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Lessons from Tara

Life Advice from the World's Most Brilliant Dog

St. Martin's Press

It can all be traced to Tara. ...

The whole thing, all that my wife, Debbie Myers, and I did and are doing: The decision to get involved in rescue, volunteering in awful Southern California shelters, starting our own foundation, rescuing four thousand dogs, putting in those endless hours, adopting an absolutely ridiculous lifestyle, and becoming certified dog lunatics.

If not for Tara we never would have had a house filled with dogs these last two decades ... never less than twenty, and a high of forty-two. I wouldn't have included a dog rescue theme in my Andy Carpenter books, and there's no doubt that a lot fewer people would have read them. I certainly would never have lived through, nor written, Dogtripping.

Our house wouldn't always be knee-deep in dog hair, and we wouldn't go through vacuum cleaners every six months. I wouldn't have taken my laser printer in to be fixed, only to have the guy tell me that there was enough hair stuck in it to make a coat. I wouldn't be literally shoveling shit every morning, and I might not have had four back surgeries. We would be using plastic grocery bags to carry groceries, and not for ... other purposes.

We wouldn't have made a succession of veterinarians wealthy, there wouldn't be a mastiff and four other dogs sleeping in our bed every night, and my car, the one we use for shuttling dogs around, wouldn't be affectionately and accurately dubbed, "The Shit-mobile." There wouldn't be a layer of dog hair on every piece of clothing I own.

Debbie Myers and I might have only dated a couple of times, and thus never fallen in love. I never would have become aware of the amazing love and comfort that dogs have to offer, and how worth it it is to deal with the pain of losing one .. and then another ... and then another. I certainly wouldn't be getting my face licked on a regular basis.

I wouldn't go though a couple hundred pounds of kibble a week, or dispense more medication than the average Rite Aid. It wouldn't take me almost an hour to give out upwards of sixty pills a day. The local PetSmart employees wouldn't spread rose petals in front of me when I arrive at their store, or know exactly what I want without my having to ask for it.

Strangers wouldn't want to visit our house, considering it sort of a canine Disneyland. Our FedEx driver wouldn't tell me that he has other customers in nearby towns who ask him if he knows where we live. People I meet for the first time wouldn't eventually snap their fingers and say, "Wait a minute ... are you that dog guy?" In fact, I wouldn't actually be "that dog guy."

I wouldn't get up at five thirty every morning to the sound of barking, nor would I cringe every time a doorbell rings in a television commercial. Halloween wouldn't be the most dreaded night of the year. I wouldn't have to navigate a canine minefield to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And I wouldn't hear more retching noises during the night than you'd hear in the average fraternity house after an all-night party. "Watch your step" would not be words to live by.

I wouldn't have had a chance to get to know dog rescuers all over the country, and if there is a more dedicated, greater group of people anywhere, I'd sure like to meet them. I never would have realized that there was a massive subculture of dog lovers that exists anywhere you could go. And I would not have been able to help any of them raise money for their very worthy causes.

There would be less screaming in our house, less vacuuming, less mopping, more sleeping, more relaxing, and much less love.

So Tara changed my life and taught me more than I would have thought possible. Some of it was through her actions, but most of it was through her legacy, and the descendants she left behind. They literally number in the thousands.

The lessons in this book are the ones I learned from Tara and her friends. She never met any of them, but she saved every one of their lives.

And I am forever grateful.

Tara taught me ...

in bed, it's best to be on the bottom.

Get your mind out of the gutter; this is not that kind of book.

Tara used to sleep in bed with Debbie and me, but she would always arrive late. I'm not sure why; it's not like she was returning from a night out clubbing. It was just part of her routine to sleep on the living room couch, then get up and come sauntering into the bedroom at around two in the morning. She'd then climb up and go to sleep. It really wasn't a problem for her, since she didn't have to get up and go to work in the morning.

We had a California king bed, so there was plenty of room, but Tara didn't necessarily see it that way. Rather than look for an available slot, she would lie on top of either Debbie's or my legs. It was actually a comforting feeling, and I was always pleased when she chose me, though it was fairly rare that she did.

Fast forward to now, and there are always at least four dogs on the bed, though it can be as many as six. The regulars are Wanda, the mastiff; Jenny, a lab mix; Cheyenne, a Great Pyrenees; and Boomer, Cheyenne's sister. And these are not small dogs; they represent a little more than four hundred pounds of dog. We still have a California king — because we can't find anything larger.

At four A.M., so regular that you can set your watch by it, Bernie the Bernese mountain dog starts to bark, softly at first, then louder. While barking, he puts his front paws on the bed, a signal that we are supposed to lift him up.

