by Julie Klam
At night the dogs would sleep in my brother Matt’s room. He was the animal kid. His long body would be smashed against the wall by Lioness or Reggie, the largest of our mastiffs (weighing in at a lithe 160 pounds), who slept on his side, legs splayed, giant head on his pillow, managing to utilize more of the bed real estate than Matt ever could. It’s a thing about sleeping with dogs I’ve noticed over the years that is similar to sleeping with children; you can move them to a spot that’s better for you a million times, but they always spring back to where they were like a bungee cord off a bridge. Matt once broke up a fight between Lioness and a newer mastiff puppy, Thumper. They’d gone at it a couple of times, and this time it was when Matt was alone in the kitchen, having just come in from feeding the horses. Breaking up a fight is not a good thing to do, but I’ve also done it. As much as you know you shouldn’t, sometimes you can’t help it. And Matt’s arm got severely chomped and he needed a bunch of stitches. He still has the bite marks today.
It was definitely a Katonah thing, the multitude of big dogs. Like a Ralph Lauren ad, the picture wasn’t complete without the oversized, khaki- and sienna-colored canines. I remember sitting at our pool watching Reggie, the largest mastiff we had, lying down beside our chaise longue in the sun, his long tongue lolling out every so often to lick up some ants. Mastiffs also have a unique type of drool, dense and hanging in long curtains from their little black lips, usually containing particles of dirt or leaves or, if they’ve been lying on my floor, a sequin or a sparkle. But the massiveness of the dogs was sort of specific to the country life. I always appreciated my friend Barbara. She’d come over to my house and yell, “Get them away from me!” At least she was honest.
My relationship with our dogs was strained as a kid. Mastiffs have triple coats and shed in sandy clumps of hair tumbleweeds. I unfortunately had asthma and allergies, so much of my connection to them happened from a distance. If I would pet one, my eyes would water and my nose would tickle. Yet I still had great love for them even from afar. Not unlike my crush on Timothy Hutton. Lioness was the dog I’d known the longest. We got her when I was four, right before we moved to Katonah. She had the most Nana-like personality; my father often told stories of how she watched us kids in the pool or followed us on sleigh-riding trips.
On the opposite end of the size spectrum, we had an odd-looking cairn terrier mix. We got her because a friend’s cairn had been “knocked up” by something long and flat, and they had free puppies. It was one of those oh-what-the-heck things. Her name was Meatball. My brother Matt rechristened her “Peenie,” like he did with every dog we had—none of them went by their Christian names; they all had their “Matthew names” (Lioness and Reggie were both called “Hoady”; Misty was called “Mewdance”) and those seemed to win.
Peenie had a wise, Yoda-like quality. My grandmother said she was horrible-looking and called her “the broom dog.” She did have some very strange hair, kind of matted but thick and coarse like a Before picture in a shampoo ad. She always had sticks and prickers from the yard attached to her, and she’d regularly saunter into the house with a branch attached to her leg. My aunt Phyllis defended her, calling her “the elegant dog.” She had the immovable grace and dignity found in African herd animals like elk and wildebeests, even after she frequently and tragically got skunked. We watched her turn every new dog that came into our homes into her apprentice. She would teach them to behave, to not be afraid, and to roll in dead things. Upon turning fifteen, Peenie started to show her age. She didn’t go for long walks and she’d sit in the sand by my parents’ pond for the whole day. My mother talked about the end coming and we all worried about how it would go, but she kept on month after month and year after year. One November morning, my mother let her out and watched her from the window. She went not to the rolling grasses in front of the house like she normally did, but to a wooded area, filled with briars, not trails. Creeping under an expansive raspberry bramble, she disappeared, nobly going off to die alone.
No one would have ever looked at her and thought, She is going to be the best dog you ever have. And more often than not, you don’t end up getting the dog that you want. You get the dog that you need.
From Otto, who showed me I could be in a reciprocal nurturing relationship, to Dahlia, who proved that life continues to surprise (and that you can drop the jaw on the most jaded New Yorker when your senior bitch gives birth), each dog in my life has brought me something or taught me a lesson that improved the quality of my life. I am richer in every way because of the dogs I’ve known.
