Soon, she went back down the hall, though she made sure that John looked in on me throughout the night.
And then, with the heat turned to high and Katie next to me just as she’d been that morning, I drifted off to sleep, ending my day in an infinitely better place than I ever could have imagined.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Party Girls
The next five years whirled by quickly, a string of dinners, shared holidays, and lots of mileage clocked up and down our hallway. It was a happy time for all of us as our little family solidified, reaching its zenith in terms of sheer fun and deep connection.
Ryan was growing taller and running faster, now often beating the determined Katie in races.
“Yesss! Victory!” he’d shout, jumping in the air and high-fiving me as Katie ran around him in circles, breathless in defeat, and ready to try again.
As Ryan matured, he had developed into a rambunctious, athletic eleven-year-old, adept at Little League baseball and utterly consumed with soccer. Proudly outfitted in his uniform—black shorts with an orange T-shirt—he’d run down to Pearl’s apartment, raring to go.
“C’mon Graaaaanny!” he implored, stretching out her name just the way I did it. “There’s a game at noon—and you’ve got to come.”
Pearl would drop everything, put on a red baseball cap and sunglasses, and hike over to the Battery Park City Ball Field a mile away to watch her boy play. There she was, cheering enthusiastically from the sidelines along with John, me, and Katie—who would try to break free from her red leash.
My frustrated dog would have done anything to get into the action, but, instead, she sat at attention, jealously watching the game. Her wet black nose twitched as she followed the players.
The way she nervously kept looking up at me seemed to say, “Dad, let me loose! I gotta get out there. The kid needs me,” which indeed he did.
Afterward, with Ryan still wired up from the game and bursting with energy, he’d slam soccer balls down our 120-foot hallway, showing off his deft footwork as Granny cheered and Katie chased him around, at last relieved to get into the fray.
On weekends, Ryan had friends over from school. No matter how much the boys hooted, hollered, and roughhoused, Katie wasn’t fazed in the least by the ruckus. She’d chase those fifth-graders up and down, keeping an ever-watchful eye on Ryan, growling if one of the boys attempted to wrestle him to the ground.
Despite Ryan’s ability to shake the house down with his soccer kicks and high spirits, he was also an inquisitive, sensitive boy—chatterbox smart, respectful, and very adult for his years.
Although he wasn’t particularly interested in science or math, he liked geography, history, and English—and was all over computers and gadgets.
Blessed with excellent hand-eye coordination, his main interest (continuing to this day) was video games.
He spent hours entertaining himself with his Game Boy, the handheld video game by Nintendo, which he was becoming addicted to. He never left home without the gadget, even when he went down the hall to visit Pearl. This sometimes offended Pearl’s sense of decorum.
“Put that thing away until you’re done eating!” was Pearl’s frequent refrain after Ryan snuck his Game Boy into dinner under his T-shirt, darting repeated glances at it as he ate. Other times, he would switch it off—reluctantly. But he knew his reward would be his favorite chocolate pie, which she only made sometimes as a special treat.
John, of course, was kept apprised of all this, as he frequently conferred with Pearl over that same chocolate pie.
Pearl admired how effectively John managed to balance work with parenting. He was at every teacher-parent conference, helped coach the soccer team, arranged playdates with other parents, and took Ryan to movies, the zoo, you name it.
While John always respected Ryan’s privacy and never entered his bedroom without knocking first, this was a nicety Katie never ascribed to. She would barge her way into his bedroom whenever she got the chance, jumping up on him and distracting him from homework.
I loved listening to Ryan tell me all about school, or watching him read a book in my living room with Katie parked next to him, her head on his lap. I always had my camera handy and wound up taking hundreds of pictures. Katie would stare into the camera, poised as always.
One day, I was in my office at my computer, showing Ryan how to type. Katie looked on, sitting next to us on a desk chair, staring at the keys.
Afterward, Ryan got off his chair and Katie jumped up on it. When I came back into the room a few minutes later, there was Katie, pushing her paws up and down on the keys, “typing” away while staring at the monitor and watching the parade of letters, imitating Ryan as she always did.
