Talking to Animals

by Jon Katz

  It took me a long time to carry Lucky home through the cold. I wrapped him in my jacket, he was shivering so badly, and soon, I was shivering even more. I stopped in the foyer of the branch library—

  I didn’t dare bring him inside—so we could both thaw out. Lucky grew heavier and heavier as my fingers grew numb, but I was nothing but happy.

  When I got home, my fingers and cheeks were nearly frozen. I took Lucky upstairs into my room. I laid him on the bed, wrapped him in some of my undershirts. He curled up in a ball by my pillow.

  I cried again, this time in relief. My magical friend had come. I was not alone anymore. I don’t recall ever being so happy or lighthearted; my troubles and fears seemed to melt away. Lucky needed me more than I needed him, I thought, or perhaps as much. The world seemed to change for me in that moment; it had become warm and safe. Lucky, I knew, loved me without condition or judgment.

  I sat with him for hours, until my mother got home from work, came up to my room, and dragged me downstairs to have dinner. I carried Lucky downstairs in a box; we sealed off the kitchen and he was permitted to walk around in there while we ate. He whined for me most of the time. See, I told my mother, see how much he loves me? My mother said Lucky was cute, but she quickly reminded me of my promise to take care of him. I could tell she liked him. She said he looked thin, that we needed to fatten him up a bit.

  My father came in to check Lucky out. He picked him up and let him lick his face. I was surprised, since my father did not care for dogs much; my mother was the dog lover. After the first encounter, though, my father had nothing much to do with Lucky. I don’t recall him ever touching him again and he wanted no part of his care or training. I remember what a different world it was for dogs then.

  But even then, Lucky was at the center of my emotional life. From the first moment, I talked with Lucky. In the school basement. On the way home. In my room. On the kitchen floor. I imagined him always to be talking back to me, responding, agreeing, supporting.

  I confessed to Lucky that I was a bed wetter, that I could not sleep over at the houses of other kids because I was too afraid of having an accident.

  I told Lucky every detail of the most painful experience of my life up to that point, the story of how I had to leave summer camp because I wet my bunk every night and the other kids were making fun of me. I was not allowed to say good-bye; my clothes and sleeping bag were collected and a counselor drove me in silence back to my house, three hours away.

  I told Lucky this so he would understand if there was an accident in the night. Puppies, I knew, also had accidents. I imagined Lucky to be as happy to be with me as I was with him. My father, I told the puppy, was angry with me every time I wet the bed; he would come in to give me lectures in the middle of the night and I would pretend to be asleep. If he comes in, I said to Lucky, pretend to be asleep, too. He’ll go away.

  I had never talked about my bed wetting before, not with any living thing. It was a great relief to share it. Lucky, I noticed, didn’t care. That night, for the first time in more than a year, I did not wet my bed. I slept through the night, Lucky there next to me.

  Every night, Lucky curled up with his head right under my neck and we both slept together. Lucky did not have any accidents in the bed, either. Not one.

  He was a calm dog, perhaps too calm for a puppy. He slept for most of the day, and while he loved to walk around the backyard, and inspect my room, he never zoomed around like other puppies did. I brought him old baseballs to chew on—he loved them—and I scoured the refrigerator for chicken and tuna fish leftovers to feed him.

  He seemed very happy just to be with me; he was perhaps the first creature who loved me in that way, who showed me what that might mean.

  We did seem to understand one another. I believed it then, I believe it now. We communicated in some mystical and intuitive way, beyond words, with emotions and feelings. I knew when he was hungry, when he wanted to play. I believed that he knew when I was frightened or sad. He always seemed to do something to cheer me up at those times, or so I convinced myself.

