Little Boy Blue (30 page)

I made sure that Izzy had everything she needed. I’d brought along her favorite toy, her veterinary papers, and even the phone number of her first foster family, back in North Carolina, in case anything came up that required all of us to help. I’d also brought Izzy’s collar, which, of course, I said the family could keep.

“Oh no,” the teenage daughter said. “I already picked out Izzy’s new collar.”

The girl walked over to the kitchen counter and produced a brand-new collar with matching leash. Her mom and I helped her adjust them so they would fit perfectly. Both were hot pink and covered in black zebra stripes.

All in all, I spent about forty-five minutes that day helping Izzy to feel settled in. The mom’s cell phone rang at least five times while I was there.

“It’s just the family,” she told me, silencing the ring tone again and again. “They all want to know what our new girl is like. Do you think she can swim? Because we go to a house at the shore in the summer. Do you think she’ll like the beach? Everybody wants to know if she’ll like the beach house.”

Yes, indeed, it seemed that both of my foster dogs were going to have better lives than I do.

A Puppy’s Potential

After Izzy and Summer were gone from my home, Blue seemed a little bit lonely. I offered to foster more dogs for Lulu’s Rescue, but until the next one arrived, I made sure to take Blue on many trips to our local dog park and to Top Dog, which is our nearby obedience school. Blue loves to spend time with other pooches, and he’s a fast learner who has a lot of fun in class. He went on to earn his AKC Canine Good Citizen certificate on the very first try, following some pretty impressive turns at puppy kindergarten.

For those who have never attended, I can say that puppy kindergarten is not unlike your average day on a youth soccer field. There’s the coach, standing in the middle and trying to give instructions whether the kids are listening or not. There are the parents, technically not playing the game but still intensely engaged, constantly shouting commands, and seriously hoping their kid isn’t the one who screws it up for the rest of the players. And then there are the kids themselves, who really don’t seem to understand all the effort that has gone into creating their day’s fun. They’re pretty much just excited to be around lots of other kids, and they’re willing to follow a ball wherever it’s kicked.

The difference with puppy kindergarten is that, while every dog is part of the same group, the ultimate goal is to achieve individual success. There is a lot of repetition and practicing commands such as “sit,” “stay,” “lie down,” and “come.” Some dogs listen, some dogs don’t, and some owners get bored and give up way too soon in the training process. So just to drill home the point of the whole exercise, the Top Dog trainers traipse out one of their seasoned graduates at the beginning of each eight-week session. They tell him to sit and stay, and then they gleefully take turns trying to distract him by clapping in his face, offering him food, and shouting other commands. The dog—usually a Border Collie who possesses more award ribbons than Lassie had endorsement deals—never moves a muscle, except perhaps to yawn at these silly, silly humans. The dog’s unfettered obedience to his master’s most recent command of course impresses all of the newly enrolled people, most of whom ooh and aah while scooping their own puppies into their arms to prevent them from peeing on the floor.

As the weeks went on at obedience school, Blue got to know every dog in our class and loved them all. During playtime, he romped equally well with the spunky, three-pound Yorkshire Terrier named Bella as he did with the lanky, twenty-five pound Spaniel named Laslo. Blue became a rock star when working on basic skills, too. He sat when told. He walked on a leash without pulling. He came when I called him, flying across the ring and into my arms as if I, personally, were made of bacon and peanut butter.

I was, without question, the proudest mom in the entire ring, beaming as if my kid had just won the National Spelling Bee. And while I know all dog owners think their new puppy is the cutest thing since their first teddy bear, mine actually seemed to be, with the trainers coming over to tell me so and trying to determine Blue’s mix of breeds the entire two months that puppy class lasted. These are professionals who see upward of a hundred dogs every week. They’d coo over Blue and cuddle with him while all of the other dogs watched like wallflowers at the prom. One trainer even offered to dog-sit for Blue if I ever went on vacation, and she warned me, with a chuckle, that I might not get him back.

The last day of puppy kindergarten is the big finale, the Puppy Olympiad, as they call it in the alternate universe that is dogtraining school. The day’s schedule includes games that test what the dogs have learned, injecting a little fun into the experience after so many weeks of rote drills. In one game, each of the pups is given thirty seconds alone in the ring with his handler, to sit and lie down on command as many times as he can. The teacher holds a stopwatch, tells you when to start, and then watches alongside all the other people in class, who cheer you with their out-loud voices while thinking silently about how to beat your score when their turn comes.

Xena, a gorgeous Weimaraner named for television’s warrior princess, was first to stride into the ring that day. Her gangly legs were still growing, which left her a little off balance when she attempted to move too quickly, but she tried hard and did her best to listen, and her owner seemed happy with their score of seven. Laslo the Spaniel, on the other hand, positively blew it and barely earned a three. We clapped for him, anyway, because he seemed so happy just to be in the game. Most of the rest of the puppies earned respectable scores in the vicinity of nine or ten. I cheered for them all and encouraged Blue to watch, secretly hoping he might pick up a few tips that we could use to our advantage.

Then came Bella the Yorkie—or, shall we call her, Bella the Ringer. Her tiny body stood barely three inches off the floor. This, I would soon learn, gave her a distinct advantage in this particular Puppy Olympiad event. For a bigger dog like Xena to go from sitting to standing position and then back to sitting or lying down took a few seconds, at least, because of sheer physics. A Weimaraner has a lot of body to move. But Bella? She could move from standing to sitting with less effort than it takes most humans to clench their butt cheeks. A stiff breeze could blow this little dog’s rear end onto the ground. And she was well trained, too, watching her owner intently and responding to every single command. “Sit!”“Lie down!”“Sit!”“Lie down!” And she would, the little bugger, every darn time. Her score, when the trainer called time after thirty seconds, was an impressive eighteen.

