Barry - Lessons from Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog

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Ive always been a dog person. When I was a boy our family had a standard poodle named Mistral, which is a French word for a cold northwesterly wind. The name wasnt our idea. Nobody in my family had ever been to France; we were the kind of family who would name a dog Buster. Mistral was named by his previous owners, a wealthy family who gave him to us because they could no longer keep him. When we got him, he was a pampered indoor dog who had one of those professional poodle hairstyles with the ridiculous poofs, including one on his head. I believe Mistral was embarrassed about how he looked, as if hed gotten invited to a dog party where the invitation said, Come in a wacky costume! and he was the only dog who did.

But after a short while in the Barry household, wrestling with us Barry kids and racing around in the woods and marshes behind our house and never receiving any kind of even semiprofessional grooming, Mistral was transformed from a foo-foo house dog into a red-blooded, slobbering, leg-humping, free-range American dog so shaggy and filthy that it would not have been surprising to see soybeans sprouting from his coat.

I had a special bond with Mistral because I illegally fed him under the table at suppertime. As a child I was a very picky eater; the only foods I really liked were vanilla ice cream and ketchup.cold green slimy alien spheres, an abused child with nothing to look forward to except a slow death by starvation.

That changed when we got Mistral. At suppertime he would camp underneath the table in front of me and wolf down anything I slipped himmeat, fish, pasta, the occasional napkin, even vegetables, including brussels sprouts. In those days there was a TV show called Lassie , wherein every week a boy named Timmywho was, with all due respect, an idiotwould get stuck in a well, or fall into some quicksand, or get into some other dire predicament. Then his faithful collie, Lassie, would race back to the farmhouse and bark at Timmys parentswho were not themselves rocket scientistsuntil they finally figured out, with some difficulty (Whats wrong, girl? Are you hungry?), what Lassie was trying to tell them, even though this happened every single week . So theyd go rescue Timmy, and everybody would praise Lassie for being a hero.

To my mind Mistral was way more heroic. Any dog can run around barking. But show me the episode where Lassie eats Timmys brussels sprouts.

So I was a dog lover from the start. Our next family dog after Mistral was Herbie, who was a mixed breed, a cross between a German shepherd and an aircraft carrier. He was huge . Fortunately he was also very affectionate, although sometimes his rambunctiousness intimidated visitors who didnt know that he was harmless.

Herbie! we would shout. Put the UPS man down RIGHT NOW!

And usually he would. Good boy!

In my adult years Ive had a series of dogs, each of them, in his or her own way, the Best Dog Ever. For a while I even had two dogs: a large main dog named Earnest, and a smallish emergency backup dog named Zippy. I wrote a number of columns about these two, the gist of these columns being: These are not the brightest dogs.

Take the matter of going outside in the morning. This is a very big thing for dogs, because its a chance to race around sniffing to determine where other dogs have made weewee, so they can make weewee directly on top of those places. Every dog on Earth is engaged in a relentless never-ending struggle with every other dog on Earth to establish weewee dominance. Its an immense responsibility.

So anyway, I used to let Earnest and Zippy out via a two-stage procedure. Stage One was, I opened the back door, which led to the patio. This patio was surrounded by a screen enclosure, which is necessary in South Florida to prevent the mosquitos from making off with your patio furniture. Earnest and Zippy would race across the patio to the screen door and wait there, eagerly, for Stage Two, which was when I opened the screen door, and they were able to sprint outside and commence weewee operations.

We used this procedure for several years; Earnest and Zippy totally understood it. Then, in 1992, Hurricane Andrew roared through our neighborhood, and when it was gone, so was the patio screen enclosure.

But the screen door was still there.

Just the door, standing alone in its frame at the edge of the patio, with nothing around it.

How do you think Earnest and Zippy responded to this new situation, when it was time to go out in the morning? If youre a dog person, you have already guessed. Id open the back door, and the two of them would sprint to the screen doorwhich I remind you was surrounded by nothingand stand there, waiting for me to open it . I swear I am not making this up. It took them a couple of weeks to fully comprehend that they no longer needed to follow the two-stage procedure for going outside.

Earnest and Zippy provided me with a lot of entertainment. They were a comedy team, like a low-IQ version of Abbott and Costello. Sometimes when I was working theyd settle down snoozing on opposite sides of my office doorEarnest usually inside with me, Zippy outside in the hallway. Theyd lie quietly, sometimes for hours, while I tapped away on my keyboard.

Suddenly, one of them would be activated by something. Dogs do this; theyll be sound asleep, then, for no apparent reason, theyll leap up, barking furiously. My theory is that theres a Dog Satellite orbiting the Earth, emitting signals that only dogs can hear as it passes over. Whatever it was, one of my dogs, usually Earnest, would hear it and start barking. This would awaken Zippy, on the other side of the door. He assumed Earnest was barking at something important, so he would start barking and leaping against the door, trying to get it to open so he could come in and help Earnest bark at whatever it was. Hearing this, Earnest would assume Zippy was barking at something important, and she (Earnest was female) would start leaping against the door from her side, which would make Zippy even more excited.

Now the two of them were hurling their bodies against the door in an escalating frenzy of dog alertness, by which I mean stupidity. They would keep this up until I got up and opened the door. Earnest would then bolt out of the office, barking; Zippy would charge into the office, also barking. The two of them would eventually conclude that there was no threat, or that they had scared it away. Id close the door and theyd resume snoozing on opposite sides of it, and the office would be peaceful again, until the next transit of the Dog Satellite.

So Earnest and Zippy were not geniuses. But they were fine dogs, and I was sad when I lost custody of them via divorce. I then entered a period of doglessness that lasted for ten years. When I remarried, I tried repeatedly to convince Michelle that we needed a dog, but she had never had a dog and was firmly opposed to getting one. Her view was that dogs are dirty, smelly animals that bark and slobber and chew things and jump up on you and deposit turds all over your yard.