  I brought him scraps from dinner—bread, some pot roast, a piece of apple pie. He loved it. He loved breakfast, too, especially toast and eggs. I got up early every morning to take him outside and feed him. I brought him old gloves to chew on, walked to the butcher near my grandmother’s house to get him a big heavy bone (his tiny teeth barely scratched it). I rubbed his belly, sang him to sleep, hauled him outside to pee and dump twenty times a day. Even then, I understood that the best and quickest way to housebreak a dog was to give him few or no opportunities to go in the wrong place.

  I was as good as my word: I took care of Lucky, cleaned up after him, swatted him with a newspaper like my father told me to when he had a rare accident inside the house, usually near the back door. The newspaper swat was a common method of correcting a dog’s behavior at one time. It is no longer an accepted method, at least not by trainers. Now I know how to use a crate to housebreak a dog—simple and not in any way traumatic.

  Intimidating a dog is not the same thing as training a dog. Using physical abuse to compel a dog to do something can lead to fear, anger, and confusion.

  Lucky got me through a few of those long school days, through Jimmy’s taunts in the recess yard, which didn’t matter to me anymore. I had the dog now. I wrote essays about Lucky in English class, drew sketches in art class, went to the library and researched the history of dogs. When Lucky arrived, I started reading about dogs and I have never stopped. Later on, I started writing about them, and I have never stopped doing that, either.

  Lucky had only been with me for several weeks when he began to grow frail, and I saw right away that he was sick. He threw up his food, started having accidents. He had recurring diarrhea, his eyes were rheumy, and he seemed to weaken. At night, I would sleep downstairs in the kitchen with him. My father brought a mattress down for me to lie on. Lucky wasn’t moving much by then; his breathing was slow, labored. I had a dream one night during his illness. Let me go, he said. I am sorry, but I have to leave.

  When I got home from school one day, I couldn’t find Lucky. There was a note from my mother saying he was sick and he had gone to the dog hospital.

  I went up to my room and cried all night. I knew the minute I saw that note that I would never see Lucky again. It was as if he had told me himself. My miracle was over; the nature of my life had reasserted itself. My heart dropped right through the floor. The walk to school the next morning seemed like the longest walk I had ever taken. I must have looked awful. Even Miss McCarthy stopped me in the hallway and asked me if I was okay, if I needed to go see the nurse and lie down.

  In the world I grew up in, children, like dogs, lived on the margins. I was presumed too fragile and innocent to understand what might befall a dog. Ignorance was protection in some twisted way.

  My parents would not take me to see Lucky, and they would not tell me where he was. They would not tell me what his sickness was or what, if anything, could be done about it. Every time I asked them about it, which was continuously, they said he was being cared for, that there was no news. I stopped asking.

  The next Saturday, my father took me to Rigney’s ice cream parlor on Hope Street and bought me a sugar cone with two scoops of black raspberry. He got a cone also, and we sat at our table, licking away at our cones. They tasted wonderful, even in winter. I had heard my parents talking softly downstairs on and off for days. I knew they were hiding the truth from me. Kids always know.

  I waited.

  “Listen, son,” said my father. “I wanted to tell you that Lucky is very sick. He has something called distemper. It is very serious. Lucky has gone to a farm in Massachusetts where they will take care of him and maybe he will recover. He’ll be happy there. He’s not coming back.”

  My father said that was all he knew, all there was to say about it. The farm did not allow visitors. He was sorry. He knew that I loved the dog. Life is like that, he said. You have to get us
ed to it, you have to learn how it is sooner or later and deal with it; this is a good time to start. Life can be rough; it can throw you curveballs. I asked a lot of questions for a while, but I never got answers or any new information.

  Eventually, I stopped asking and Lucky was never mentioned again.

  So much has happened between then and now, but bonding with and caring for Lucky, my intense early need for this small dog, was a transformative experience for me.

  Lucky taught me my first lesson about the power of animals in our lives, what they can mean for us, what they can do for us. He also taught me never to lie to my daughter about what happens to them.

  As powerful as it was, my experience with Lucky was primitive. It was my first step into the world of animals, only a shadowy view of what was to come. I don’t know if Lucky and I were really communicating. It felt that way, but how can I know looking back after so much time?

