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Such as, hypothetically speaking, Sunday diners
You mean like living in mortal fear of going out Own feces. Thank God,I thought, at least he doesn’t eat his As I read, I began to feel better about our flawed John Grogan retriever. We had gradually come to the firm con- clusion that Marley was indeed the world’s worst dog. Now I was buoyed to read that there were all sorts of horrid behaviors he did not have. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He wasn’t much of a barker. Didn’t bite. Didn’t assault other dogs, except in the pursuit of love. Considered everyone his best friend. Best of all, he didn’t eat or roll in scat. Besides, I told myself, there are no bad dogs, only inept, clueless owners like Jenny and me. It was our fault Marley turned out the way he had. Then I got to chapter 24, “Living with the Mentally Unstable Dog.” As I read, I swallowed loudly. Woodhouse was describing Marley with an understanding so intimate I could swear she had been bunking with him in his battered crate. She addressed the manic, bizarre behavior patterns, the destructiveness when left alone, the gouged floors and chewed rugs. She described the at- tempts by owners of such beasts “to make some place either in the house or yard dogproof.” She even addressed the use of tranquilizers as a des- perate (and largely ineffective) last measure to try to return these mentally broken mutts to the land of the sane. “Some are born unstable, some are made unsta- ble by their living conditions, but the result is the Marley & Me same: the dogs, instead of being a joy to their owners, are a worry, an expense, and often bring complete despair to an entire family,” Woodhouse wrote. I looked down at Marley snoozing at my feet and said, “Sound familiar?” In a subsequent chapter, titled “Abnormal Dogs,” Woodhouse wrote with a sense of resigna- tion: “I cannot stress often enough that if you wish to keep a dog that is not normal, you must face up to living a slightly restricted existence.” for a gallon of milk? “Although you may love a subnormal dog,” she continued, “other people must not be inconvenienced by it.” Other people at a sidewalk café in Boca Raton, Florida? Woodhouse had nailed our dog and our pa- thetic, codependent existence. We had it all: the hapless, weak-willed masters; the mentally unsta- ble, out-of-control dog; the trail of destroyed property; the annoyed and inconvenienced strangers and neighbors. We were a textbook case. “Congratulations, Marley,” I said to him. “You qualify as subnormal.” He opened his eyes at the sound of his name, stretched, and rolled onto his back, paws in the air. I was expecting Woodhouse to offer a cheery so- lution for the owners of such defective merchan- John Grogan dise, a few helpful tips that, when properly exe- cuted, could turn even the most manic of pets into Westminster-worthy show dogs. But she ended
her book on a much darker note: “Only the own- ers of unbalanced dogs can really know where the line can be drawn between a dog that is sane and one that is mentally unsound. No one can make up the owner’s mind as to what to do with the last kind. I, as a great dog lover, feel it is kinder to put them to sleep.” Put them to sleep? Gulp. In case she wasn’t making herself clear, she added, “Surely, when all training and veterinary help has been exhausted and there is no hope that the dog will ever live a reasonably normal existence, it is kinder to pet and owner to put the dog to sleep.” Even Barbara Woodhouse, lover of animals, successful trainer of thousands of dogs their own- ers had deemed hopeless, was conceding that some dogs were simply beyond help. If it were up to her, they would be humanely dispatched to that great canine insane asylum in the sky. “Don’t worry, big guy,” I said, leaning down to scratch Marley’s belly. “The only sleep we’re go- ing to be doing around this house is the kind you get to wake up from.” He sighed dramatically and drifted back to his dreams of French poodles in heat. Marley & Me ❉ ❉ ❉ It was around this same time that we also learned not all Labs are created equal. The breed actually has two distinct subgroups: English and Ameri- can. The English line tends to be smaller and stockier than the American line, with blockier heads and gentle, calm dispositions. They are the favored line for showing. Labs belonging to the American line are noticeably larger and stronger, with sleeker, less squat features. They are known for their endless energy and high spirits and fa- vored for use in the field as hunting and sports dogs. The same qualities that make the American line of Labs so unstoppably superb in the woods makes them challenges in the family home. Their exuberant energy level, the literature warned, should not be underestimated. As the brochure for a Pennsylvania retriever breeder, Endless Mountain Labradors, explains it: “So many people ask us, ‘What’s the difference between the English and the American (field) Labs?’ There is such a big difference that the AKC is considering splitting the breed. There is a dif- ference in build, as well as temperament. If you are looking for strictly a field dog for field trial competition, go for the American field dog. They are athletic, tall, lanky, thin, but have VERY hy- John Grogan per, high-strung personalities, which do not lend themselves to being the best ‘family dogs.’ On the other hand, the English Labs are very blocky, stocky, shorter in their build. Very sweet, quiet, mellow, lovely dogs.” It didn’t take me long to figure out which line Marley belonged to. It was all beginning to make sense. We had blindly picked out a type of Lab best suited to stampeding across the open wilder- ness all day. If that weren’t enough, our specific choice just happened to be mentally unbalanced, unwound, and beyond the reach of training, tran- quilizers, or canine psychiatry. The kind of sub- normal specimen an experienced dog trainer like Barbara Woodhouse might just consider better off dead. Great, I thought. Now we find out.