“Maybe she can write your next book!” giggled Ryan.
Later that day, when Pearl heard about Katie’s latest caper, she laughed, “Between changing channels on the TV and typing, maybe you can get her on Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
It was during these years that John and I became closer to Pearl than ever as we sat around “home base,” her dining table, savoring the lively conversation and good food that could always be found in 3C.
Although forty years separated us, “Pa-Re-El” was a complete contemporary. She was up-to-date on tennis, golf, and baseball; current on showbiz gossip and the stock market; avidly listened to radio and TV news; and liked to talk about the wonders of the Internet and the “magic” of faxes.
She was also our resident critic, as good as anyone. “Oprah gets it right every time,” she pronounced, “but Geraldo should retire.” Although modern in her thinking, she wasn’t necessarily interested in adopting technology foreign to her, so she had no cell phone and drew the line on computers as well.
Since John was such a computer whiz, he tried to talk Granny into learning how to use one, but she just waved him away with her hand. “What do I need it for? I keep all my recipes in this index box, and when I want to talk to somebody I use the phone or write a letter.” Case closed.
She was, however, much more interested in a before-dinner drink. “I love beer,” she told us, swigging one back, “which is why I bought lots of Anheuser-Busch stock. It’s always a good bet and I’m never going to lose on it.”
“She has opinions on everything,” John would tell me, “and you can’t stop her from offering them.”
“We’d better not try it,” I replied.
One interest that brought me closer to Pearl was an activity that I always had enjoyed (and one she fought me on)—planning at-home parties, the more complicated the better.
We’d sit for hours at her dining table, creating the guest lists, menus, and themes. “I think you’re crazy going to all this trouble,” she’d reply, though she wound up being energized by the prospect of what I had in mind. Secretly, I always thought my party schemes were therapeutic for Pearl, a great way to keep her feeling useful and fully engaged.
One of the most creative was a Halloween dinner for sixteen, complete with towering goblin figures on the table, spooky background music, and scary-looking desserts that tasted better than they looked. Katie came dressed as Cleopatra, with a golden crown on her head and a multicolored doggie caftan.
Ryan loved this party too and raced around the living room in a Batman cape, attempting to scare the crowd while stealing as many orange-frosted cookies as possible. He reveled in all the party action up and down the hall as much as anyone. He may not have had a brother or sister, but he sure had lots of friends of all ages, including many of mine.
One of his favorites was my decorator friend Michael, who had, years before, helped me purchase Baby, the pug that I returned the very next day. Michael had a very wide smile with perfect teeth—and I had always jokingly asked him to “Give me your biggest!”—meaning his exuberant smile.
Ryan caught right onto that, and it became a running joke. When Michael was visiting, he’d playfully goad the little boy, telling him, “Give me your biggest”—and Ryan would break out
into a huge smile, mimicking Michael, the two of them grinning at each other like chimpanzees.
Maybe you had to be there, but it was pretty funny—and Ryan was always slaphappy to see Michael.
“When’s the next party?” Ryan would ask me eagerly, sometimes helping with the name cards or party favors, even when he wasn’t invited.
Granny and I brainstormed for days about a surprise birthday party for fourteen magazine editors honoring my longtime friend Susan Ungaro, then the editor in chief of Family Circle. The owner chef from a local restaurant came on-site to cook the lunch, and Marie Osmond, whom I had interviewed previously, generously supplied the party favors—hand-painted porcelain dolls. “I think you’ve completely lost it,” Granny surmised, delighted nonetheless by the chocolate-raspberry cake, her idea.
The year’s biggest sugar high was Pearl’s annual Valentine’s Day luncheon, where Katie, dressed in a red hat, sat on a chair at the table with her favorite group of eighty-year-olds. She ate a special heart-shaped dog bone while the others had chocolate hearts, all of us on our way to becoming diabetics.