  I cannot tell you one thing my teachers taught me in that school, but I can tell you every single thing I felt and learned in my time with Lucky. It is as sharp and fresh as if it had happened yesterday.

  When Lucky left, I started wetting my bed again, but my life was not the same as it had been before. I was not the same. Once you have experienced love, trust, and companionship, you know it’s out there, even if you can’t always find it. Even then, I believed he had come to me with a purpose, and for a reason.

  Lucky showed me there was feeling beyond my isolation and loneliness, love beyond my sadness and fear. He came to show me that I had more strength and resilience in me than I realized. After all, it was me who got the dog in the end. I always believed that was really his purpose in coming to me, to show me what was possible, even in a schoolyard, alone in the dark, surrounded by bigger kids—that in the face of all that, I could do it. I could get the dog. And I did.

  2

  Visualization

  Picturing the Future

  After Lucky, I drifted away from dogs for the rest of my adolescent years. I wouldn’t have another dog again until I got married in my early twenties, when my first wife moved to Washington, D.C., where I worked as a reporter for the Washington Post. This was a time in my life when I was focused on ambition and my professional life. I moved from city to city—Washington, Boston, New York, Dallas, Baltimore—eventually transitioning from newspapers to television.

  Still, the dog we had with us during that time wasn’t really mine—she ultimately belonged to my wife. Other than the occasional walk, she wasn’t a factor in my chaotic, mobile life. Bean was a rescue mutt from a shelter in Virginia. Smart, loyal, energetic, she followed my wife everywhere. I was very fond of her, but we did not connect in the powerful ways that were to become a trademark of my life with dogs and animals. I suppose it’s like romantic love in that way; you find it when you are ready.

  The first transformative dog of my adult years was Julius, who came to me when I decided I could not survive in the corporate world and set out to become a full-time book writer. From Emily Dickinson to Virginia Woolf to E. B. White, writers have loved and needed dogs. They have served as creative muses, sounding boards, and companions in a solitary craft.

  In my mid-thirties, I had become something I always wanted to be. I wrote about media for magazines. I wrote mysteries, novels, and nonfiction books. No more offices, bean-counting bosses, traveling, racing to cover stories, managing newspapers, or appearing on TV news shows. I had come home to myself, and although I didn’t know it at the time, animals were about to become the foundation of my work and my life.

  Although I had spent years in offices and around people, my headquarters for the next decade or so was a dark basement in an old colonial in media-centric Montclair, New Jersey, home to writers, academics, New York Times editors, TV producers, hot-shot agents, and journalists.

  It was a big change, a big risk. I was out on my own. I knew I was going to be alone every day, beset by distractions and temptations. I needed to learn the art of discipline, of motivating myself to get up every morning, get to my new, flashy Apple computer, and write every single day. I decided to start every workday with a walk around my pretty tree-lined block. Montclair is a beautiful suburban town, filled with gracious old homes and wide streets. I thought walking might clear my head, get me set for the working day.

  I never really felt comfortable in the Jersey suburbs, though. I remember feeling odd everywhere I went. I remember being lonely. Although my marriage was beginning to fail, I had no sense of it, no awareness of what was happening to me and around me. But even in the midst of all that uncertainty, I also remember the wonder when I felt a warm nose at my side and looked for the first time into the big, brown, gorgeous eyes of a yellow lab named Jade.

  I had been walking alone when Jade came running up to me as if we’d been friends for years. She was full of joy, her tail wagging, eyes wide with love and greeting. Her owner came running up apologetically, but not in alarm. She knew Jade wasn’t going to harm or frighten me, or run off.

  Caroline was a well-known artist and poet; I knew her name right away. She told me her dog Jade ran with her every morning. I was surprised to see no leash or restraint.

  “She stays with you like that?” I asked, incredulously.