Not long after Woodhouse’s book opened our eyes to Marley’s crazed mind, a neighbor asked us to take in their cat for a week while they were on va- cation. Sure, we said, bring him over. Compared with a dog, cats were easy. Cats ran on autopilot, and this cat in particular was shy and elusive, es- pecially around Marley. He could be counted on to hide beneath the couch all day and only come out after we were asleep to eat his food, kept high out Marley & Me of Marley’s reach, and use the kitty-litter box, which we tucked away in a discreet corner of the screened patio that enclosed the pool. There was nothing to it, really. Marley was totally unaware the cat was even in the house. Midway through the cat’s stay with us, I awoke at dawn to a loud, driving beat resonating through the mattress. It was Marley, quivering with excite- ment beside the bed, his tail slapping the mattress at a furious rate. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! I reached out to pet him, and that sent him into eva- sive maneuvers. He was prancing and dancing be- side the bed. The Marley Mambo. “Okay, what do you have?” I asked him, eyes still shut. As if to an- swer, Marley proudly plopped his prize onto the crisp sheets, just inches from my face. In my groggy state, it took me a minute to process what exactly it was. The object was small, dark, of inde- finable shape, and coated in a coarse, gritty sand. Then the smell reached my nostrils. An acrid, pun- gent, putrid smell. I bolted upright and pushed backward against Jenny, waking her up. I pointed at Marley’s gift to us, glistening on the sheets. “That’s not...” Jenny began, revulsion in her voice. “Yes, it is,” I said. “He raided the kitty-litter box.” John Grogan Marley couldn’t have looked more proud had he just presented us with the Hope diamond. As Bar- bara Woodhouse had so sagely predicted, our mentally unstable, abnormal mutt had entered the feces-eating stage of his life. C H A P T E R 1 9 Lightning Strikes ❉ After Conor’s arrival, everyone we knew— with the exception of my very Catholic par- ents who were praying for dozens of little Grogans—assumed we were done having children. In the two-income, professional crowd in which we ran, one child was the norm, two were consid- ered a bit of an extravagance, and three were sim- ply unheard-of. Especially given the difficult pregnancy we had gone through with Conor, no one could understand why we might want to sub- ject ourselves to the messy process all over again. But we had come a long way since our newlywed days of killing houseplants. Parenthood became us. Our two boys brought us more joy than we ever thought anyone or anything possibly could. They defined our life now, and while parts of us missed the leisurely vacations, lazy Saturdays John Grogan reading novels, and romantic dinners that lingered late into the night, we had come to find our pleas- ures in new ways—in spilled applesauce and tiny nose prints on windowpanes and the soft sym- phony of bare feet padding down the hallway at dawn. Even on the worst days, we usually man- aged to find something to smile over, knowing by now what every parent sooner or later figures out, that these wondrous days of early parenthood—of diapered bottoms and first teeth and incompre- hensible jabber—are but a brilliant, brief flash in the vastness of an otherwise ordinary lifetime. We both rolled our eyes when my old-school mother clucked at us, “Enjoy them while you can because they’ll be grown up before you know it.” Now, even just a few years into it, we were realiz- ing she was right. Hers was a well-worn cliché but one we could already see was steeped in truth. The boys were growing up fast, and each week ended another little chapter that could never again be re-
visited. One week Patrick was sucking his thumb, the next he had weaned himself of it forever. One week Conor was our baby in a crib; the next he was a little boy using a toddler bed for a trampo- line. Patrick was unable to pronounce the L sound, and when women would coo over him, as they often did, he would put his fists on his hips, stick out his lip, and say, “Dos yadies are yaughing Marley & Me at me.” I always meant to get it on videotape, but one day the L ’s came out perfectly, and that was that. For months we could not get Conor out of his Superman pajamas. He would race through the house, cape flapping behind him, yelling, “Me Stupe Man!” And then it was over, another missed video moment. Children