Giant George (21 page)

And we weren’t about to
stop him—okay, so it was a present, but we figured we could get another one for Annabel easily enough. It was a period of such big adjustment, for him as well as us, that if it made him happy, then it was just fine by us.

And our patience was finally rewarded, come the holidays, by a softening in George’s attitude toward Annabel herself. He celebrated Christmas morning by, for the very first
time, not only acknowledging her presence in our lives, but also licking her hand. Bingo! We’d knew we’d cracked it at last.

If initially it felt like George had made the decision to like her, as the days passed, it became so much more than that. We felt we could
see
his mind working; not only had she now been accepted into our “pack,” it seemed he also understood that she was the pack’s youngest
member, and so was in need of, and due, our boy’s affection and protection. We couldn’t have had a better Christmas present.

And the new year brought good news as well. I took a call from Paul right after the holidays were over. “Guess what?” he announced. “This ball is still rolling. We just hit one thousand fans on Facebook!”

I knew Paul and Dana had been doing great work, keeping both the
website and social media sites fresh and active. They’d both post any news about what George had been up to, as well as photos and videos and interesting links. They trolled the Internet for interesting dog-related facts and had lately been posting George’s thought for the day—most often great quotes from inspirational figures, and links to things and places and sentiments that mattered.

No sooner
had these updates been posted, Paul told me, than they’d find them commented on by a hundred plus people, from across the globe. But a thousand fans? It seemed pretty incredible. “And growing daily,” Paul added, “as are the
followers on Twitter. Plus we are now up to seveny-five thousand hits on our video with Boomer on YouTube.”

No, George didn’t hold any world records yet, but if it was popularity
they were measuring, rather than inches, he’d have been a winner by a mile. The bottom line was that George was a very special dog, and not just in terms of his stature. If my childhood dog, Apollo, could wow the crowds with his mad antics, George seemed to wow everyone just by being George. No, he didn’t goof around, or perform tricks—he didn’t need to. Just being in his presence seemed to
do something to people. There was wonderment, obviously, at a dog who had to bend down to pinch a steak off a kitchen counter, but there was also something so special about this amazing boy of ours. For want of a better word, we called it his “aura.” It was, we decided, the same kind of special something that separated true movie stars from all the other actors.

And whatever it was, George enjoyed
it. You could take him pretty much anywhere around people and he was happy. He might shower everyone around him in drool (as a consequence we never traveled anywhere these days without either one of our “drool towels” or rolls of paper towels), but he was never once cranky or uptight, or skittish or bad-tempered—no wonder he was so much in demand.

During the holidays things had been pretty quiet—just
as we’d planned—but after the break things really started to pick up. We got a call from the drug company Pfizer’s Animal Health Division. Their annual convention was right here in
Tucson and they wanted to know if George could come over to the hotel to do photos with the attending veterinarians.

The organizers were very professional from the start, and set it up so that George would pose with
one small group of doctors at a time. We did this a few times to accommodate all the attending doctors, and George didn’t seem to mind in the least. Far from it—he seemed to have this sixth sense about when the “say cheese!” moment happened. He’d always pose with such grace and stand perfectly still.

Back online, we knew things were still growing exponentially. During the month of January our
website had over thirty thousand visitors—an absolutely incredible number. And if we’d been thrilled to reach the magic number of one thousand fans on Facebook, we had even more excitement in store. By the end of the second week in January, we hadn’t just doubled that figure—we were getting close on reaching
five
thousand.

Yes, we were responsible grown-ups with day jobs, but we were all like
a bunch of overexcited kids. Dana would go peek at Facebook when she should have been working, and fire off an e-mail to Paul and me: “4,974!” She didn’t need to put anything else in the e-mail—we knew what the numbers referred to.

And then that evening, she checked again, grabbed her cell and called Paul. “Are you watching?” she wanted to know, before Paul could even say hello.

“Of course I’m
watching!” he answered. “4,997!”

“You know what?” said Dana. “If anyone could see us, up at
eleven at night, hunched over our computers, doing what we’re doing, they’d think we were mad!”

“Yeah, but isn’t it fun?” Paul started to reply. “Yey! Five thousand! We got it! We’re rocking!”

And it didn’t stop there. By the last day of January, George had a staggering ten thousand Facebook fans. And
it wasn’t just the number of people that amazed me; it was their enthusiasm, their interest, their real passion.

But if George’s fans were on board, it seemed the Guinness organization was not. We got a call from them, right at the beginning of February. “I’m sorry,” the man said, “but there’s a problem.”

I took the call and it left me speechless. The man was British—I could tell right away from his accent—and he explained that he was calling from London, from the Guinness World Records headquarters, in fact.

“A problem?” I asked him, once he’d explained who he was. “I don’t understand. What sort of problem?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” he quickly reassured me. “It’s just that we’ve had someone get in touch by letter, and it seems there’s some controversy about George’s recorded height.”

I was stunned, but at the same time alarm bells began ringing. Would someone really go to such lengths to deny George the title? Was this the same person who’d made all those comments? It was incredible.
Yet it seemed to be happening, even so. “What sort of controversy?” I asked him. “We followed all your protocols to the letter.”

“I’m sure you did,” he said soothingly. “It’s just that someone has challenged the data you sent in and—”

“Challenged?” I asked him, my mind whirling now. How could someone be so fixated on this that they’d make so much effort to dispute the results? What had we ever
done to them? “Who has challenged it?” I wanted to know. “How? On what grounds?”

The man seemed anxious to reassure me I mustn’t worry, but at the same time he wasn’t about to tell me. “I’m sure you’ll understand,” he said, “and I’m really very sorry, but it’s important that we are seen always to follow up on this sort of thing. All we need is—”

I interrupted because I knew what was coming.
“For George to get measured again, right?”