  Caroline told me that Jade was an integral part of her work and daily routine. She kept her company, staved off loneliness, and helped ground her work by running, walking, and sitting with her. Jade was her inspiration and her companion. She could not imagine her life without her.

  This was something of a shock to me. I had never had a dog like that or really heard anyone speak about that kind of relationship with a dog beyond Lucky, but I was very young, and she had not lived long. I did not know there were dogs that would stay with you in a congested town with no leash, or sit with you as you worked, or walk with you as you tried to organize your mind to think and write.

  The idea that a dog might sleep in bed, be cremated at death, or go on vacation was simply beyond imagination or reason. Our dog Bean, who had died a few years earlier, slept downstairs on her dog bed, never came on vacation, and had nothing whatsoever to do with our work.

  Jade awakened me to a completely different vision of animals. I was mesmerized by the idea that this sweet, beautiful creature—something about Jade was soothing and so grounding—was a creative partner, a signpost, a companion. Caroline gave me the name of Jade’s breeder, who lived in Ramsey, New Jersey, and I went out to meet him. Six months later, I went back to Ramsey and came home with the most adorable puppy I had ever seen. He was small, mellow, snow white, soft, and sweet. Even then, he was easygoing.

  I named him Julius, my father’s middle name. He cost six hundred dollars; my grandmother would have fainted dead away. In the car on the way home, Julius put his head on my lap and went to sleep. I could feel us bonding even in that first hour. We were fusing, Julius and I. I had entered a different space, a different universe. I had my first lifetime dog, my heart dog. Julius loved everyone in the world, but he was, from the very first, my dog.

  On my morning walks, he came along, and after three months I took the leash off him; he never once in the years I owned him strayed away, chased another dog, or went into the street without permission.

  Julius enchanted the entire neighborhood; he was adopted by every child and nanny and mom and dad. I had to walk him early or late, because our walks took a long time, since he had so many admirers to meet and greet. His tail was spinning like a rotor blade from the minute we left the house to the time we returned. We often greeted the school bus that stopped in front of our house, and Julius was thronged by squealing kids lining up for a hug or pat. He got quite a few leftover bits of sandwich, too.

  Our walks became a seminal part of my work. During them I would often speak aloud of new characters, story ideas, and plots twists. Walking is one thing; walking with a dog like Julius is something else, a totally different experience. I found it inspiring and comforting. He never strayed too far ahead of me or too
far behind. He paid no attention to other dogs, was easy with people, and loved children to pet and hug him. I never had to worry about him, wonder where he was or what he might do. I trusted him completely. I walked with him in total peace and harmony, free to think about my work, to plan for the day. Whenever I looked over, he was right there, alongside me.

  I worked alone, but I was not alone. I worked in love and companionship. I had never experienced this before. It changed my work for good. Julius changed my life, just as Jade had done for Caroline.

  There was an athletic park near our house where Julius and I made the rounds early in the morning. Every book I wrote in those years, every column idea, was hatched on those walks. After the walks, I’d make myself a cup of coffee and go to work. Julius would come downstairs, curl up at my feet under the glass table, sigh, and settle. As long as my computer was on, Julius never moved. He never barked, never stirred. He simply gave himself over to my need to work. When I got tired or stuck or frustrated, I would stand up and say “let’s take a walk,” and Julius would be up and out the door with me. We would work out the problem together. It was as if he understood what I needed him to do, to be. As if I had communicated the life I wished to have with him, and he accepted and embraced it.

  Julius came to define my transition to life as a full-time writer. There was a special rapport between us, a communication happening through feelings, images, yearnings, signals—the first evidence of what I was later to call visualization.

  Visualization is a daunting term, unnerving and confusing. I encountered it when a therapist advised me to use visualizations to get over the trauma of a divorce that ended a thirty-five-year marriage. I was hesitant at first, but it turns out that in the animal world, visualization is a simple process used frequently both by humans and animals.