He could make it up there himself, but somehow seems to consider it beneath his dignity to do so. Debbie and I both pretend not to hear him, until one of us (usually me) gives up and hoists all 120 pounds of him onto the bed.

The act of lifting him is more than just a question of strength and effort. It's also a strategic challenge, because the other dogs sometimes have to be repositioned so as to find a space on which to hoist him. They are all asleep, and would not react well to a Bernese mountain dog landing on them. They are not as tolerant as Debbie and I.

Once I've successfully added Bernie's very large frame to the crowd, I've got another challenge. Except for Jenny, who shares my pillow, and Cheyenne, who insists on resting her head on a human's upper torso, the rest of them like to sleep near the other end of the bed, blocking off half of it.

That leaves me three choices. One would be to lie in the fetal position, knees up near my chin. That would be fine, unless I wanted to stretch out, or fall asleep, or be able to walk in the morning. The fetal position works fine for fetuses, because they get to stay in one place, and don't have to lift forty-pound bags of kibble.

The second option would be to rest my feet on top of one or more of the dogs, in effect turning them into canine ottomans. That might actually be fairly comfortable, until one of them decided they wanted to get up. If Wanda the mastiff was the one to make that decision, I would immediately feel like I was going into traction, and real traction would soon follow.

The third, Tara-inspired choice, is the perfect option. I burrow my feet under them. They don't seem to mind, I'm able to stretch out, and I get that comforting feeling of them lying across my legs. Of course, when it's the 175-pound Wanda, or even Bernie, it feels like my legs are propping up South Dakota. But it still works fine, and it is particularly warming on cold Maine winter nights. Wanda has so much padding, I don't even think she notices.

Of course, even this has its drawbacks. For one thing, rolling over becomes an impossibility, at least for the lower half of my body. And if one of my "foot blankets" should happen to drool, it would provoke an unpleasant, even disgusting, sensation.

In addition to our bed not being the most comfortable of places, it's not the most sanitary of environments either, since dogs have a tendency to shed as well as drool where they sleep. The trick is for us to pretend we're out camping, and think of it all as communing with nature.

One night, when Debbie was out of town, I got into bed, initially joined by three dogs. The television is on the wall to the left, so I was looking in that direction, watching it. The lights were off in the room, but the television has a very large screen, and it was providing a substantial bit of illumination. I don't remember what was on, but there's close to a one hundred percent chance it was a sporting event of some kind.

Suddenly, from the television side of the bed, Wanda appeared. She is so large that she doesn't jump on the bed, she walks up on it. And that was what she was doing, slowly and deliberately. Wanda doesn't scamper or dart, she plods. She gets where she is going, not quickly, but eventually.

In a few seconds she was standing on the bed, her massive frame coming toward me, the television behind her. What I noticed immediately was the large amount of drool dripping from each side of her mouth.

This in itself was not exactly a shocking event; Wanda is a walking saliva factory. I generally don't mind the fact that she drools; my problem is how she gets rid of it. She doesn't dab it away with a napkin, but rather shakes her head from side to side, spraying it everywhere.

But on this particular night the drool was much more than normal, and I don't know what was causing it. Perhaps she had just finished eating a tree, or maybe a car. I didn't have time to reflect on the cause of her drool, because she was heading in my direction. She was eerily backlit by the television, which made it look like neon drool.

She came toward me, towering, slowly and ponderously. Had Godzilla moved that slowly toward the city of Tokyo, the panicked citizens could have had a few beers, taken in a movie, and then casually ambled away. It felt like it took ten minutes, but it was really only a few seconds. I couldn't take my eyes off the sparkling drool, but I knew where it was headed.

My pillow.

Wanda plunked her massive head next to me on the pillow, and the body followed with a thud. The entire episode was disgusting, so I did what Debbie and I have learned to do in these situations.

I turned my side of the pillow over, closed my eyes, and went to sleep, right next to the Great Wall of Wanda. The drool would be dry by morning, and I wanted to get to sleep before she started snoring. Her snoring sounds like a road crew drilling into concrete.

Of course there are other challenges to sleeping in our house that Tara did not teach me how to deal with, like the unbelievable noise, and I don't just mean Wanda's snoring. Tara was comparatively quiet, only barking when there was a reason to, and even then not very loudly. Such is not the case in our house now.

When I lived in New York, I used to pride myself on being a city guy, able to deal with the difficulties that urban life presented. For instance, at night there were frequent noises, such as car horns, early morning garbage trucks, drive-by shootings, car bombs ... that kind of stuff. Sounds of the city.

