Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dave Barry is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands, including Lessons From Lucy, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, Dave Barry Turns 40, and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes, Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He lives in Miami.

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Lessons From Lucy

INTRODUCTION

I’ve always been a dog person. When I was a boy our family had a standard poodle named Mistral, which is a French word for a cold northwesterly wind. The name wasn’t our idea. Nobody in my family had ever been to France; we were the kind of family who would name a dog Buster. Mistral was named by his previous owners, a wealthy family who gave him to us because they could no longer keep him. When we got him, he was a pampered indoor dog who had one of those professional poodle hairstyles with the ridiculous poofs, including one on his head. I believe Mistral was embarrassed about how he looked, as if he’d gotten invited to a dog party where the invitation said, “Come in a wacky costume!” and he was the only dog who did.

But after a short while in the Barry household, wrestling with us Barry kids and racing around in the woods and marshes behind our house and never receiving any kind of even semiprofessional grooming, Mistral was transformed from a foo-foo house dog into a red-blooded, slobbering, leg-humping, free-range American dog so shaggy and filthy that it would not have been surprising to see soybeans sprouting from his coat.

I had a special bond with Mistral because I illegally fed him under the table at suppertime. As a child I was a very picky eater; the only foods I really liked were vanilla ice cream and ketchup.1 But we Barry children were not allowed to leave the table until we cleaned our plates. So I was in big trouble when my mother, an otherwise decent human being, decided to serve us brussels sprouts, which—this has been shown in laboratory studies—are actually the severed heads of Martian fetuses. I could not eat them. I could barely look at them. The rest of the family would finish supper and go watch Gunsmoke on the RCA Victor TV with the massive wooden cabinet housing an eleven-inch, black-and-white, no-definition screen, and I’d be stuck at the table, sitting in front of a plate of cold green slimy alien spheres, an abused child with nothing to look forward to except a slow death by starvation.

That changed when we got Mistral. At suppertime he would camp underneath the table in front of me and wolf down anything I slipped him—meat, fish, pasta, the occasional napkin, even vegetables, including brussels sprouts. In those days there was a TV show called Lassie, wherein every week a boy named Jeff—who was, with all due respect, an idiot—would get stuck in a well, or fall into some quicksand, or get into some other dire predicament. Then his faithful collie, Lassie, would race back to the farmhouse and bark at Jeff’s parents—who were not themselves rocket scientists2—until they finally figured out, with some difficulty (“What’s wrong, girl? Are you hungry?”), what Lassie was trying to tell them, even though this happened every single week. So they’d go rescue Jeff, and everybody would praise Lassie for being a hero.

To my mind Mistral was way more heroic. Any dog can run around barking. But show me the episode where Lassie eats Jeff’s brussels sprouts.

So I was a dog lover from the start. Our next family dog after Mistral was Herbie, who was a mixed breed, a cross between a German shepherd and an aircraft carrier. He was huge. Fortunately he was also very affectionate, although sometimes his rambunctiousness intimidated visitors who didn’t know that he was harmless.

“Herbie!” we would shout. “Put the UPS man down RIGHT NOW!”

And usually he would. Good boy!

In my adult years I’ve had a series of dogs, each of them, in his or her own way, the Best Dog Ever. For a while I even had two dogs: a large main dog named Earnest, and a smallish emergency backup dog named Zippy. I wrote a number of columns about these two, the gist of these columns being: “These are not the brightest dogs.”

Take the matter of going outside in the morning. This is a very big thing for dogs, because it’s a chance to race around sniffing to determine where other dogs have made weewee, so they can make weewee directly on top of those places. Every dog on Earth is engaged in a relentless never-ending struggle with every other dog on Earth to establish weewee dominance. It’s an immense responsibility.

So anyway, I used to let Earnest and Zippy out via a two-stage procedure. Stage One was, I opened the back door, which led to the patio. This patio was surrounded by a screen enclosure, which is necessary in South Florida to prevent the mosquitos from making off with your patio furniture. Earnest and Zippy would race across the patio to the screen door and wait there, eagerly, for Stage Two, which was when I opened the screen door, and they were able to sprint outside and commence weewee operations.

We used this procedure for several years; Earnest and Zippy totally understood it. Then, in 1992, Hurricane Andrew roared through our neighborhood, and when it was gone, so was the patio screen enclosure.

But the screen door was still there.

Just the door, standing alone in its frame at the edge of the patio, with nothing around it.

How do you think Earnest and Zippy responded to this new situation, when it was time to go out in the morning? If you’re a dog person, you have already guessed. I’d open the back door, and the two of them would sprint to the screen door—which I remind you was surrounded by nothing—and stand there, waiting for me to open it. I swear I am not making this up. It took them a couple of weeks to fully comprehend that they no longer needed to follow the two-stage procedure for going outside.

Earnest and Zippy provided me with a lot of entertainment. They were a comedy team, like a low-IQ version of Abbott and Costello. Sometimes when I was working they’d settle down snoozing on opposite sides of my office door—Earnest usually inside with me, Zippy outside in the hallway. They’d lie quietly, sometimes for hours, while I tapped away on my keyboard.

Suddenly, one of them would be activated by something. Dogs do this; they’ll be sound asleep, then, for no apparent reason, they’ll leap up, barking furiously. My theory is that there’s a Dog Satellite orbiting the Earth, emitting signals that only dogs can hear as it passes over. Whatever it was, one of my dogs, usually Earnest, would hear it and start barking. This would awaken Zippy, on the other side of the door. He assumed Earnest was barking at something important, so he would start barking and leaping against the door, trying to get it to open so he could come in and help Earnest bark at whatever it was. Hearing this, Earnest would assume Zippy was barking at something important, and she (Earnest was female) would start leaping against the door from her side, which would make Zippy even more excited.

Now the two of them were hurling their bodies against the door in an escalating frenzy of dog alertness, by which I mean stupidity. They would keep this up until I got up and opened the door. Earnest would then bolt out of the office, barking; Zippy would charge into the office, also barking. The two of them would eventually conclude that there was no threat, or that they had scared it away. I’d close the door and they’d resume snoozing on opposite sides of it, and the office would be peaceful again, until the next...