by Julie Klam
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
LESSON ONE - How to Find the Right One for You
LESSON TWO - How to Find the Parachute Color That’s Most Flattering to You
LESSON THREE - How to Keep the Yin from Strangling the Yang
LESSON FOUR - How to Listen to That Still, Small Voice
LESSON FIVE - How to Be an Amateur Therapist
LESSON SIX - How to Fall in Love . . . Again
LESSON SEVEN - How to Mourn the Loss of a Friend
LESSON EIGHT - How to Uncover Truths
LESSON NINE - How to Feel Good About Your Neck
LESSON TEN - How to Find Happiness
LESSON ELEVEN - How to Find the Right Fit
Acknowledgements
ALSO BY JULIE KLAM
Please Excuse My Daughter
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2010 by Julie Klam
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klam, Julie.
You had me at woof: how dogs taught me the secrets of happiness / Julie Klam.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44473-3
1. Klam, Julie. 2. Dogs—Therapeutic use. 3. Dog owners—Biography. 4. Human-animal
relationships. I. Title.
RM931.D63K
615.8’5158—dc22
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assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.
Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume
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Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.
In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however, the story, the experiences, and the words
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For Paul,
who has never said no
to a dog who needs us
“The humans have tried everything. Now it’s up to us dogs!”
—Danny, 101 Dalmatians
LESSON ONE
How to Find the Right One for You
One night I dreamed I had a dog. He was a Boston terrier, not stocky, but substantial, with a good face. He came slow-motion scampering through the high grass and wild daisies of my sleep. He was perfect in every way, and I instantly felt an unexplainable future love for him, the kind I’d always imagined I’d feel when I met my soul mate—the Sonny to my Cher. His eyes were big O’s and it looked like his face was spelling O-T-T-O, so I knew that had to be his name, and that I had to go find him.
I was thirty, living alone in Manhattan, and employed part-time as a clerk in an insurance company. The only thing I felt sure of was that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. With no career and no boyfriend, I had the feeling that I was waiting for my life to start, and I needed something special to show me how to make it happen.
I believed everything was a sign. I went to my parents’ house and found a Close Encounters of the Third Kind T-shirt in the attic that I’d never seen before and thought, Maybe I’m going to work with Steven Spielberg . . . or be contacted by aliens; or I’d buy a pair of pants and find a square of paper in the pocket that said “INSPECTED BY 34,” and think, I’ll meet my husband when I’m thirty-four, or, I need to lose thirty-four pounds.
After the Otto dream, I called my friend Barbara at work because I knew she’d understand. We were both going through a period of fogginess in our lives and were looking for clarity, which we chose to seek in the reliable forms of psychics, seers, tarot card readers, crystal goddesses, and astrologers. We were certain that definitive answers—perhaps in the guise of a nice Michelin road map—were laid out somewhere. All we wanted was to know what was going to happen so we could stop worrying about it. Was that so much to ask? We just needed names, dates, and locations. My mother, who worked as a healer, had a steady stream of recommendations, though she always emphasized our lives were ours to do with what we wanted. But we didn’t know what we wanted. We wanted someone to tell us.
I’d call my mom up and say, “Bad news, I’m not going to meet my husband for five years. I might as well just stay home and watch TV.”
“No,” she explained, “you are in charge of your own path. All of the great yogis say you have free will; these are just suggestions of what may happen if you do nothing.”
“Oh good, so I won’t necessarily die in a hang-gliding accident?”
“Why would you be hang gliding? You’re definitely not going to die hang gliding because you won’t be going hang gliding! What are you, Bruce Willis?” Even though she was a healer, she was a Jewish mother first.
But this Otto dream seemed significant and I wanted Barbara’s take.
“Is that the kind of dog that looks like a cat?”
“Yes,” I said, “kind of like a cat and an old man combined.”
“Oh, I think that’s the kind of dog Michael has.” She held her hand over the mouthpiece and asked Michael, her funny, gay coworker, if Buster was a Boston terrier. I heard him say yes and start espousing his virtues. Then she asked me if I wanted to know where he got it.
“Sure,” I said and waited while she got the breeder’s name and number, thinking that this all figured into the magic; I mean, what were the chances that a guy who worked in Barbara’s office had the very same kind of dog I dreamed about?
I did some research on Boston terriers to see if they’d work as an apartment dog and what their shedding ratio was. I was in luck: in the book Finding the Breed That’s Right for You, Bostons got five out of five stars in the categories of apartment suitability and hypoallergenicity.
I found out that the Boston terrier originated when an English bulldog and an English terrier were bred and then the product was bred with a bulldog. Though they were not intentionally bred for it, Bostons have a very pronounced loyalty to their masters. Because they looked like they were wearing tuxedos, they were nicknamed the “American Gentleman.” Though I’m not the formal type, their look was very appealing to me.
