Julie Klam - You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness

Table of Contents

ALSO BY JULIE KLAM

The humans have tried everything. Now its up to us dogs!

Danny, 101 Dalmatians

LESSON ONE

How to Find the Right One for You

One night I dreamed I had a dog. He was a Boston terrier, not stocky, but substantial, with a good face. He came slow-motion scampering through the high grass and wild daisies of my sleep. He was perfect in every way, and I instantly felt an unexplainable future love for him, the kind Id always imagined Id feel when I met my soul matethe Sonny to my Cher. His eyes were big Os and it looked like his face was spelling O-T-T-O, so I knew that had to be his name, and that I had to go find him.

I was thirty, living alone in Manhattan, and employed part-time as a clerk in an insurance company. The only thing I felt sure of was that I wasnt where I was supposed to be. With no career and no boyfriend, I had the feeling that I was waiting for my life to start, and I needed something special to show me how to make it happen.

I believed everything was a sign. I went to my parents house and found a Close Encounters of the Third Kind T-shirt in the attic that Id never seen before and thought, Maybe Im going to work with Steven Spielberg... or be contacted by aliens; or Id buy a pair of pants and find a square of paper in the pocket that said INSPECTED BY 34, and think, Ill meet my husband when Im thirty-four, or, I need to lose thirty-four pounds.

After the Otto dream, I called my friend Barbara at work because I knew shed understand. We were both going through a period of fogginess in our lives and were looking for clarity, which we chose to seek in the reliable forms of psychics, seers, tarot card readers, crystal goddesses, and astrologers. We were certain that definitive answersperhaps in the guise of a nice Michelin road mapwere laid out somewhere. All we wanted was to know what was going to happen so we could stop worrying about it. Was that so much to ask? We just needed names, dates, and locations. My mother, who worked as a healer, had a steady stream of recommendations, though she always emphasized our lives were ours to do with what we wanted. But we didnt know what we wanted. We wanted someone to tell us.

Id call my mom up and say, Bad news, Im not going to meet my husband for five years. I might as well just stay home and watch TV.

No, she explained, you are in charge of your own path. All of the great yogis say you have free will; these are just suggestions of what may happen if you do nothing.

Oh good, so I wont necessarily die in a hang-gliding accident?

Why would you be hang gliding? Youre definitely not going to die hang gliding because you wont be going hang gliding! What are you, Bruce Willis? Even though she was a healer, she was a Jewish mother first.

But this Otto dream seemed significant and I wanted Barbaras take.

Is that the kind of dog that looks like a cat?

Yes, I said, kind of like a cat and an old man combined.

Oh, I think thats the kind of dog Michael has. She held her hand over the mouthpiece and asked Michael, her funny, gay coworker, if Buster was a Boston terrier. I heard him say yes and start espousing his virtues. Then she asked me if I wanted to know where he got it.

Sure, I said and waited while she got the breeders name and number, thinking that this all figured into the magic; I mean, what were the chances that a guy who worked in Barbaras office had the very same kind of dog I dreamed about?

I did some research on Boston terriers to see if theyd work as an apartment dog and what their shedding ratio was. I was in luck: in the book Finding the Breed Thats Right for You, Bostons got five out of five stars in the categories of apartment suitability and hypoallergenicity.

I found out that the Boston terrier originated when an English bulldog and an English terrier were bred and then the product was bred with a bulldog. Though they were not intentionally bred for it, Bostons have a very pronounced loyalty to their masters. Because they looked like they were wearing tuxedos, they were nicknamed the American Gentleman. Though Im not the formal type, their look was very appealing to me. Id seen them in early silent films and they felt old-fashioned and classic. They were kind of like Harold Lloyd as dog. And they were very popular around New York City during my grandparents childhood, which made them even more comforting to me.

A few days later, armed with my vast knowledge of Bostons, I gave the breeder a call. Were not doing Boston puppies anytime soon, were concentrating on Frenchies, she said, referring to the Bostons cousin the French bulldog. But were involved with Boston terrier rescue. Do you know what that is? I said yes even though I didnt. I sort of figured it had to do with rescuing Boston terriers in peril. You know, stuck up in trees, stranded on ice floes.

Were fostering a young male, about a year and a half, and the people who were supposed to take him never showed up. She said hed been on the street for a long time when he was brought into the shelter in the winter; he still had summer fleas, and mange, and was skin and bones. They were nursing him back to health, and with all hed been through, hed never, not once, had an accident in the house. He really is a wonderful dog, she said, adding, All he really needs is a little love, which made me imagine the dog version of the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Weve been calling him Buddy. His ears droop over; hes definitely not show quality, but if you dont care about that, then hes perfect. While I talked to her I wrote down on a piece of paper ears, show quality, and Buddy. I dont know if I shouted, Ill take him! or if it just felt like that. It turned out the people who stood him up the day before called a few minutes after me but the breeder said it was too late. Another girl was coming to get him. Me.

He was way out in Pennsylvania, though, and I had to get someone to drive me there.

When I hung up I said, Am I getting a dog?

I was convinced that doing anything to shake up my world would help with the at-sea feeling permeating every aspect of my life. I really wanted to meet a guy, and all of the conventional ways, like hanging out in bookstores and coffee bars and taking classes in biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History and, the one I did most, sitting in my apartment watching TV, werent working. I needed to find something to get me out and about that wasnt so contrived. Id grown up with dogs, but they were huge English mastiffs that I was terribly allergic to. I liked them as much as you can like anyone whose mere presence gives you an acute asthma attack. Recently I had started looking into the hypoallergenic breeds. Apparently poodles were fine, but I wasnt crazy about them despite the claims that they are the smartest breed of dog. (I never understood how that was determined. Were they found by their owners hooking up Bunsen burners and pouring liquids into flasks?) I believe that different dog breeds speak to different people. The first time Id seen a Boston was in a black-and-white photo with the actor/comedian Chris Elliott that hung in his foyer. I babysat for his kids and when they were asleep, I stared at the photo, captivated. When I asked Chris about it, he said the dog was just a prop for the photo shoot, but he remembered he was cute as a button. As loopy as it may sound, every time since then that I passed a Boston terrier on the street, I felt a little tug, a small flat-faced voice saying to me, You and I should be together.