But when you're a New York guy like me, you learn to adjust. You get used to the noise, and you either sleep through it, or you go to the window and yell profanities at the people making the racket. When they're finished yelling back at you and saying horrible things about your mother, you fall back to sleep without much of a problem. That's what us tough city guys do; we accept it as part of the natural order of things.

That was then; this is now. I challenge any city guy to come sleep for a night in our shoes, much less our bed. Compared to what we deal with every night, spending a night in Manhattan is like sleeping in the cone of silence.

I would say there are five or six outbursts of barking every night. I have no idea why; maybe the dogs sense something outside, or maybe they're just deliberately being obnoxious. But imagine a police car driving through your bedroom, sirens blaring, and with the cops firing their weapons out the window. That's the level of sound we're dealing with. There is no hearing person on the planet who could sleep soundly through it.

The cause of at least three outbursts a night is Ralph, a black lab who camps himself on the landing at the top of the stairs leading to our bedroom. He's like the bouncer outside the bar, checking IDs and hand stamps. Late-arriving dogs are afraid to walk by Ralph, who growls at them. But they want to get into the bedroom so they stand on the steps and bark at Ralph, in effect telling him to move.

Ralph has no interest in moving, and, unlike Debbie and I, is really not put off at all by late-night barking. But the dogs wanting to get by are apparently optimists, and believe that if they continue to bark as loudly as they can, Ralph will see the light and get the hell out of the way.

Of course he doesn't, so in each case I have to get up and escort the barking dog past Ralph and into the bedroom. Then Ralph goes back to sleep and waits for the next trespasser, so the entire process can be repeated. I have tried moving Ralph to comfortable dog beds or pieces of furniture, but he prefers the top of the stairs, and the feeling of power it gives him.

If it was just the barking, the nights would be almost bearable, emphasis on the "almost." But there are all kinds of other noises. Growling, scratching, wrestling, snoring ... they all have their distinctive sounds. It's like sleeping in the jungle, but with a television and running water.

Probably the worst noisemaker is a senior golden retriever named Mamie, who makes a retching sound that sounds like she's throwing up a lung two or three times a night. It's a dry heave; nothing actually comes out (or if it does, it's happily gone by morning). She's been doing it for years, and has been checked by a vet on numerous occasions. There is no obvious physical reason for it; it's just part of her charm.

As you might guess, lack of sleep leaves me tired a lot, so I attempt to take some daytime naps. As I mentioned, our bedroom is upstairs, and once I put one foot on the steps, my "nap team" springs into action. Benji, Cody, Wanda, Molly, Jenny, and Otis all share the bed with me while I'm napping, and they run up ahead of me and get into position before I even arrive.

I rarely go upstairs during the day unless I'm going to take a nap, and I try not to do so. I feel guilty that my nap team is so disappointed if I get up there and don't climb into bed.

Debbie has an almost entirely different nap team; only Wanda and Molly overlap with mine. So, of course, we can't take naps together; there simply isn't room for both teams. I have no idea why the different nap teams are structured this way, or why certain dogs want to be on the bed during daytime naps, but not nighttime sleep. Maybe they've just divvied us up among themselves.

But, like everything else about our house, it's bizarre and exhausting.

Tara taught me ...

about dating and women.

Back in the days when I was single, it is fair to say that I did not live a bachelor's dream life. To those of you who have met me, this probably does not come as a big surprise.

Were I to stand on a phone book, in the event that phone books still existed, I would be six feet tall. I don't want to be too self-critical, but my distinguishing physical feature has always been my nondescriptness. If I were to set a low bar for success, I would say that girls, and then women, never seemed to recoil from me.

And then I met Debbie Myers, who introduced me to her golden retriever, the aforementioned Tara. We started to date, and many of those dates included Tara. We took her on walks, to beaches, outdoor restaurants, etc. I will admit to having been head over heels for both of them.

Debbie was a senior vice president for the Fox Network in those days, and she worked in an office all day. So I offered to drive up to her house once or twice a day and take Tara for walks. It was an offer both she and Tara happily accepted.

I did it because walking with Tara was a hell of a lot more appealing than sitting in my own house, waiting for a movie or television executive to call and hire me to write a script. Since those calls pretty much never came, and since Tara was always wagging her tail eagerly at the prospect of walking, the decision to do it was basically a no-brainer.

But I received an added bonus; Debbie found it very appealing. At first I assumed it was just that she was grateful I was doing her this favor, and also providing Tara with the walks that she loved. But that turned out not to be the main factor at all. It was my attitude toward Tara that provoked the positive reaction; she liked me because I liked her dog!

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Excerpted from Lessons from Tara by David Rosenfelt. Copyright © 2015 David Rosenfelt. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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