Stories of My Life

I was fond of C.C., but it has always been the dogs that I have loved most.

First there was Manch. He was my consolation after the miscarriage. He was half dachshund and half Manchester terrier. That may sound awful, but actually with the longish legs of a Manchester and the sweet face of a dachshund, he was a very handsome little fellow. And fellow he was. We hadn’t realized that we should have had him neutered, and so he became the Don Juan of the canine world. Bolting out of the house whenever the door was cracked open, he sometimes was gone for more than a day. He often came home from these jaunts in wretched shape but he would heal to head out another day. Coming into my life when he did, he was utterly spoiled. A young German pastor, who lived with us while working for the summer with John, couldn’t believe how spoiled Manch was—I treated him as though he were human. Win was flabbergasted when he heard me say to the dog: “We don’t put our paws on the table while folks are eating, Manch.”

“No wonder he thinks he’s human with that name!” Winfred said.

“What?”

“Mensch!” he said. “It’s the word for ‘man.’”

But, then, to Manch’s distress, we began to have children at a rapid rate. With each child he grew more jealous of all the attention being lavished elsewhere that used to be his alone. Finally, when David was a toddler, he decided that if you can’t beat them, join them. As soon as David could reach the knob, Manch taught him how to open the door, and one day that door got opened and we never saw Manch again.

For years, while I was out driving, I would think I saw him and slam on the brakes to make sure. But it never was.

Manch is memorialized in a book I started when John Jr. was an infant. Standing at the window one snowy day, I watched Manch bounding through a foot of snowfall and thought: I wonder where he’s going in all that snow. I wrote a couple of chapters, but I didn’t know how to write a book and before long Lin arrived and I really forgot about my attempt to write about Manch. Many years later Avi asked me to contribute a serialized story for the newspapers in his Breakfast Serials project. Writing a newspaper serial is unlike any other kind of writing. Each chapter has to be three to three and a half double-spaced pages with the final page ending in a cliff hanger so patrons can hardly wait to buy the newspaper the following week to see what happens. You move from that opening to another cliff hanger at the end of that chapter and so on for twelve to fifteen chapters.

Aha! I thought. That’s how I can write Manch’s story. I dug my abandoned few chapters out of my messy files and they became The Field of the Dogs in the newspaper serial. Sally Daugherty, who edited the story for Breakfast Serials, then brought it out in book form at HarperCollins. The book opens with the words: I wonder where he’s going in all that snow. The setting is no longer New Jersey, it is Vermont, and the problems of the boy are different, but the hero dog is Manch as I remembered him.

Blossom was a gift from my parents. My mother had never liked Manch, probably because of his promiscuous ways, so she could hardly wait until he had disappeared to announce that they were going to give us a proper dog—a thoroughbred English springer spaniel. They had close friends who bred springers and we were to have one. I thought I needed a bit more time—what if Manch were to miraculously return?—and even not, I needed to mourn for him. What was all the rush? But our designated puppy was ready to be brought home right at Apple Blossom Festival time in Winchester, so the six of us went to get her. She was adorable, a tiny liver-and-white bundle who waddled on her short legs. We all fell in love at first sight. On her American Kennel Club registration she has a more dignified name, but we lost those papers years ago. The only name she ever knew was “Blossom.”

Looking back, it’s hard to remember Blossom ever doing anything wrong—well, that is, except when she ate the lightbulb, and she was hardly more than a puppy at the time.

I went into the den one night to find on the floor a chewed cardboard wrapper for a lightbulb, but when I looked for the bulb there was none—not even any glass—just a metal screw end. I was alarmed. My beautiful Blossom had eaten the bulb. I had read that if a child or an animal ate glass, you should feed them bread to keep the shards from cutting their innards. Fortunately, we had just been to the day-old bread store and had several two-pound loaves on hand. I fed Blossom an entire loaf, and was halfway through the second loaf when she let me know she’d had more than enough.

She seemed all right when I went to bed, and the next morning I was busy getting everyone off to school. It wasn’t until after my husband had left for the office that I realized I hadn’t seen Blossom all morning. I called and looked and finally located her in the dining room, tucked between the hutch and the wall corner. She looked at me sadly but didn’t emerge. I tried to tempt her out with a piece of bologna. She didn’t move. I put a hot dog just out of reach, thinking she’d surely come out and get it. She stretched her nose in that direction, but she only whimpered.

I had no car at the time, so I called John. “You’ve got to come home and take Blossom to the vet,” I said. “She won’t even come out to get meat.”

John pulled Blossom out and carried her to the car and then into the vet’s waiting room. She simply lay across his lap in a semi-comatose fashion. A woman came in carrying a sick cat. At this point in Blossom’s life, she hadn’t had a close personal relationship with a cat, and she was visibly alarmed. She began to shake so much that John, fearing she would fall, put her gently on the floor. She squatted and laid an enormous pile right on the pristine floor of the waiting room. Whereupon she stood up, tail wagging, completely cured.

The receptionist scurried to get cleaning equipment, and the vet appeared to see what all the commotion was about. John explained about the lightbulb, the bread, and her deadly appearance until this moment. The vet began to laugh. “Poor thing. She was so constipated from all that bread your wife gave her that she couldn’t move.”

