Dana Jennings - What a Difference a Dog Makes: Big Lessons on Life, Love and Healing from a Small Pooch

ALSO BY DANA JENNINGS

NONFICTION

Sing Me Back Home

FICTION

Lonesome Standard Time
Women of Granite
Mosquito Games

CHILDRENS

Me, Dad & Number 6

DOUBLEDAY

Copyright 2010 by Dana Jennings

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Frontispiece photograph by Deborah Feingold

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Jennings, Dana Andrew.
What a diffference a dog makes : big lessons on life, love, and
healing from a small pooch / by Dana Jennings. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Jennings, Dana Andrew. 2. ProstateCancer
PatientsNew JerseyBiography. 3. Miniature
poodleNew JerseyAnecdotes. 4. Human-animal
relationshipsAnecdotes. I. Title.
RC280.P7J46 2010
362.196994630092dc22
{[B]}
2010018632

eISBN: 978-0-385-53284-6

First Edition

v3.1

For my wife, Deborah
forever and ever, amen

In their mysterious and muttish ways, our dogs become our teachers. When I think about Bijou, I realize that besides being the family dog, she has also been a life coachan accidental Zen master, if you will.

If you pay close attention to your dogs behavior, there are any number of simple and useful lessons to be learnedproving that it isnt necessary to spend thousands of dollars and burn a month at some rarefied mountain retreat to find true enlightenment.

Some dogs are Seeing Eye dogs, but Bijou has opened our eyes and she has become our Seeing Life dog.

She has, for example, taught us:

Nap in the sun whenever possible.

Play, even when youre old and creaky.

And live in the moment: Eat when youre hungry. Drink when youre dry. And be sure to attach yourself to a visitors leg when the spirit moves you. (Yes, Bijou is a female, but shes a dominant female.)

These are just a few of the lessons from Bijou that we have taken to heartwell, except for the part about the visitors leg.

But rather than squander all of her wisdom in a single chapter, I have seeded Bijous nuggets to live by throughout this book, between chapters. And if you want to skip ahead and read them firstlike tasty doggie treatsgo right ahead.

I myself have one more teaching to go with Bijous. The dust-encrusted clich tells us to stop and smell the roses. But I say: Stop and pet the dog. I always make sure I give Bijou a friendly rub before I head out the door in the morning.

Our dogs constantly surprise us. They are our four-legged verbs: They dance when we come home from work, they fetch when we fling the ball, and they come running and panting when we call their names. Dogs are miracles in the momentthey teach us, in fact, that each moment is an absolute miracleand they live in the eternal present. They dont fret over past mistakes, or dwell on past glories, either. The future is always now.

We invite our dogs into our lives as just the family pet, but often they end up being canine candles that blaze and shine, illuminating our lives. My familys furry candle is a miniature poodle named Bijou de Minuit (Jewel of Midnight), and over the years she has taught us countless lessons about life, love, and healing.

Besides being the family dogthe only role we ever expected of herBijou has been a drinking buddy and a fuzzy shrink, an alarm clock and an angel of mercy, a sleeping partner and a sun worshipper, bunny-lunger and carcass-snuffler, beggar-dog and thief, ear-sniffer and tail-chaser, and, in the end, a devoted mystery with a cold black nose.

When my younger son, Owen, and I were both seriously illhim with liver failure, me with an aggressive prostate cancerBijou became even more than verb and miracle. She was a healing presence in our lives. Believe me, when your life is reduced to a large question mark, nothing feels better than having a twenty-three-pound mutt snuggled up next to you. Owen and I both profoundly understand what a difference a dog makes.

The summer that I recovered from radical surgery, Bijou would jump onto my sickbed, nuzzle me, and ask for her ears and pointy snout to be scritched and scratched. It made both of us happy as she sighed in doggish satisfaction.

As I lazed and dozed at home, there was nothing sweeter in the world than to hear Bijou drink from her water dish outside my door, the gentle sound of her measured lap-lapping ferrying me to waters of healing.

And she was the subject of one of our favorite family jokes during my recuperation:

You take the dog out. I have cancer.

I spent a lot of time spading the past that summer. And fittingly, my very first memory is of a dog:

Its dawn and Im standing in my crib. Dad is holding up a wriggling puppy and its licking my facepossibly administering my first baptism by tongueand making me laugh.

Thats it, as sharp and fleeting as a dream.

I asked my parents about that memory, wanted to confirm the truth of it, and they told me that the dog was a black Lab puppy. A few weeks after we got her, she bolted out of the house and onto Route 125, where she was hit and killed. My folks couldnt recall her name.

A poor unknown puppyoh, lets call her Midnightundone by her doggish exuberance over fifty years ago. And yet, she still lives in my memory, squirming and yipping and licking and the thought of her too short life makes me want to cry, just as most thoughts of Bijou make me smile.

Bijou is ordinary in being extraordinary. Good dogsand most dogs are good dogs, if given a chancegrant us the grace of their brief lives.

The ancient rabbinic sages believed that in saving one life it was as if the entire world had been saved. In that spirit, I would argue that in writing about one dog it is as if I am writing about the entire world, writing about every dog that has ever blessed our lives.

Here is the story of the one dog that I know bestmy Every DogBijou de Minuit.