I’d seen them in early silent films and they felt old-fashioned and classic. They were kind of like Harold Lloyd as dog. And they were very popular around New York City during my grandparents’ childhood, which made them even more comforting to me.
A few days later, armed with my vast knowledge of Bostons, I gave the breeder a call. “We’re not doing Boston puppies anytime soon, we’re concentrating on Frenchies,” she said, referring to the Boston’s “cousin” the French bulldog. “But we’re involved with Boston terrier rescue. Do you know what that is?” I said yes even though I didn’t. I sort of figured it had to do with rescuing Boston terriers in peril. You know, stuck up in trees, stranded on ice floes.
“We’re fostering a young male, about a year and a half, and the people who were supposed to take him never showed up.” She said he’d been on the street for a long time when he was brought into the shelter in the winter; he still had summer fleas, and mange, and was skin and bones. They were nursing him back to health, and with all he’d been through, he’d never, not once, had an accident in the house. “He really is a wonderful dog,” she said, adding, “All he really needs is a little love,” which made me imagine the dog version of the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. “We’ve been calling him Buddy. His ears droop over; he’s definitely not show quality, but if you don’t care about that, then he’s perfect.” While I talked to her I wrote down on a piece of paper “ears,” “show quality,” and “Buddy.” I don’t know if I shouted, “I’ll take him!” or if it just felt like that. It turned out the people who stood him up the day before called a few minutes after me but the breeder said it was too late. Another girl was coming to get him. Me.
He was way out in Pennsylvania, though, and I had to get someone to drive me there.
When I hung up I said, “Am I getting a dog?”
I was convinced that doing anything to shake up my world would help with the at-sea feeling permeating every aspect of my life. I really wanted to meet a guy, and all of the conventional ways, like hanging out in bookstores and coffee bars and taking classes in biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History and, the one I did most, sitting in my apartment watching TV, weren’t working. I needed to find something to get me out and about that wasn’t so contrived. I’d grown up with dogs, but they were huge English mastiffs that I was terribly allergic to. I liked them as much as you can like anyone whose mere presence gives you an acute asthma attack. Recently I had started looking into the hypoallergenic breeds. Apparently poodles were fine, but I wasn’t crazy about them despite the claims that they are the smartest breed of dog. (I never understood how that was determined. Were they found by their owners hooking up Bunsen burners and pouring liquids into flasks?) I believe that different dog breeds speak to different people. The first time I’d seen a Boston was in a black-and-white photo with the actor/comedian Chris Elliott that hung in his foyer. I babysat for his kids and when they were asleep, I stared at the photo, captivated. When I asked Chris about it, he said the dog was just a prop for the photo shoot, but he remembered he was cute as a button. As loopy as it may sound, every time since then that I passed a Boston terrier on the street, I felt a little tug, a small flat-faced voice saying to me, “You and I should be together.”
Once the decision was made to get “Buddy,” I started, like any mother-to-be, to purchase things. This was where I could really bring my expertise as a shopper to bear. I bought a red-and-black-checked dog bed from Orvis and in a trimming store I found small varsity football letters. I bought two sets of Offensive Tackle letters and sewed “O-T-T-O” onto the front of the bed. I sent away for an engraved name tag in the shape of a bone, and spent hours poring over the contents of dog catalogs, putting check marks next to bowls, revolting-sounding treats like pig ears and marrow bones, stuffed animals that had squeakers, Kong toys, Nylabones, collars, and leashes in a variety of colors and patterns. I bought four books all called Boston Terrier. In short, I went nuts.
The night before my aunt Mattie and I went to get him I stood in the kitchen of my small studio looking at his bed with all of the toys lined up neatly beside it, a few treats on the pillow. “Tomorrow at this time, a real live dog will be in that bed.” I could hardly sleep that night.
It was an awful, nasty, sleety March day when we drove to the rural Pennsylvania county where the breeder lived. On the way, I began to get nervous, really nervous.
“What’s wrong?” Mattie said to me, looking over from the driver’s seat. Her own dog, Harry, a mutt she rescued from the side of the Bronx River Parkway going north, was sitting on her lap. “Your lips are white.”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t have to do this,” she said. “We can turn right around.”
“I want to.”
Mattie was a wonderful aunt, but at this moment her concern was not for me. What troubled Mattie, the most insane dog person I or anyone else had known, a woman who ordered room service entrees of filet mignon for her pups, was that I’d get this dog and not treat it well and then she’d stop liking me.