And each year, I hosted a birthday party for my close friend Bud, debonair and movie-star handsome in his eighties. A Broadway-show fanatic, Bud loved it when Pearl would bring over her vintage collection of Broadway programs, reminiscing about productions dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. (Pearl would shoo Katie away when she tried to “peruse” one with her teeth.)
“It was great meeting someone even older than me who could present something from the past,” Bud reflected, “and we always played a little quiz about our favorite shows.”
Pearl had seen nearly every production on the Great White Way, as had Bud. “But my favorite,” she smiled dreamily, showing Bud the original program, “was The King and I because I loved Yul Brynner. There was a man.”
Most of the time Pearl was in a festive mood, and she’d come and stay for the entire party, enjoying it from beginning to end. At other times, she’d make a grand entrance just at dessert time.
Like Ed McMahon introducing Johnny Carson, I’d announce: “Heeeeeeeeeeeere’s Granny!” and into the room she’d burst, Katie at her side, beaming as everyone applauded.
“I have the cutest date in the room,” Pearl once laughed, pointing at Katie as she sat down, plunking my dog on her lap as she took all of my guests in with a discerning, somewhat sardonic look.
In October 1997, I planned an eighty-fifth birthday party for Granny, a lunch for thirty, complete with helium balloons, flowers, place cards, a rented thirty-foot table with ballroom chairs, and a chocolate cake made by one of my favorite bakeries, the Cupcake Café, which specialized in intricately true-to-life buttercream flowers.
“Please don’t bother,” said Granny, resisting such an elaborate party, and disapproving of all the expense. Pearl was the kind of woman who always took a bus, rarely a taxi, who kept a refrigerator filled with leftovers, and who ate out only occasionally, mostly when she was in the mood for the incomparable pastrami at the Second Avenue Deli in the East Village. Otherwise, she was a homebody.
“Anita, I’ve tried and tried to tell Glenn not to be so extravagant, but it only makes him mad,” she told my mom, who had become close friends with Pearl.
“Well,” Mom said, “you can forget about changing him. Even as a kid, he was setting the table for my parties—so just let him do it.”
And she did. On the day of the party, we got Katie all dressed up, just as she always was for every party.
“Which one should it be?” I asked Granny. We had two glitzy doggie dresses to choose from, both gifts from Katie’s modeling jobs. There was either a multicolored sequined dress with a yellow satin collar or a black satin taffeta getup with ruffled fabric at the tail, complete with purple and yellow flowers embroidered all over it.
“They’re both pretty gaudy,” Granny laughed, “but the taffeta—good for afternoon.”
Katie understood that a party was in the works and had no problem donning the costume, expertly so, daintily stepping into it by pushing her paws through the arm holes, then staying still while I attached the Velcro in the back.
Then off she flew down the hall to promenade around the living room of my apartment, racing to the window, twirling in circles, then jumping up on the green-and-beige lounge chair to peruse her kingdom from above. She posed for pictures with Pearl until she got bored, then hung her head over the thick cushion, staring down at the floor as she scratched her ears.
“My little baby looks so pretty!” exclaimed Granny, attractively outfitted that day in blue linen.
And so it was that Granny and Katie were our family’s “party girls,” expert hostesses whose social season peaked with this special birthday party, an affair to remember.
Overexcited, Katie jumped down from the chair in my bedroom, and her tail hilariously stuck out from the black satin ruffles as she skipped back down the hallway to Pearl’s apartment. Ryan and John came by to pick up Katie and Pearl—and Katie raced back down to my apartment with her favorites following from behind. It was a whirl of activity.
That day, Pearl held court amid the ivory and gold balloons, birthday hats, noisemakers, and elephant-and-tiger printed napkins. And despite herself, she was delighted by all the attention.
When the twelve-inch chocolate cake came out, Ryan and a few neighborhood girls quickly surrounded Granny and helped her blow out her candles. Katie pushed her way into the picture as well.
Pearl hugged Ryan tightly, “You’re my boy!”
“Happy birthday, Oldest!”
Pearl’s final words to me?