serve as impossible-to-ignore, in- your-face timepieces, marking the relentless march of one’s life through what otherwise might seem an infinite sea of minutes, hours, days, and years. Our babies were growing up faster than ei- ther of us wanted, which partially explains why, about a year after moving to our new house in Boca, we began trying for our third. As I said to Jenny, “Hey, we’ve got four bedrooms now; why not?” Two tries was all it took. Neither of us would admit we wanted a girl, but of course we did, desperately so, despite our many pronounce- ments during the pregnancy that having three boys would be just great. When a sonogram finally confirmed our secret hope, Jenny draped her arms over my shoulders and whispered, “I’m so happy I could give you a little girl.” I was so happy, too. Not all our friends shared our enthusiasm. Most met news of our pregnancy with the same blunt question: “Did you mean to?” They just could not believe a third pregnancy could be anything other John Grogan than an accident. If indeed it was not, as we in- sisted, then they had to question our judgment. One acquaintance went so far as to chastise Jenny for allowing me to knock her up again, asking, in a tone best reserved for someone who had just signed over all her worldly possessions to a cult in Guyana: “What were you thinking?” We didn’t care. On January 9, 1997, Jenny gave me a belated Christmas present: a pink-cheeked, seven-pound baby girl, whom we named Colleen. Our family only now felt like it was complete. If the pregnancy for Conor had been a litany of stress and worry, this pregnancy was textbook perfect, and delivering at Boca Raton Community Hospital introduced us to a whole new level of pampered customer satisfaction. Just down the hall from our room was a lounge with a free, all- you-can-drink cappuccino station—so very Boca. By the time the baby finally came, I was so jacked up on frothy caffeine, I could barely hold my hands still to snip the umbilical cord. When Colleen was one week old, Jenny brought her outside for the first time. The day was crisp and beautiful, and the boys and I were in the front yard, planting flowers. Marley was chained to a tree nearby, happy to lie in the shade and watch Marley & Me the world go by. Jenny sat in the grass beside him and placed the sleeping Colleen in a portable bassinet on the ground between them. After sev- eral minutes, the boys beckoned for Mom to come closer to see their handiwork, and they led Jenny and me around the garden beds as Colleen napped in the shade beside Marley. We wandered behind some large shrubbery from where we could still see the baby but passersby on the street could not see us. As we turned back, I stopped and mo-
tioned for Jenny to look out through the shrubs. Out on the street, an older couple walking by had stopped and were gawking at the scene in our front yard with bewildered expressions. At first, I wasn’t sure what had made them stop and stare. Then it hit me: from their vantage point, all they could see was a fragile newborn alone with a large yellow dog, who appeared to be babysitting single-handedly. We lingered in silence, stifling giggles. There was Marley, looking like an Egyptian sphinx, lying with his front paws crossed, head up, panting con- tentedly, every few seconds pushing his snout over to sniff the baby’s head. The poor couple must have thought they had stumbled on a case of felony child neglect. No doubt the parents were out drinking at a bar somewhere, having left the infant alone in the care of the neighborhood Labrador re- John Grogan triever, who just might attempt to nurse the infant at any second. As if he were in on the ruse, Marley without prompting shifted positions and rested his chin across the baby’s stomach, his head bigger than her whole body, and let out a long sigh as if he were saying, When are those two going to get home? He appeared to be protecting her, and maybe he was, though I’m pretty sure he was just drinking in the scent of her diaper. Jenny and I stood there in the bushes and ex- changed grins. The thought of Marley as an infant caregiver—Doggie Day Care—was just too good to let go. I was tempted to wait there and see how the scene would play out, but then it occurred to me that one scenario might involve a 911 call to the police. We had gotten away with storing Conor out in the breezeway, but how would we explain this one? (“Well, I know how it must look, Officer, but he’s actually