You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (3 page)

More than just emotionally changed by our bond, I had practically restructured my life for Otto, without even realizing it. I didn’t order spicy foods because he couldn’t eat them, and I always ordered enough for two. If he got up during the night, I jumped up and took him out. If he had an accident on the floor, I gave him Pepto-Bismol. I never resented anything I had to do for him. The only way I could justify leaving him for a workout was if it was before he woke up in the morning. So I’d slip out at 4:45 and return by 6:30, a full fifteen minutes before he woke up. For my whole life up to that point I had worried that I was too selfish to get married. I couldn’t imagine finding someone whom I’d want to live with all the time. What if we didn’t like the same TV shows? What if he didn’t want to have Mexican or pizza when I wanted Mexican or pizza? What if he expected me to have six-pack abs? My fears were always about what would be taken from me, never what I might gain. It took time, but my relationship with Otto made me realize that if you love someone, you’re more than willing to compromise to meet their needs—whether it be more nights of roast chicken than you would ordinarily choose, skipping an evening on the town, or not watching a television show with a barking dog.

It made me feel good to see him content. I took care of him and he took care of me. Within six months of adopting him, I grew up.

 

 

 

 

HAVING OTTO TAUGHT ME
about the give-and-take that is needed to succeed in a relationship. He gave me the courage to try things and the feeling that there was someone waiting for me. If I could’ve turned Otto into a man, Pinocchio-style, maybe with a tad less gas and eyes that looked straight ahead, I thought at the time, I might actually be able to have a viable relationship. So what if I met a man who wanted to do nothing but watch baseball game after baseball game or eat in restaurants that scored poorly on the Department of Health’s inspection? I now knew I could compromise. It might work. It was certainly worth finding out.

LESSON TWO

How to Find the Parachute Color That’s Most Flattering to You

Acouple of years into my life with Otto, I decided I wanted a job that would allow me to spend more time with him. I thought about writing a children’s book about him called
Otto in the City
, but it probably wouldn’t earn me enough to support the two of us. I needed to find a dog-inclusive career. I think somehow I also knew that were the day to come when I’d have human children, this kind of career would be useful in making time for them as well. I looked into a variety of careers that I was either unqualified for or uninterested in—like groomer, veterinary technician, receptionist for a vet office. And then my Omega Institute catalog arrived. I’d been to Omega with my mother a couple of times for various new age workshops. Located in bucolic Rhinebeck, New York, the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies is a new age retreat with classes in everything from Past Life Therapy Training to Kabbalistic Healing to Meditations and Yoga to Spring Ecstatic Chant and The Elixir of Passion to knitting with
Indiana Jones
’s own Karen Allen.

Looking through the catalog, I quickly passed over career training in topics like Feng Shui Landscaping and Bodywork Artistry. Then I fell upon the answer: I would be an animal communicator. I’d had a session with one when I first got Otto—over the phone—and she was not unlike the psychics I’d consulted for myself. She told me what Otto thought about various things in my apartment (didn’t like the loft, liked the oversized mirror) and that he wanted to visit the big white house (there was a photo of my house in Katonah on the wall; I asked the animal communicator to tell Otto it had been sold). He felt my choices in dog coats were not working for him, particularly the belted ones (it sounded like a long-winded way of saying “too gay”). And he spent a good deal of time talking about food (“Save your money on the dog food, I like people food better”). All in all, I was impressed and jealous. I wanted to talk to Otto, too. Now I could learn to talk to him and every other animal on the planet. I would be Dr. Do-little-or-nothing. And I’d charge the one hundred and fifty dollars for a forty-five-minute hour that I’d shelled out. It was shaping up into a brilliant plan.

I signed up for the three-day workshop. Omega was like being at a Grateful Dead sleepaway camp, with lots of rainbow batik, white-people dreadlocks, and that vegan/vegetarian/ macrobiotic food that some people who don’t happen to be me really like. A few years later, I would come with my friend Barbara for a writing workshop taught by Lynda Barry and every night when we turned the lights out in our cabin, a cloud of bats swarmed in through the cracks in the eaves. I stayed under the covers emitting bursts of bloodcurdling screams while Barbara attempted to reason with them (and laughed at me). When we’d tell people at breakfast about the horrors of our night, they’d say, “Oooh, you’re so lucky!” “That’s a wonderful blessing!” “Oh, I wish bats came into my room!”

I took the bus upstate on Friday afternoon. It was an Omega bus but it picked you up on a street beside Penn Station. There was no need to check the sign in the bus window; Omega students were unmistakable, with their bongos, nose rings, tie-dye, and Guatemalan beads. I got on behind a woman who asked the bus driver if it was okay to bring
chapati
on the bus.

“No, no pets on the bus!” he said.

“It’s bread,” she clarified.

“Oh, bread’s okay,” he confirmed.

WE ARRIVED LATE IN
the day but there was so much to do in this course over just one weekend that a Friday evening class was scheduled for 7 to 10 P.M. Our teacher was Penelope Smith, the foremost animal communicator (this was before animal communicators had their own TV shows and channels). With her oversized Coke-bottle glasses and cherubic face, she greeted the class—over one hundred students—with the kind of grin that made you think she knew a wonderful secret, which of course she did if she knew how to talk to animals. I felt very encouraged by that as I found a seat on the floor of the enormous, screened-in gazebo in the woods of Omega. We all looked at her smiling eyes and everyone got very, very quiet. There was a long pause as she looked around at the expectant faces framed by the purple dusk.

“Listen,” she said and then said nothing. I guessed she didn’t mean “listen to me” because she wasn’t saying anything. Many students smiled knowingly and nodded as if they knew what we were listening to.

