When Harry Met Minnie

by Martha Teichner

  “Where’s Goose?” he asked, pointing down at Minnie. I told him. I said that Goose’s heart had failed and mine was broken, that Minnie was inconsolable, that I’d been looking for an older, male bull terrier to be Minnie’s companion but so far hadn’t found one to adopt.

  He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out his phone. He swiped the screen, paused, then did it again, shaking his head, then again. “Wait,” he said, as he found what he was looking for. He showed me a photograph of Goose and Minnie in their winter coats. The two dogs looked stubbornly uninterested, not just in having their pictures taken, but uninterested in walking, uninterested in anything, as only bull terriers can be. I laughed, thinking … unlike your big, eager golden. “Remind me what your dog’s name is.” “Teddy,” he answered. “Remember, I took this picture to send to my friend Carol, who has a bull terrier?” By this time, he and I were by ourselves, our dogs at our feet. The others had drifted off to do their shopping. “Vaguely, it’s coming back to me,” I replied. I remembered weeks of standing in the cold dressed in so many layers of fleece and down, I felt as if I were wearing an extra person or could pass for the Michelin Man.

  The chunky ring of keys hanging from a heavy chain in his back pocket, the tattoos, and the shaved head contradicted his careful speech, his resonant voice. His beard and mustache were carefully trimmed, sculpted almost, very nineteenth-century gentleman. I’d known him for several years but didn’t know him at all. Who was he? Who was his friend Carol with the bull terrier?

  When I go to the market, I take my iPod, which has a built-in FM radio. I hang it around my neck on a lanyard and listen to NPR’s Weekend Edition starting at eight o’clock. I’m a professional news junkie. I have to be. I stood there with an earbud stuck in one ear, the other one hanging down, half listening to the news, half speculating about this man I hadn’t seen in a long time. I half heard him say, “Carol is dying of liver cancer. She’s desperate to find a home for Harry, her dog. He’s eleven and a half. She’s more concerned about him than she is about herself. He’s got some issues, but he’s very sweet. Would you take him?”

  “What?” Suddenly, I was paying attention. “Say that again.” He repeated what he’d just told me, but this time added, “Nobody wants him. The vet has warned her she should be prepared to have him put down. Would you take him?”

  “Well…” I felt startled and a little light-headed. I knew, I really did, that something big and important had just begun. “Well, maybe, if he and Minnie get along. Possibly.” I suggested getting the two dogs together to meet. He said he had a car and could drive Harry and Carol to my apartment. In spite of the years we’d been acquainted, all those months we’d spent talking, we had to introduce ourselves. Stephen Miller Siegel … Martha Teichner. When I go to the market, I take my passport and all my credit cards out of my wallet and only carry the cash I need and one business card for identification. I handed it to him. He looked at it and took in that I work for CBS News, that I am a correspondent on a show he watches regularly. When I walk my dogs in the morning or go to the farmers market, I look more like a bag lady than the person people see on television. I wear sloppy clothes and no makeup, but even so, people recognize me, often just because they know my voice. Evidently, walking our dogs at Chelsea Piers, Stephen never made the connection, which is fine with me. He gave me his card and said he would contact Carol.

  We went our separate ways. It was a five-minute exchange. That’s it. If I’d been standing somewhere else; if I’d been there at eight forty-five instead of eight-thirty; if it had been raining, and Minnie and I had stayed home, Stephen would not have seen us. In more than two decades of going to the Union Square market practically every Saturday morning, year-round, never, not once, had I ever seen him there before.

  Chance had just made us characters in a remarkable story, a very New York story, about friendship and community … about Life and Death, as gloriously rich and funny as it inevitably turned out to be achingly sad.

  All sorts of circumstances put us in the right place at the right time that July day, as if we’d been destined to be there, random circumstances that had all lined up just so.

  Late that afternoon, I received an email from Carol Fertig telling me that Stephen had been in touch.

