coo over him, as they often did, he would put his fists on his hips, stick out his lip, and say, “Dos yadies are yaughing at me.” I always meant to get it on videotape, but one day the L’s came out perfectly, and that was that. For months we could not get Conor out of his Superman pajamas. He would race through the house, cape flapping behind him, yelling, “Me Stupe Man!” And then it was over, another missed video moment.
Children serve as impossible-to-ignore, in-your-face timepieces, marking the relentless march of one’s life through what otherwise might seem an infinite sea of minutes, hours, days, and years. Our babies were growing up faster than either of us wanted, which partially explains why, about a year after moving to our new house in Boca, we began trying for our third. As I said to Jenny, “Hey, we’ve got four bedrooms now; why not?” Two tries was all it took. Neither of us would admit we wanted a girl, but of course we did, desperately so, despite our many pronouncements during the pregnancy that having three boys would be just great. When a sonogram finally confirmed our secret hope, Jenny draped her arms over my shoulders and whispered, “I’m so happy I could give you a little girl.” I was so happy, too.
Not all our friends shared our enthusiasm. Most met news of our pregnancy with the same blunt question: “Did you mean to?” They just could not believe a third pregnancy could be anything other than an accident. If indeed it was not, as we insisted, then they had to question our judgment. One acquaintance went so far as to chastise Jenny for allowing me to knock her up again, asking, in a tone best reserved for someone who had just signed over all her worldly possessions to a cult in Guyana: “What were you thinking?”
We didn’t care. On January 9, 1997, Jenny gave me a belated Christmas present: a pink-cheeked, seven-pound baby girl, whom we named Colleen. Our family only now felt like it was complete. If the pregnancy for Conor had been a litany of stress and worry, this pregnancy was textbook perfect, and delivering at Boca Raton Community Hospital introduced us to a whole new level of pampered customer satisfaction. Just down the hall from our room was a lounge with a free, all-you-can-drink cappuccino station—so very Boca. By the time the baby finally came, I was so jacked up on frothy caffeine, I could barely hold my hands still to snip the umbilical cord.
When Colleen was one week old, Jenny brought her outside for the first time. The day was crisp and beautiful, and the boys and I were in the front yard, planting flowers. Marley was chained to a tree nearby, happy to lie in the shade and watch the world go by. Jenny sat in the grass beside him and placed the sleeping Colleen in a portable bassinet on the ground between them. After several minutes, the boys beckoned for Mom to come closer to see their handiwork, and they led Jenny and me around the garden beds as Colleen napped in the shade beside Marley. We wandered behind some large shrubbery from where we could still see the baby but passersby on the street could not see us. As we turned back, I stopped and motioned for Jenny to look out through the shrubs. Out on the street, an older couple walking by had stopped and were gawking at the scene in our front yard with bewildered expressions. At first, I wasn’t sure what had made them stop and stare. Then it hit me: from their vantage point, all they could see was a fragile newborn alone with a large yellow dog, who appeared to be babysitting single-handedly.
We lingered in silence, stifling giggles. There was Marley, looking like an Egyptian sphinx, lying with his front paws crossed, head up, panting contentedly, every few seconds pushing his snout over to sniff the baby’s head. The poor couple must have thought they had stumbled on a case of felony child neglect. No doubt the parents were out drinking at a bar somewhere, having left the infant alone in the care of the neighborhood Labrador retriever, who just might attempt to nurse the infant at any second. As if he were in on the ruse, Marley without prompting shifted positions and rested his chin across the baby’s stomach, his head bigger than her whole body, and let out a long sigh as if he were saying, When are those two going to get home? He appeared to be protecting her, and maybe he was, though I’m pretty sure he was just drinking in the scent of her diaper.
Jenny and I stood there in the bushes and exchanged grins. The thought of Marley as an infant caregiver—Doggie Day Care—was just too good to let go. I was tempted to wait there and see how the scene would play out, but then it occurred to me that one scenario might involve a 911 call to the police. We had gotten away with storing Conor out in the breezeway, but how would we explain this one? (“Well, I know how it must look, Officer, but he’s actually surprisingly responsible…”) We stepped out of the bushes and waved to the couple—and watched the relief wash over their faces. Thank God, that baby hadn’t been thrown to the dogs after all.
“You must really trust your dog,” the woman said somewhat cautiously, betraying a belief that dogs were fierce and unpredictable and had no place that close to a defenseless newborn.
“He hasn’t eaten one yet,” I said.
Two months after Colleen arrived home I celebrated my fortieth birthday in a most inauspicious manner, namel
y, by myself. The Big Four-O is supposed to be a major turning point, the place in life where you bid restless youth farewell and embrace the predictable comforts of middle age. If any birthday merited a blowout celebration, it was the fortieth, but not for me. We were now responsible parents with three children; Jenny had a new baby pressed to her breast. There were more important things to worry about. I arrived home from work, and Jenny was tired and worn down. After a quick meal of leftovers, I bathed the boys and put them to bed while Jenny nursed Colleen. By eight-thirty, all three children were asleep, and so was my wife. I popped a beer and sat out on the patio, staring into the iridescent blue water of the lit swimming pool. As always, Marley was faithfully at my side, and as I scratched his ears, it occurred to me that he was at about the same turning point in life. We had brought him home six years earlier. In dog years, that would put him somewhere in his early forties now. He had crossed unnoticed into middle age but still acted every bit the puppy. Except for a string of stubborn ear infections that required Dr. Jay’s repeated intervention, he was healthy. He showed no signs whatsoever of growing up or winding down. I had never thought of Marley as any kind of role model, but sitting there sipping my beer, I was aware that maybe he held the secret for a good life. Never slow down, never look back, live each day with adolescent verve and spunk and curiosity and playfulness. If you think you’re still a young pup, then maybe you are, no matter what the calendar says. Not a bad philosophy for life, though I’d take a pass on the part that involved vandalizing couches and laundry rooms.
“Well, big guy,” I said, pressing my beer bottle against his cheek in a kind of interspecies toast. “It’s just you and me tonight. Here’s to forty. Here’s to middle age. Here’s to running with the big dogs right up until the end.” And then he, too, curled up and went to sleep.