“Do you hear the crickets?” I thought it was a good sign that I had heard the crickets. How sharp my skills were already!

“What are they saying?”

I knew what they were saying: “chirp, chirp!” I was communicating with the animals. Five cents, please! There were lots of nodding heads, including mine.

Many hands went up so I raised mine, too. I was going to say, “Chirp, chirp,” or maybe “Chip, chip.”

She called on a woman with a deep tan on her very plump face and wild blond curls pulled back in a hand-dyed iridescent lilac bandanna. “I hear one saying”—here she paused, straining to make sure she got the message right—“it’s going to rain.” Penelope nodded yes; she’d apparently heard the same cricket. I slowly pulled my hand down.

Another woman whipped up her arm, very encouraged, and said, “There seems to be a lot of concern about the weather!” Interesting. The crickets were just like my grandparents’ friends in Fort Lauderdale.

Now the class was on fire. The crickets were warning one another about a storm coming from the Northeast, assigning tasks of who was to bring what to the shelter (“Don’t everyone bring dessert!”). There was also a pregnant cricket and another one who was mad about missing the season finale of
Home Improvement
. I walked back to my cabin alone, where I heard a squirrel say, “Hey, do you believe these people paid five hundred bucks to try to figure out what crickets are saying?”

The next morning after a breakfast of tofu-eggs and what seemed like a seventy-five-pound whole wheat roll with ghee, I headed to the classroom, wondering who we would be talking to today—a fly? A hydra? I was very happy to see actual dogs there; I thought I had a much better chance of hearing them.

Penelope told us stories of the different animals she’d communicated with in her work and at home—she lived on a nature preserve in Point Reyes, California, a place that sounded like magickal-unicorn-rainbows-of-love land.

We were instructed to start by just listening and imagining what we heard. We each took turns with the dogs. I was beside a boxer so I decided to chat with him. I did what I was told—closed my eyes, tried to empty my mind and hear what he said. Nothing was coming and I imagined him saying, “What? What am I supposed to say?” I thought if I were him, I would not have liked having my ears and tail docked so I made him say, “I didn’t like having my ears and tail docked.” Later, we went around the room and I raised my hand and told Penelope what I’d “heard.” She nodded that yes, he had said that. I asked her how you know if they’re saying it or if you’re making it up. She looked me in the eye and said, “You don’t have to worry,
you’re
already doing it.” Me, no one else—she knew I had the gift. I looked around at all the other students with great smugness and started figuring out how I could get the money together to take Animal Communication II at the Point Reyes Commune.

What Penelope described to us about being an animal communicator was something like being in a country where you don’t speak the language and then going off and learning it and coming back. It was like a switch went on and all of the voices were clear. She told us about a time when there was a great fire on her nature preserve (everything she said sounded like a plot point in a Disney movie) and she’d been so upset that for a brief period of time she couldn’t hear the animals speak! She’d lost her sense. “I knew what it was like to be a ‘normal’ person,” she said in a chilling tone.

I walked around Omega imagining every sparrow and kitty cat was talking to me. Curiously, they all seemed to have my personality.

The one thing that did ring true to me was when Penelope talked about the ways in which you were already communicating with your dog. Aside from the sit/stay/leave it type commands, you knew if your dog had to go out for a walk or they’d stand by their food bowl to tell you they were hungry. There were other things. My aunt Mattie always knew when her dog was getting a stomachache because he’d do a certain kind of stretching, and I knew when Otto needed his anal glands expressed because he’d perform a very special dance. He’d sit on the rug and with one leg drag himself around and around in circles and he’d look at me every time he came around, like a ballerina spotting during a series of pirouettes.

On the bus back to New York, I talked to people who’d taken other workshops and we all had the same self-satisfied sense that we were now in possession of superhuman abilities. We could have driven the bus back with our minds or, better yet, transported ourselves by breaking down our molecular structures. One woman who’d done some kind of automatic writing class asked me if I could talk to her cat for her (you don’t need to try to convince these people—they drank the Kool-Aid in the Omega dining hall). The cat was back in San Luis Obispo, California. She showed me his picture in her wallet and asked me to see if he was okay. I stopped and concentrated hard on his picture and San Luis Obispo and I thought about the swallows in Capistrano and finally decided yes, he was okay. I had a very strong feeling that he
was
. You know, because he looked fine in the picture. Why wouldn’t he be? She was really relieved because she’d talked to a friend on the phone the night before and there’d been
a hurricane
and she was worried that her cat had been scared or worse.

“He’s alone?” I asked.

She gasped, “You knew that!”

No! I just couldn’t believe someone would go from California to New York for four days and leave their cat alone. I worked a six-hour day and had a dog walker come in the middle of it to look in on my boy. The woman from the bus and I exchanged addresses, and she wrote to me when she got home that her house was nearly destroyed. A tree had fallen on it. But, as I’d said, the cat was fine. He’d found a safe place under the porch to hide. She was eternally grateful for my message. Maybe I had gotten a line on the cat, but more likely I’d guessed right. Much of animal communication and psychic abilities has to do with confidence, and I had none. I also knew how anxious I was to believe when someone predicted something (especially if it was positive) for me. But it kind of scared me, too. Like the stories I’d heard about people getting possessed while playing with the Parker Brothers Ouija board. I wasn’t psychic. I mean, I did have those moments where I’d be singing Steely Dan’s “Peg” and turn the radio on just as it was playing or pick up the phone to call my mother and she’d already be on the line because she’d just called me, or when I intuited that I wasn’t going to get a job and then didn’t. But what was psychic and what was coincidence? I was sure I didn’t know.