  “I believe he told you a bit about my ‘situation’ and my beloved dog/child Harry.… Nothing would make me happier than knowing he would have a loving home to go to.”

  We agreed to meet the following Saturday.

  two

  INTELLIGENCE GATHERING

  Suddenly, I was nervous. What was I getting myself into? Why was this beginning to remind me of online dating for dogs? Or two overly protective mothers trying to arrange a marriage?

  A lot of emails went back and forth.

  I sent a reply to Carol. I asked her to tell me about Harry, how old he was, whether he had health issues, if he got along with other dogs. She sent me this email the next morning:

  From: Carol Fertig

  To: Martha Teichner

  M—So since last night I have been trying to figure out how I could succinctly describe Harry to you … an impossible task.

  So, I thought I might as well get the “CONS” out of the way:

  1. He takes meds; puppy Zoloft (he was a problem child apparently too much testosterone, he has now mellowed and is a big wooz) and Phenobarbital. He has taken these for years and have totally helped his “issues”-like going ballistic over skate boards and rolling suitcases. He takes Rymadyl for arthritis and Tynell (I think that’s the name) for colitis. Dr. Farber is always impressed with his blood work and what good shape he is in.

  2. I have trained Harry very well, he is a great listener but he does have a problem with large dogs. I have adjusted my own “radar” to keep an eye on this but I do have to be watching. Again, he is great with smaller dogs, always wagging his tail and wanting to engage-he especially loves those Frenchies.

  3. I don’t know if you have occasion to have a hose in your life, but if you do you can be sure he will destroy it as an act of protection of you. He also does this on the street if he sees someone using one in the street.

  4. He has a sensitive stomach so eats Dr. Hills special food. I order from Chewy.com every few weeks.

  All this to say he is on some level a money pit.

  EXCENTRICITIES

  When he was about 4 months old Harry discovered a metal bowl at the dog park. It has been in his life ever since. He is incredibly smart and after a time he figured out he could put a tennis ball (or 2) in the bowl and flip it out and catch it. He does this for hours and will entertain (or not) guests for hours with this “trick.” I am going to send you videos of Harry with his bowl under separate cover.

  PROS

  1. He is at heart a big wooz, a love bug, a big baby.

  2. He is so great with kids. The kids in my building adore him, they sit on him, stroke him, kiss him etc.

  3. He is outgoing to friends (am sure your BT’s the same, they are indeed clowns).

  4. He is so smart. He will figure out ways to let you know exactly how he feels (if I try to get him to do a second poop on the street and he doesn’t want to he will just lay down in the street and not move until I finally give in and take him home).

  5. Like all BTs he is relentless, notice how I put this under pros, it is one of the things I love about the breed. Having said this, he can tell by your tone what he should and should not do and will abide by your wishes.

  6. He has a gentle bite.

  Again, I am going to send you a number of short videos so you can see some of this for yourself.

  I hope this is helpful.

  Also, I am going to call Dr. Farber tomorrow to get his take on all this.

  Again, looking forward.

  Xc and H

  A weird coincidence on top of a weird chance encounter … Carol and I took our dogs to the same vet, Dr. Michael Farber. I asked her to give him permission to talk to me about Harry. I said I would
allow her to discuss Minnie and me with him. A breach of doctor/patient confidentiality in the name of matchmaking … and to calm what I realized was our mutual uneasiness.

  A money pit? An animal who was obsessive-compulsive, had arthritis and chronic colitis, and attacked bigger dogs? Oh, dear. Good with kids though. I don’t have any kids. Who in their right mind would look at Harry’s list of pros and cons and think he’d be a good candidate for adoption?

  Only a bull terrier lover.

  On Sunday, Carol sent me a cell phone video of Harry putting multiple tennis balls into a metal bowl and waving it around, another of him attacking a hose on somebody’s balcony, and a third of an unseen person (Carol) flinging his metal bowl like a Frisbee, the bowl clanging as it hits concrete, and Harry racing after it. I could see that he was mostly black and white. I sent her photos of a sleeping Minnie, white on white in my bathtub, where she likes to go when it’s hot.