A week before Thanksgiving, Paul’s uncle, a scholar and collector of antiquities, passed away. He was twice divorced, with no children and no pets. An isolated misanthrope, but one who was always delighted to see Otto and later Beatrice. He left behind a rent-controlled seven-room apartment on West End Avenue (two blocks from our apartment though we’d never been inside) overflowing with his collections—hundreds of paintings, books, militaria, ephemera, coins, pretty much anything you’ve ever seen at an auction or flea market. (Think Collyer brother.) Due in part to his poor health over the last several years, the majority of his purchases remained in their original packaging. Paintings wrapped in brown paper and twine, postcards in bags, a dozen sabers under the couch hidden by crumpled-up newspapers. It fell to Paul and his brothers (and wives) to do the excavating. The first day Violet and I came and helped, but between the dust and the impenetrable clutter, it was impossible for us to stay too long. Besides, we needed to walk the dogs.
We went home and picked them up and headed toward the park. On Riverside we passed a man in his sixties who from his stance I recognized as “not a dog lover.” Violet and I pulled the dogs over to the side so he could pass, but not before he looked me in the eye, motioned to my pack, and said with great irritation, “What is the point?”
I ignored him, and Violet and I kept walking. “Mom, why didn’t you answer him?”
That’s the thing about kids: they’re constantly forcing you into “teachable moments.” I turned around, and the man was still glaring. I said, “Well, the National Institutes of Health has proven that owning pets has significant health benefits including the boosting of survival rates for coronary care patients. Dog ownership promotes regular exercise, being near a dog lowers its owner’s blood pressure, and when a person interacts with a dog, the central nervous system releases several hormones that cause feelings of pleasure—included in that is oxytocin.”
Mr. Cranky brushed me off, but Violet was very happy I defended our herd.
Later I told the story to Paul, who was sitting on the couch with the dogs. He asked me not to talk to crazies anymore and then started interviewing the dogs in his William F. Buckley accent. He took turns asking each of them, “What is your point?”
The dogs tend to get very excited when they’re being interviewed. So they were jumping, wiggling, yipping, and grabbing toys and dropping them on Paul’s lap. Fiorello got so excited, he peed a little. Violet and I were laughing hysterically. Their point, it seemed to all of us, was pretty evident.
Acknowledgments
Even though she’s a cat person, I am down on my knees with gratitude to my dear friend and agent, Esther Newberg. There would just be nothing without her. Standing ovation for Megan Lynch, my editor, whose brilliance and good grooming could stand up to any poodle anytime! Huzzahs to Geoff Kloske, captain of the Riverhead Dream Team (RIV-ER-HEAD! RIV-ER-HEAD!). Enormous thanks to Mih-ho Cha for her unimaginable smarts and endless kindness, and to everyone else at Riverhead Books.
Rainbows, unicorns, and hearts to Barbara Warnke, Jancee Dunn, Gigi Levangie Grazer, Lizzie Skurnick, Margaret Fox, Kristin Moavenian, Sadie Resnick, Mandi Zuckerman, Molly Jong-Fast, Amy Harmon, Brenda Copeland, Kate Christensen, Patty Marx, Ken Foster, Deborah Copaken Kogan, Hyatt Bass, Martha Broderick, Diane Sokolow, Sam Sokolow, Robin Green, Joy Riley, Sheryl Trent, Northeast Boston Terrier Rescue, Lynda Barry, Emma Straub, John T. Smith, John Lewis, Elisabeth Albert, Arth
ur Einstein, Arthur Phillips, Leslie Verbitsky, Megan Gliebe, Jen Maxwell, Ann Binstock, Haley Fox, Susan Roxborough, Wendy Hammond, Claudia Glaser-Mussen, Abby Weintraub, Nicole Leibman, David Rakoff, Rich Cohen, Jessica Medoff, Dan Menaker, Patrick Brown, Bethanne Patrick, Erin McHugh, Kimberly Burns, Marian Brown, Carrie Fisher, Victoria Comella, Sarah Bowlin, Kari Stuart, Mattie Matthews (the savior to my dogs), and my brother Brian for coming up with the title.
All the luff in the world to my family (especially my sweet baby Violet Jean) and to all of the people who rescue animals.