surprisingly responsible...”) We stepped out of the bushes and waved to the couple—and watched the relief wash over their faces. Thank God, that baby hadn’t been thrown to the dogs after all. “You must really trust your dog,” the woman said somewhat cautiously, betraying a belief that dogs were fierce and unpredictable and had no place that close to a defenseless newborn. “He hasn’t eaten one yet,” I said. Marley & Me ❉ ❉ ❉ Two months after Colleen arrived home I cele- brated my fortieth birthday in a most inauspicious manner, namely, by myself. The Big Four-O is supposed to be a major turning point, the place in life where you bid restless youth farewell and em- brace the predictable comforts of middle age. If any birthday merited a blowout celebration, it was the fortieth, but not for me. We were now respon- sible parents with three children; Jenny had a new baby pressed to her breast. There were more im- portant things to worry about. I arrived home from work, and Jenny was tired and worn down. After a quick meal of leftovers, I bathed the boys and put them to bed while Jenny nursed Colleen. By eight-thirty, all three children were asleep, and so was my wife. I popped a beer and sat out on the patio, staring into the iridescent blue water of the lit swimming pool. As always, Marley was faith- fully at my side, and as I scratched his ears, it oc- curred to me that he was at about the same turning point in life. We had brought him home six years earlier. In dog years, that would put him somewhere in his early forties now. He had crossed unnoticed into middle age but still acted every bit the puppy. Except for a string of stubborn ear in- fections that required Dr. Jay’s repeated interven- John Grogan tion, he was healthy. He showed no signs whatso- ever of growing up or winding down. I had never thought of Marley as any kind of role model, but sitting there sipping my beer, I was aware that maybe he held the secret for a good life. Never slow down, never look back, live each day with adolescent verve and spunk and curiosity and playfulness. If you think you’re still a young pup, then maybe you are, no matter what the calendar says. Not a bad philosophy for life, though I’d take a pass on the part that involved vandalizing couches and laundry rooms. “Well, big guy,” I said, pressing my beer bottle against his cheek in a kind of interspecies toast. “It’s just you and me tonight. Here’s to forty. Here’s to middle age. Here’s to running with the big dogs right up until the end.” And then he, too, curled up and went to sleep. I was still moping about my solitary birthday a few days later when Jim Tolpin, my old colleague who had broken Marley of his jumping habit, called unexpectedly and asked if I wanted to grab a beer the next night, a Saturday. Jim had left the newspaper business to pursue a law degree at about the same time we moved to Boca Raton, and we hadn’t spoken in months. “Sure,” I said, not stopping to wonder why. Jim picked me up at six Marley & Me and took me to an English pub, where we quaffed Bass ale and caught up on each other’s lives. We were having a grand old time until the bartender called out, “Is there a John Grogan here? Phone for John Grogan.” It was Jenny, and she sounded very upset and stressed-out. “The baby’s crying, the boys are out of control, and I just ripped my contact lens!” she wailed into the phone. “Can you come home right away?” “Try to calm down,” I said. “Sit tight. I’ll be right home.” I hung up, and the bartender gave me a you-poor-sorry-henpecked-bastard kind of a nod and simply said, “My sympathies, mate.” “Come on,” Jim said. “I’ll drive you home.” When we turned onto my block, both sides of the street were lined with cars. “Somebody’s hav- ing a party,” I said. “Looks like it,” Jim answered. “For God’s sakes,” I said when we reached the house. “Look at that! Someone even parked in my driveway. If that isn’t nerve.” We blocked the offender in, and I invited Jim inside. I was still griping about the inconsiderate jerk who parked in my driveway when the front door swung open. It was Jenny with Colleen in her arms. She didn’t look upset at all. In fact, she had John Grogan a big grin on her face. Behind her stood a bagpipe player in kilts. Good God! What have I walked in on? Then I looked beyond the bagpipe player and saw that someone had taken down the kiddy fence around the pool and launched floating candles on the water. The deck was crammed with several dozen of my friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Just as I was making the connection that all those cars on the street belonged to all these people in my house, they shouted in unison, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OLD MAN!” My wife had not forgotten after all. When I was finally able to snap my jaw shut, I took Jenny in my arms, kissed her on the cheek, and whispered in her ear, “I’ll get you later for this.” Someone opened the laundry-room door look- ing for the trash can, and out bounded Marley in prime party mode. He swept through the crowd, stole a mozzarella-and-basil appetizer off a tray, lifted a couple of women’s miniskirts with his snout, and made a break for the unfenced swim- ming pool. I tackled him just as he was launch- ing into his signature running belly flop and dragged him back to solitary confinement. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll save you the left- overs.” Marley & Me ❉ ❉ ❉ It wasn’t long after the surprise party—a party whose success was marked by the arrival of the police at midnight to tell us to pipe down—that Marley finally was able to find validation for his intense fear of thunder. I was in the backyard on a Sunday afternoon under brooding, darkening skies, digging up a rectangle of grass to plant yet another vegetable garden. Gardening was becom- ing a serious hobby for me, and the better I got at it, the more I wanted to grow. Slowly I was taking over the entire backyard. As I worked, Marley paced nervously around me, his internal barome- ter sensing an impending storm. I sensed it, too, but I wanted to get the project done and figured I would work until I felt the first drops of rain. As I dug, I kept glancing at the sky, watching an omi- nous black thunderhead forming several miles to the east, out over the ocean. Marley was whining softly, beckoning me to put down the shovel and head inside. “Relax,” I told him. “It’s still miles away.” The words had barely left my lips when I felt a previously unknown sensation, a kind of quiver- ing tingle on the back of my neck. The sky had turned an odd shade of olive gray, and the air John Grogan seemed to go suddenly dead as though some heav- enly force had grabbed the winds and frozen them in its grip. Weird, I thought as I paused, leaning on my shovel to study the sky. That’s when I heard it: a buzzing, popping, crackling surge of energy, similar to what you sometimes can hear standing beneath high-tension power lines. A sort of pffffffffffft sound filled the air around me, fol- lowed by a brief instant of utter silence. In that instant, I knew trouble was coming, but I had no time to react. In the next fraction of a second, the sky went pure, blindingly white, and an explosion, the likes of which I had never heard before, not in any storm, at any fireworks display, at any demoli- tion site, boomed in my ears. A wall of energy hit me in the chest like an invisible linebacker. When I opened my eyes who knows how many seconds later, I was lying facedown on the ground, sand in my mouth, my shovel ten feet away, rain pelting me. Marley was down, too, in his hit-the-deck stance, and when he saw me raise my head he wig- gled desperately toward me on his belly like a sol- dier trying to slide beneath barbed wire. When he reached me he climbed right on my back and buried his snout in my neck, frantically licking me. I looked around for just a second, trying to get my bearings, and I could see where the lightning had struck the power-line pole in the corner of Marley & Me the yard and followed the wire down to the house about twenty feet from where I had been standing. The electrical meter on the wall was in charred ruins. “Come on!” I yelled, and then Marley and I were on our feet, sprinting through the downpour toward the back door as new bolts of lightning flashed around us. We did not stop until we were safely inside. I knelt on the floor, soaking wet, catching my breath, and Marley clambered on me, licking my face, nibbling my ears, flinging spit and loose fur all over everything. He was beside him- self with fear, shaking uncontrollably, drool hang- ing off his chin. I hugged him, tried to calm him down. “Jesus, that was close!” I said, and realized that I was shaking, too. He looked up at me with those big empathetic eyes that I swore could al- most talk. I was sure I knew what he was trying to tell me. I’ve been trying to warn you for years
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