Bella was still striding out of the ring with her precious plastic barrette atop her proudly raised head when the trainer called Blue and me as the day’s final contestants. I am embarrassed to say that I actually took a deep breath before I walked him into the center position to start. No three-pound pooch wearing pink hair accessories was going to whip my boy after all he’d been through in life.

“Aaaaand…. Go!” the instructor said.

My strategy was to keep Blue moving constantly, so he had time only to react to the commands instead of to think about them. Most of the other puppies had seemed confused by the idea that they had to move from sitting to lying down and then go right back to sitting, which is something we’d never practiced in class. Usually, our drills went from sitting to lying down, and then the puppies were told they could get up altogether. So, instead of telling Blue to sit and lie down, sit and lie down, in rapid succession, I decided instead to have him sit, lie down, and then walk a step or two toward me by telling him to come. Then I’d start again with sit and lie down, and then get him on his feet with “Come!” before telling him to sit and lie down again.

He thought this was one of the greatest experiences of his life, a mesmerizing new dance that we were doing together in the rhythm of synchronized swimmers. For about the first twenty seconds, Blue followed me around that ring as if he were a college kid chasing a dropped dollar bill in the wind. His eyes were focused on mine, his ears were perked and listening at all times, and his reaction to my every command was immediate. The teacher counted aloud as we approached Bella’s score of eighteen. “That’s fifteen for Blue!” “Sixteen!” “That’s seventeen for Blue with five seconds to go!”

I was sweating. I was breathing heavily. I was working desperately to concentrate and maintain the pace. I might as well have been trying to juggle apples while running on a treadmill at the gym.

And then I said, “Lie down,” and Blue looked at me like I was from Mars.

The entire room went silent. It was if everyone gasped at once, sucking the very walls of the place in.

“Lie down!” I cried. “Lie down!” My decibel level grew alarmingly high, as if I were trying to coax a child out of a burning building. All the people around us, who had been cheering just a moment earlier, no doubt thought to themselves, “They lost it! Blue lost it! He choked at the end!”

We had only two or three seconds left. Our score was seventeen. We needed nineteen to win, and Blue was just sitting there, staring at me.

“Okay, then come!” I screamed. “If you won’t lie down then come! Come now for the love of all that is holy in this world!”

It was not exactly a command that we had practiced, but for some reason, he did. And then he sat. And then he lay down— just in time to score nineteen before time ran out.

Bella’s owner smiled politely. The rest of our classmates beamed and cheered. Blue looked up at me waiting for my next command, confused as to why all of the fun had suddenly stopped.

It was all I could do to walk out of the ring without raising my arms over my head and humming the theme song to
Chariots
of Fire
.

Our days at Top Dog were almost always a delight, but getting to and from school each week slowly but surely became a disaster. Blue’s fear of cars, which had seemed minor when he first came home, was growing like a star destined for a cosmic explosion. Pretty much every time that Blue got into my Jeep, he vomited. Sometimes more than once. It didn’t matter whether we were going to school, to the vet, or for our daily walk at one of the five parks within ten miles of our house. Something about getting into that vehicle made Blue react like a condemned man being forced into a guillotine.

The trainers at first told me that lots of dogs are afraid of cars because there’s a window of time, when they’re quite young, that is ideal for introducing them to the feeling of being inside a moving vehicle. Breeders, for instance, will put puppies into cars and drive them around the block to get them used to the experience of the ride. In Blue’s case, we had no idea if he’d ever even seen a car as a baby. For all we knew, he’d been born on the side of a road where cars whizzed by like terrifying dog-crushers. Heck, he could have been tossed out of a car or even grazed by one in oncoming traffic. At a minimum, it was certainly possible that he’d missed his window of learning time and was having the same normal reaction that a lot of dogs face when they get into a car for the first time at an older age.

But as the weeks went by, the trainers’ shared opinion changed. The pivotal day in their thinking was the one when we learned the skill of having the dog stay inside when you open the door to your house. The idea is that, if somebody rings your doorbell, you should be able to open your front door without the puppy scampering out and into the street. We practiced by having each dog on a leash, telling him to sit, and then opening the door to the Top Dog parking lot.

Each of the puppies in our class, the minute the door opened, tried to rush out into the fresh air. Their owners dutifully pulled them back inside, leashes intact, and made a second attempt. Usually, the puppies tried to run outside again. This was normal, the trainers said, and it’s why we all should practice this skill at home using our leashes until the puppies got the message.

When Blue’s turn came, things seemed to begin just fine. I checked his leash, told him to sit, and then reached out and opened the door. I was ready for him to dash outside like all of the other puppies had, but instead, he bolted backward. He pulled as hard as he could against his leash, yanking desperately to get away from the door.

We settled him down and tried again, only to experience the same result. The third time we tried, he wouldn’t even go near the door. He pulled to the center of the ring, sat down, and let his ears droop so low that he looked as if he’d just been beaten with a stick.

I stood there puzzled, his leash dangling from my hand, trying to make sense of his bizarre reaction.

Then the trainer said, “Oh, I know what it is. He can see your Jeep right outside that door. Boy, I wonder if something really bad happened to this dog inside of a car.”

Back at home, his fears got worse and worse. On days when I would open the door from the house to the garage, Blue absolutely, positively would not follow me into the Jeep. And after he realized that the only reason we went into the garage was to get into the Jeep, he began refusing to go into the garage at all.