Blossom grew more regal by the year, and then along came Princess, the least regal dog we ever owned. We had moved to Norfolk, taking only Blossom and C.C. with us, but, somehow, David was dissatisfied. He was very homesick for Takoma Park and, feeling friendless, brought home a little wild duckling from the bank of the nearby river. This was a very bad idea. The duckling agreed and immediately died to prove it.

“If you have to have another pet,” I said, “you may have a puppy. We will go to the humane society and you may have the smallest dog there that isn’t a Chihuahua.”

We went, as I recall, the very next afternoon. In the stories, a puppy leaps out and licks the face of her rescuer, showing that it truly belongs. The puppy

David chose hung to the back wall of the cage and didn’t move. David reached in and pulled her out. Her pitiful state was, if anything, worse than C.C.’s the night he arrived.

“Are you sure?”

He was sure. He named her Princess. I never asked, but I suspected in honor of Prince Terrien in Bridge to Terabithia. My sister Helen’s family came for a visit that first week. When I warned her in advance that we had a new puppy, she was appalled. She says that her first reaction was that I was crazy to let the children have another pet, but when she saw Princess, she thought: Oh, well, it’ll be dead in a week.

But Princess thrived. She and C.C., who was larger than she was for quite some time, roughhoused like fond siblings. Occasionally, Blossom would go over and put her nose between them as if to say, That’s enough, children. You keep at it, someone’s going to get hurt. When Princess was rebuked or unhappy she would stick her back paw in her mouth and suck it exactly as a child will suck his thumb. It was a habit she never broke and she lived to be fifteen years old. If I don’t confess it, my friends will wonder why not, but the fact is, once the children left home, Princess loved very few people. We warned every visitor not to pet her, but we have many friends who love dogs and were sure Princess could not resist them. They’d never met a dog who could. “See? She likes me,” they would say, stroking her lovingly. At just about that moment Princess would snarl, and occasionally nip the startled visitor. It was very embarrassing, as dogs, they say, take after their owners. But we couldn’t just get rid of her. She wasn’t Frank that we could return to the wild. So we loved her and were loved in return by her until she died peacefully and is buried in our backyard.

We decided not to get another dog. It was a rational decision. We were traveling too much and getting to the point that yet another round of house-breaking was daunting. We missed having a dog, but we were not going to get another Princess who threatened all our friends with a growl or a nip. John’s first cousin’s wife raised golden retrievers—a perfect dog for people with lots of friends and small grandchildren. We didn’t realize that several members of the family would find their allergies going haywire whenever they were around her. But aside from the family allergies and our never having a hairless garment, Annie was the perfect pet, the most beautiful, loving creature anyone could hope to know. She was, however, not without problems. If she gave others allergic reactions, she herself was plagued with allergies. We went through all the allergy tests, gave her the long series of allergy shots, spent more money at the vet’s taking care of her ear and skin problems than I spent at the pediatrician’s for all four children combined.

When she was nine, her lymph nodes swelled rather alarmingly, but we thought it was in reaction to her many ear infections. Then the vet suggested gravely that the nodes should be biopsied, in case it was more serious. He suspected lymphoma, but he couldn’t be sure without the pathology report. Sick with dread, we agreed, and to our great relief the tests came out negative. The vet, who also loved her, was happy, but puzzled. He had been so sure. We lived in a fool’s paradise for the next several months. When summer came and she seemed to be lethargic and panted excessively, we put it down to the unusually hot weather.

But one morning at Lake George I let her out. She always came right back, but that day she didn’t. “She’s gone to the woods to die,” John said. And she had. When I found her hours later, she was still alive but she had made herself a little nest between two logs. She looked up when she saw me coming with her usual sweet expression, but she did not move. I got three young men who were working nearby to help me get her into the car and we took her to the vet in Ticonderoga. When we got back to the house there was a message to call the animal hospital. She was in terrible distress and there was nothing they could do for her.

We went back to the hospital and were led into a small room. Two young women brought Annie in on a stretcher. She looked almost dead, but when we spoke to her, she sat straight up, wagged her tail and smiled her wonderful smile. After we both hugged and kissed her, she lay back down on the stretcher, her head on her paws, her eyes closed, and didn’t move again.

We were devastated, but so was everyone who knew her. I had never seen an animal so beloved. We got the kind of messages that you get when a family member has died, everyone saying what a wonderful dog she was and how much they would miss her. “It’s a bit sad when you remember that when poor little Princess died you and I were the only people in the world who mourned her,” I said to John. Every card, letter, email, and call about Annie made us cry, but they were a real comfort.

Lin and her family came to Lake George not long after Annie’s death, and Lin and our granddaughter Jordan decided that John and I needed a dog badly. They went on a website called Petfinder that lists dogs needing adoption in every part of the country. At one point they found the perfect dog for us in Florida. But I thought surely Vermont would have dogs needing rescuing, and indeed they do. So our lives have been made rich again with two-year-old Pixie (named after The Flint Heart). We’re guessing she’s a Maltese Yorkie mix—eleven pounds as opposed to Annie’s nearly ninety—non-shedding and very much a lap cuddler. She had been found on the streets of Gainesville, Georgia, never claimed, and would have been euthanized except that a rescue transport team brought her to Good Karma Rescue in East Montpelier, Vermont, who certified us as a genuinely okay adoptive home.

John and Pixie.