“I’ve never had a birthday party. Don’t do it again!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Talking Picture Frame
In the late 1990s, after five years of support groups, therapy, and physical rehabilitation, my back (and the depression) had finally healed completely and I was able to return to writing. Instead of a grueling high-pressure newspaper job with tight deadlines and constant travel, however, I switched gears entirely, working from home as a freelance contributor to Family Circle.
It was a perfect fit. Gone were the tabloid stories, the celebrity column, and the movie star interviews. Instead, I now concentrated on what were new niches for me—self-help, inspiration, and service-related articles, all in keeping with my priorities in life—family, friends, and dogs (and not always in that order).
I researched and wrote about whatever intrigued me. Some of my favorite articles included “The Best Decision I Ever Made,” “Are You Looking for the Good Life or the Good in Life?” “Should Your Child Watch TV News?” “How to Be a People Magnet,” “Create the Life You Want,” “The Positive Power of Friendship,” “Putting Gratitude in Your Attitude,” “Why Laughter Is Good for You,” and my all-time favorite—“The Secrets of the Centenarians.” I was fascinated by the phenomenon of longevity.
Reading about a 107-year-old woman in my story, Granny was puzzled. “Why,” she asked me, “did she make a decision to get remarried at ninety-nine?”
I told her what the woman had told me, “Just optimistic, I guess!”
“But her new husband was twenty years younger,” Granny exclaimed, titillated by this golden years romance that included drinking champagne, dancing, and acting together in theatrical productions.
I picked up the magazine and read to Granny the woman’s reason for dating a younger man, “I robbed the cradle! He was lonesome. I wasn’t, but I enjoyed his company so we fell in love.”
Granny, who had no interest in a new suitor, was nonetheless intrigued by this subject. One of the greatest secrets of longevity, aside from genetics, is the ability to shake off stress and stay involved in life, just as Granny had by getting so intimately involved with Katie, John, Ryan, and me. The “centenarian personality,” I had learned, is a mind-set that combines positive thinking and a fighting spirit. That was Granny.
And so, it was during this time that I made up my mind to write an entire artic
le about my relationship with Pearl, and I titled it “Granny Down the Hall: From Friendship to Family.” It was the first and only time, until now, that I’d ever written about my life and the people in it.
The opening lines of the story said it all, “Some of the best things that happen in life are purely accidental. A friendship sometimes develops when you least expect it. That’s what happened to me.”
Here was our story, all about the coincidence of living in the same hallway, about how our little family had been accidentally created and cemented together by my precocious puppy.
Whether it was serendipity, luck, chemistry, or sheer proximity, my first brief encounter with Pearl and the events that followed it had changed my life (and my dog’s) forever.
Writing the article was bittersweet, as the key person who had first introduced me to Pearl was no longer there to read it. Joe, my good friend and dog mentor, had died a year earlier of AIDS. He’d been incredibly brave, fighting to the end by keeping himself active, always looking forward to life—investing in real estate, picking up gardening as a hobby, and getting two new dogs (collies this time) after Dinah died. I would never forget his wisdom and kindness a decade earlier, when he encouraged me to get a dog and taught me how to train one. We all missed him—as he was certainly part of our story.
During the photo shoot for the article (Pearl’s first), we posed at her dining room table. One of Ryan’s arms was around my neck, his other around Pearl’s shoulder, with Katie wedged between us. You couldn’t take a bad picture of Ryan, who was now a lanky and very handsome eleven-year-old, happy-go-lucky and intrigued by all the attention being paid to him.
Although Pearl, Ryan, and John were a little shy about having a magazine photograph taken, Katie sure wasn’t. Now nearly twelve, she was just about as energetic as always. An experienced model, she pushed herself into the center of every frame and stared at the camera, never blinking at the flashes. Betty had groomed her to within an inch of her life, and her blond hair was shining that day, her ears never fluffier. She was an old pro and a big ham.
Katie Up and Down the Hall: The True Story of How One Dog Turned Five Neighbors Into a Family Page 14