  Carol replied:

  OMG, those chunky little legs!!!! That Minnie!

  Have put a call in to Dr. FARBER, will respond more fully once I have spoken with him.

  Xc and H

  On Monday, Dr. Farber reassured Carol that I am competent at dog care and would be a good dog stepmother for Harry. He admitted to me he’d advised Carol she had to come to terms with the likelihood she would have to have Harry put down, that it would be impossible to “rehome” him. Who would want an eleven-and-a-half-year-old dog with all those issues?

  So, I thought, not only had Carol been told she had terminal cancer; if that wasn’t nightmare enough, now she had to face the probability that the dog she loved more than anything would have to die, too, just because she was dying. What a horrible, double calamity. Dr. Farber didn’t try to talk me into taking Harry. He did say Harry was sweet, his issues manageable, and that if we were careful about how we introduced Minnie and Harry, they would probably get along. He suggested short meetings, then longer visits, working up to sleepovers.

  That night I dreamed Goose was alive. We were sitting in the back of a car. I was holding him. He was young, healthy, warm, his snuffly, sturdy, gentle self. When I woke up, and it wasn’t true, I was desolate. I tried to wish the dream back, but it wouldn’t come.

  Carol and I decided to introduce the dogs the following Saturday.

  In the meantime, I googled her. A bonanza. The first item to come up was from a website called New York Social Diary, dated January 2013, a long interview with all kinds of pictures. There was Carol sitting on a sofa with Harry draped across her lap. Harry with his metal bowl and tennis balls. Her Maine coon cat, Bruno. (A cat, too? Hmmm.) Objects Carol had designed. Objects Carol had collected. Her eclectic, stylish apartment. In her snug study, painted in a color called tangerine, a whole wall with photos and clippings pinned to it, pictures of fashionable people and clothing and furniture, castles, flowers, a Roman bust. Vogue magazine legend Diana Vreeland very much in evidence. Here and there snapshots of Carol dressed and made up to look like Vreeland, in Vreeland-like poses. The wall reminded me of storyboards I’d seen clothing designers use to inspire a look or a season, but covered with much, much more of everything, a thick clutter of ideas, overlapping like shingles on a roof. In the photographs, I saw shelves jam-packed with books surrounding an artfully arranged stack of a dozen or so orange Hermès boxes.

  I clicked again and up came an article from 2012 in Elle Decor magazine about her apartment, a rental in what used to be the headquarters of JPMorgan, across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. Wow … no internationally known decorating magazine would do a story on my apartment. I scrolled down and found a page with a red logo at the top that said THE MET and then, under the heading “All Collection Records,” a picture of a coat made out of pieced-together panels of rust and black wool. Date: early 1980s. Designer: Carol Fertig. Carol had a garment in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another wow.

  I learned from my search that she’d designed clothing but also lots of other things: furniture, home accessories, even jewelry. She’d done brand strategy for a who’s who in the fashion world, a bunch of those glamorous names whose ads for clothes and fragrances you have to page through before getting to the table of contents in magazines such as Vogue or Vanity Fair. In one interview, she admitted to being “addicted to television.” In the mid-1980s, she was one of the founders of a magazine called New York Woman.

  Peering at the pictures of Carol with her short, curly gray hair, in her big, owly glasses, I realized that I’d met her, long ago, sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s. Then, she had a different bull terrier, an all-white one. I was walking up Tenth Avenue one hot summer Sunday and came upon them at a restaurant with outdoor tables. I would tend to remember anyone with a bull terrier, but these two were singular. Carol was an imposing figure sitting there. She wore an extravagant, floppy-brimmed straw sun hat and giant dark glasses. The hazy snapshot in the back of my mind was of someone who looked slightly eccentric, flamboyant, wearing a dress that was ample and unconventional in some way. I explained to her that I, too, had a bull terrier, who was at home. His name was Piggy. She introduced the barrel-chested dog at her feet as Violet. Violet is not a name anyone would ever forget when attached to a bull terrier.