“Exactly,” he confirmed. “We’re going to need a second measurement from a different veterinarian, just so we can corroborate your figures. Can you arrange that, do you think? And for the measurement we’ll send one of our own adjudicators to verify the measurement and act as a witness. Is that okay?”

I said yes because, really, what choice did we have?
We knew we’d done everything completely to the letter, but if they needed for us to do it all again, then so be it. It really didn’t matter
who
was so intent on causing trouble. We certainly were living and learning!

We arranged that we’d plan something for February 10, when their adjudicator, Jamie Panas—who’d be flying all the way to Tucson from New York—could come down and confirm that we
had measured George correctly.

“Unbelievable” was Christie’s opinion, when I called and told her. “And kind of sad too, don’t you think?”

“Sad?” I answered.

“Yes,” she said. “I think it
is
sad. I mean, sad that this bitter person is so completely stuck on all this that they’d go to such lengths to cause trouble for us. He’s just a pet. They all are. Like it really matters so much to them that
they even write to Guinness? Like they really have so little else in their lives? It’s incredible, that’s what it is.”

But, incredible as it was, there was more incredulity to come.

“ ‘That’s Incredible!’”

I’d listened hard, but wasn’t sure that I’d heard right. “I beg your pardon?”

“ ‘That’s Incredible!’” the woman who’d called my cell said again. “You remember we spoke on the phone a couple
months back? About George guesting on one of our ‘That’s Incredible!’ shows?”

I laid down my drill and carefully climbed down my ladder. It was February 11, and I was doing some work on a house that I was selling, a few miles from where we lived, close to downtown. I had a guy working with me on some wiring that needed doing, and what with the noise he was making across the room from me, I’d
missed the first couple of things the woman had said. But now I
could
hear and realization kicked in. It was Shantel, the producer I’d talked to before, from
The Oprah Winfrey Show
.

“We’re busy preparing the next one,” she explained again. “And we wondered how you felt about bringing George along to guest on the show.”

George himself ambled up now and snorted at my cell. Was he really so clever
that he could sniff the smell of celebrity? The whiff of fame? The heady scent of success? I smoothed a hand over his velvety head. The whole idea of George “guesting” on a TV show seemed so funny. “That sounds great in theory,” I said. “Except you know what’s been happening with all that, right?”

I didn’t actually know she knew about it—I just assumed that she must know something. Why else would
she be calling today? I explained about the challenge to our data that had come in, and the fact that Guinness needed us to measure George again.

“Which was supposed to happen yesterday, but didn’t,” I added. “The adjudicator’s flight here got canceled, because of all the snow in New York. So we had to rearrange the date. It’s now scheduled to take place next Monday, the 15th.”

But I’d obviously
been wrong about what the woman did and didn’t know. It seemed she knew nothing of the whole remeasuring fiasco; they just wanted George on because they wanted George on. But now that she
did
know, she was really excited about it. In fact, she was on a new mission.

“That’s just
fantastic
,” she told me, and I could hear her shuffling papers. “So, yes, let me see now. We need to be there too.”

“You do? At the measuring?”

“Yes, we do. Absolutely. So we can film it for the show. Just perfect. February 15, you say? Next Monday?”

“Yup. Monday the 15th.”

“Okay. That’s great. Now leave everything to me, Dave. I’ll
make a start on getting things organized right away. Oh, and, one thing: are you able to promise me something?”

“What?”

“That you won’t appear on—or talk to—any other shows
in the meantime? That’s pretty important, as you can imagine, because this is potentially big news, and we want to be the ones to break it. Okay?”

“Of course. That’s fine,” I said. “No problems. But—”

“Because, obviously, if it’s ratified and George
does
get the title, then we’ll need to get him on up here to Chicago right away.”

“Yes, that’s fine, as I say, but—”

“And we’d need him on his
way to us within the next twenty-four hours after the measuring, ideally. Strike while the iron’s hot!”

“Yes, of course, but—”

“I’m sorry?”

“But how are we going to
do
that?” I finally managed to cut in. “I mean it’s great and all, and I’m sure George would absolutely love all the attention, but how’s he going to get from Tucson to Chicago? Because there’s no way we’re sticking him in a crate
on a plane or driving him all the way across country.”

There wasn’t even so much as a microsecond of silence. “Oh,” she said breezily. “No need for you to worry about that. We’ll fly you all here first class, of course!”

Jamie, the Guinness official adjudicator, flew in from New York on Sunday, February 14, at around 2 p.m. It was raining a little
when Paul and I drove out to the Tucson airport
to collect her. Was that going to be some sort of omen?

We were both a bit nervous about meeting her, because we didn’t know what to expect. New York. It had plenty of connotations, for sure. New Yorkers were a breed apart, weren’t they? Paul had been there. I hadn’t. But it made no real difference. New Yorkers were all hard-driven, in-your-face people, weren’t they? Would
she
be like that? All
high heels and sharp edges? Or would she be softer around the edges—a fun, fashionable New Yorker, like you saw in all the cable shows? Would she be an older woman—hell, she was a Guinness adjudicator, wasn’t she?—who hated dogs and had no sense of humor? If so, then we might have trouble relating to her.

Tucson airport’s not too big, and it’s not too busy either, but even so, to show our goodwill,
we made a sign with her name on it, and stood in arrivals like a pair of nervous schoolkids waiting for someone they expected to be a bit scary. Ridiculous, but that’s what it felt like that day—like she was some prim school principal who held our fate in her hands.