Picking Otto up in that farmhouse in One Black Tooth County was what I imagined, at the time, it must have felt like to give birth. My nerves were so jangled, I could barely see. It didn’t help that the week before, I’d started taking antidepressants, so I was all fuzzy-headed from my body’s adjustment to the drugs. I don’t remember my initial meeting with Otto as love at first sight. The family who’d been keeping him took me into the kitchen and there was a baby French bulldog in a playpen that was utterly adorable—and then Otto came in. He was jumping up on everyone, sweet as could be.
Otto had a funny little bent tail, and his eyes went in two totally different directions—a complete East-Wester—and he had some lumps on his back (I was told they were fatty tissue). But he was undeniably the cutest dog I’d ever seen. When we took him into the car I noticed his feet were all bloody. His nails had been clipped too close to the quick. I picked him up to bring him back in to get something for the bleeding and he didn’t want to go in the house. He had already bonded with me, and he also really loved riding in a car. One time months later when I was walking him in Manhattan with my usual very long lead and not paying attention, I looked down and he was gone. I followed his leash into the backseat of a car; there was Otto sitting on a clean, white pillow, face forward, ready to ride. Some foolish person had left their car door open while loading it.
On the way to the home we’d be sharing, he lay on my lap, and though I acted cool, I couldn’t imagine I would be able to manage life as a dog owner. When we got to the city, I walked him up my street. He didn’t have any leash skills, and nor did I, but in my apartment he went straight for his bed and sat in it like he’d been there all his life. And as with everything else he did, I took it as a sign of genius.
SO THERE WE WERE. That first night I felt embarrassed as I ate my dinner. I was used to living alone, and thus eating while reading the Times, without anyone watching. Otto’s dinner was in his bowl in the kitchen, but he wasn’t ready to eat and he just sat and stared at me. I felt it was rude to ignore him, or read, so I just scarfed down my meal not looking up and we moved on.
I took the week off from work and stayed with him to help him get adjusted. There was a difficult adjustment period, mostly revolving around my chronic neurosis about leaving him alone for any more than a few minutes. I’d walk out of the apartment and tell him to stay, then I’d stand in the hallway for an hour. He never made a peep. I’d come back in from my fake shopping trip and he’d be positioned right where I told him to stay, and I’d say, “Oh no, you don’t have to remain in that one spot. Just the apartment.” He was good. And he was bad. He’d started snapping at people so I had to keep him on a really tight leash. Yet interestingly, there was a developmentally disabled woman who waited for her bus when I walked him in the mornings and she would run to pet him every day. She was not gentle or cautious or quiet, but Otto just knew. He never snapped at her. He let her do whatever she wanted and waited patien
tly till she was done, which we’d know when she’d say, “Now that’s what I call a good dog!” and repeat, “Now that’s what I call a good dog!”
I THOUGHT ABOUT HIM every minute we were apart, brought him everywhere the law allowed, fed him everything I ate, carried him up to my sleeping loft every night, and tucked him under the covers, his head on the pillow next to mine. All my energy was put toward making him happy. It was the best relationship I’d ever been in.
The more time we spent alone, the more I thought he was just like me. We were both on our own, we both needed someone, and we both hated being left alone. I started to realize after a week or so that I loved him.
“You’re in love with him,” my therapist said to me. It had been her idea for me to get a dog. She’d recently gotten two bichons frises and was overwhelmed by the number of men who approached her to chat on her walks.
Yuck, I thought, not so much for the bestiality connotations but for the idea that my new boyfriend was four-legged, flat-faced, and neutered. Somehow it made me feel like that was going to be it for me. I’d never be a part of a human couple.
As I walked him around the Upper West Side, I noticed more families and I continued to worry that people would now begin to see me as a “dog person.” You know, the kind who likes dogs better than people. Or the kind who can only attract a companion who relies on her for food. I wondered if by adopting Otto, I had sealed my fate as a single woman with a dog. I could see our future together. Me and him. Otto and Julie. “Happy Holidays from Julie and Otto” accompanied by a picture of Otto dressed in a Santa hat. Well, so be it. At least I wouldn’t be totally alone.
But something close to miraculous did happen. I suddenly discovered I had developed dog-vision. Prior to this point, I had not known there was a dog run two blocks from my apartment at the Museum of Natural History. I’d never seen it though I’d walked by it thousands of times. It was like entering the Twilight Zone or suddenly being able to see dead people but instead it was dogs and people with dogs. I’d apparently walked by these formerly invisible neighbors again and again, but only now, with Otto as my ambassador, did I stop to say hello. I had to wonder what else I had been missing. Were handsome single men all over the place, too? Thrillingly, I also got to talk to celebrities with dogs, now that we had a common denominator. While walking Otto, I met Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, who were walking their dog. Otto peed on the ground and did his usual male-dog kicking of dirt to cover his potent scent.