Walking the Dog

As some of you may know, we have a new puppy. We got her shortly before Thanksgiving, just in time to make the holidays even more interesting than usual. Her name, the one on her passport, as well as on the chip the breeder embedded inside her somewhere (with instructions to eat socks, and then chase them with goose manure, apparently) is Lexi O'Hare Bueltel, though we just call her Lexi. Almost always. 

I held out for five years after our last dog, Melville, died, explaining over and over to my children that my nervous system felt besieged, that if I had to handle the slightest bit more calamity I would end up in a padded cell, curled in a ball, cracked up like Fitzgerald—there are many metaphors, and my children were quick to relay them to strangers now that I'd finally buckled and gotten us a puppy.

For instance, on the second day we had her we went to the place in Boulder where I get my coffee beans. It was a warm sunny day, more like early September than late November, and I told them, my boys, that we were going to learn how to pick up girls. I told them to sit at one of the tables with the new puppy and I would go in and pick up the beans and an espresso and a couple of hot chocolates and by the time I came back out we'd see how they'd done. By the time I returned, two young teachers who had the Thanksgiving break off and, presumably, were trying to sober up after a wild morning, had already sidled beside our table and were fussing with the puppy. They looked up, smiling. "Your children just told us that you're a writer, that you just finished a book, that you wouldn't get them a puppy until you finished your book which apparently took a long time and you're lucky you're not in a padded cell—"

"Though there's still time!" the other one added while Lexi chewed on her hand that was apparently numbed somewhat from all the shots of tequila they'd had earlier that day, since they were teachers and had the week off.

"Oh yes, they told us everything about you!"

"You see how it works?" I said to the boys. They agreed it was remarkable, if you were into picking up teachers. Could we take her home now, they wondered, and wait for her to pee on the carpet and for me to go FUCK!!! and pick her up and haul her outside, that whole routine?

The teachers, like everyone else, wanted to know if we were "crate training" her. In the five years that I had actively resisted my fate, this sort of training had become de rigueur: someone had discovered that dogs apparently love being in a crate as much as we humans love debt, devices, houses that are too big for us to manage without despairing, and a lot of other things you wouldn't necessarily imagine we'd love. Moreover, if you put the dog in a crate, one that was small enough, the dog wouldn't "make a mess" in her crate but rather would wake you two or three times in the middle of the night to take her outside in the snow so she could "do her business" there, once she got done sniffing around, after she (and neighbors, who were trying to sleep) got tired of hearing you noisily whisper for her to hurry up, to piss already, to take a goddamn shit if she had to!

"So you aren't crate training her, then?" they said, in chorus, as if I'd told them I had no intention of fixing my tom cat, cleaning up my dog's poop from the sidewalk, composting, recycling, going gluten-free ...

"No," I said, "why would I? I work at home. I don't like a cage, why would she?"

They frowned. I imagined them thinking, fearing, perhaps, that they might be right: "One day you'll look back and realize what a mistake you made, not crate-training. Dogs who are properly crate-trained don't eat gym socks, nor do they indulge overly in goose manure. That and your nice oak floor will be curled up like dirty, filthy elephant tusks—"

Whereas if I had just done what the book said, adhered to the program ...

"Are you absolutely sure she ate a sock?" our vet's receptionist asked one day in January, not long ago.

"My son said she just pulled it from his hand and swallowed it."

"Just now?"

"No, yesterday. Yesterday morning. Right before school."

"Why didn't you call yesterday morning?"

"Because I couldn't believe it. I didn't believe it."

It was true. I couldn't believe it. Even with an eye-witness. My son who had no reason to lie ...

Then, a week later, the sock emerged, soiled from the ride through her GI tract—it looked like something you'd find in an alley, in the garbage of a shoeshiner. Three weeks later there was another one. No one had seen her eat this one. Then, on Super Bowl Sunday, Donna—a registered nurse trained to spot things like this, who hardly ever makes anything up—saw her, Lexi, eat a sock. Saw it with her own eyes and immediately got on the phone. The vet had said that if you can catch them eating it and get them in within a half-hour, they can give them something to make them throw up. So you don't have to do an x-ray, surgery, watch them die, your dog that you paid a crazy amount of money for, dead after swallowing a sock ...

So that's what we did. We took her in. I did. While Donna made guacamole and got the stuff out for martinis. Ten minutes after I arrived at the vet emergency room—$163.00 later—the vet tech came out with a slightly staggering Lexi (they give them a morphine byproduct) and a baggie with a gooey gym sock inside.

On the way home she threw up two more. Gym socks. Along with a smattering of undigested food.

I'm not making this up. 

I came home, still in awe, in disbelief—three socks! not one but three fucking socks!!—and told the boys that if I found another sock laying on the floor I was going to take away their allowance for a week and in all likelihood completely lose it on them ...

They assured me they'd pick up their socks. Just as soon as I quit freaking out and cussing so much—

Fuck you! Pick up your fucking socks!!!

"We're just kidding. We'll pick up our socks. By the way, she's peeing on the floor—"

"Jeee-zusss—"

"Why don't you go write," one of my boys said to me then. "Go hide in your office and turn the fan on so we can let the puppy run all over the house and listen to Mommy unravel. She's even more fun than you. By the way, when's this new book you keep talking about going to be done? Is this one going to take ten years, too? Are we going to starve? Lose our cable?

I said no, it wouldn't take ten years.

"Five?"

I didn't think it would take five either. At least I hoped. "Why are you asking me?"

"Three?" he asked coyly, buttering his bagel.

"A thousand days," I finally answered, so he'd leave me alone and I could go write, and if nothing came, well, I could watch the Super Bowl; I could walk the dog. "I'll have it done in a thousand days ... if you just pick up your socks, and I'm able to sell the last book and execute a film option, and make millions and hire a butler, a governess, a wife for your mother and another one for me—"

"Awesome! Can we get a parrot then?"