  Bull terriers are odd dogs. With their egg-shaped heads, slitty eyes, and pointy ears, they’re funny looking. Think Spuds MacKenzie or the Target dog. BTs are opinionated, exuberant, stubborn, extremely silly, and loving, but at times too smart for their own good. What does that say about bull terrier owners? Every BT person I’ve ever met admits liking that these animals are subversive by nature. So right away, I figured that I understood something about Carol and that we’d get along.

  I felt a little sneaky looking her up on the internet, but not that sneaky. Just about every time now I do an interview, the interview subject arrives with the printed-out results of a Google search and knows as much about me as I do. I’m sure Carol looked me up, too. She would have found out that I started at CBS News in 1977, that I’ve reported from all over the world: Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and southern Africa. For more than a dozen years I was sent practically everywhere there was a war. She might have turned up a black-and-white photograph of me in a helmet sitting cross-legged in the Saudi desert during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, a tank shadowy behind me as I write in a reporter’s notebook, or another, taken in 1988 on my fortieth birthday. I’m facing a cameraman about to do an on-camera. We’re surrounded by what look like walking skeletons, victims of a civil war in Mozambique that lasted more than twenty years. They’d silently appeared out of the bush, most of them naked, at a camp where the charity CARE was offering them food. I remember interviewing a woman that day who was so emaciated that I could see her pulse through her chest, her heart beating just under her skin. I’ve been at CBS Sunday Morning since the end of 1993. It’s been much safer.

  If Carol had googled “Martha Teichner bull terriers,” she would have seen a picture of me with Minnie and Goose, our heads together, all of us smiling.

  * * *

  AS SATURDAY APPROACHED, I realized how much I wanted it to work out between Harry and Minnie. There were good arguments, a lot of them, against taking Harry, even if the two dogs got along. But I heard myself trying to rationalize away his negatives, trying to discount the fact that I would have Harry for the sad years of his life, the even more expensive years. I would be the one, not Carol, who would have to make the decision someday to put him to sleep. I was sure I would love him enough to be torn to pieces … again, when I had to hold him in my arms as he died, just as I was shattered when that moment came for Goose. I tried to be realistic, to put the brakes on my excitement, but I couldn’t.

  Minnie, I knew, wouldn’t accept a younger dog. She doesn’t like puppies, so the right companion for her had to be older, a dog who, almost certainly, would have issues, just as Harry did.

  And there was another reason I was fighting my better judgment. My mother’s dog, Winkie.

/>   He was a Cairn Terrier, gray, like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, the last in a succession of Cairns my mother had over decades. When she retired to a house I’d bought her near Charleston, South Carolina, Winkie developed allergies so severe, his sides had nothing but patchy wisps of hair, more scabby skin than fur. He was only allowed outside on a fenced wooden deck that was always swept clean, so he wouldn’t come in contact with grass or pine straw, which would make his allergies worse. Walks were forbidden. Nothing helped, not his weekly medicated baths, not the prednisone, which made him incontinent.

  Winkie was timid. He trusted my mother but practically no one else. Even when he was a puppy, it took coaxing before he allowed me to pet him or play with him. He liked it when I put him in a shoulder bag and carried him around under my arm. He felt secure and would lick my face.

  My mother lived a solitary life. She and Winkie had each other. It was enough, until my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1990. I was living in London. I flew to Charleston and stayed with her for her surgery and as long as I could afterward. I was back for her second surgery a year later, when the colon cancer had spread to her liver, and for almost all the other times she was in the hospital. I was there, taking care of Winkie, and then I wasn’t. An aunt also came and went, but too many times Winkie was alone in the house with a couple of lights left on for hours and hours and sometimes all night. When the person paid to come in and care for him arrived to feed him or let him out, he would hide under my mother’s bed.