Always By My Side CHAPTER 1 Our golden girl Millie came to Julee and me on an airplane from Tampa, Florida, via Atlanta, on Memorial Day weekend, 2007, a hot, brilliant, backlit kind of morning, one of those days that stamp a vivid, practically surreal impression on your memory. I remember standing in the baggage claim area at Newark Airport, disembarking passengers streaming around us, waiting for the luggage handlers to bring out a ten-week-old puppy in a sturdy plastic travel kennel provided by her breeder. There were several false alarms, including a Dalmatian who was barking hysterically and a pug with its eyes bulging out of its head. Then she appeared. Or at least her nose did, poking out of the wire mesh of her kennel door. The kennel was stacked precariously with a whole bunch of non-living luggage on a stainless-steel cart, which the man pushing it seemed determined to bash into everything that stood in its way. I ran over protectively and snatched the kennel. "This one''s mine," I snapped.
He didn''t ask me for my baggage claim ticket. I think he knew better. We liberated Millie immediately, Julee gently lifting her up in her arms and me taking pictures with my phone. We''d lost Sally, our sixteen-year-old cocker, a few weeks earlier while Julee was on tour in Europe. We waited until she got home to find another dog. It was the longest we''d ever been without a dog as a couple, and the longest Julee had ever been in her life. Julee is known to say that she was raised by golden retrievers and cocker spaniels, in a family that sometimes treated their dogs better than they treated one another. Sally had been at the center of our lives for so long we hardly recognized ourselves as a couple without her.
She had lived a long, eventful life, but that didn''t make losing her any less of a heartache. We needed another dog, not to replace her but to fill that void in our hearts. This creamy, snuggly puppy was an answer to prayer. We had found a small, specialty breeder in Florida online. We''d seen video of the parents, Maggie and Petey, proudly standing with their litter. Immediately both Julee and I were attracted to a puppy with a kind of light in her eyes--Dark Pink Girl, named after the collar that identified her from her brothers and sisters. And now, finally, here she was. Millie.
Yes, she was a little rank and a little damp from her imprisonment, but that could be easily remedied by a quick bath when we got back to New York. Julee held her in her lap in the backseat all the way into Manhattan. I nearly got into several wrecks reaching back to pet Millie. We got to the apartment and carried her upstairs. We had everything ready--toys, bowls, treats, a bed, and wee-wee pads until she was old enough to go outside. I emailed the breeder as soon as we got in: "She''s absolutely out-of-this-world beautiful!" That night she slept in a brand-new kennel at the foot of the bed. In the middle of the night she cried. Julee started to get up.
"No," I said. "It''s like a baby--you have to let them cry it out. You can''t go running." Reluctantly Julee went back to sleep. A few minutes later Millie cried again. I stared at the ceiling for about a minute then reached over, undid the door to her kennel and brought her into bed. She was everything we dreamed of in a pup. We were ready to raise her to be a strong, confident girl, to love her until the ends of the earth and back.
If she was traumatized by her time in the belly of a 747, she didn''t show any signs of it. She was the happiest puppy I''d ever seen. Or so I thought. But we''ll get to that soon enough. WHEN I AM NOT spending time with my dog, I am the editor-in-chief of Guideposts magazine, a publication featuring true, uplifting personal stories from people of all walks of life. It was a job I literally wandered into one day in 1986, a lost young man desperate to keep body and soul together. Would I be interested in using my writing background to help people tell their stories of hope and inspiration? Well, why not? I had nothing better to do and practically no place to live at the time, no "visible means of support," as they say. I liked the Midtown Manhattan location of the office.
It made me feel like I was coming up in the world and my bottom was a long way down. I figured I''d give it a year, work on my resume, and use the office Xerox machine to make copies to send out. In any event, I wouldn''t stay at Guideposts for long. It wasn''t really my milieu, I told myself. Things didn''t quite work out like that. I kept staying. One year, then two, then five, until I couldn''t imagine leaving this wonderful publication and the millions of people who are inspired by it every month. They inspired me.
One thing everyone knows about me as an editor is that I love a great dog story. My first cover story for Guideposts was with a man named Bill Irwin, who thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in his fifties. No big deal? Well, Bill had never hiked anything in his life. In fact, up until shortly before the story takes place he was a sedentary, lifelong alcoholic. Did I mention that he was blind? And that he hiked the entire 2,000 miles of the trail from Georgia to Maine alone save for his amazing guide dog, Orient? All of this simply because he believed the Lord wanted him to, that a man as broken as Bill Irwin could be restored. Bill was unforgettable and so was Orient. It was one of my biggest thrills when I finally got to meet them in person, though it was a totally random-rush hour encounter at Union Station in Washington, DC. Well, maybe not so random.
Bill and Orient have supplied me with a lifetime of inspiration. I identified with Bill as a recovering alcoholic and a dog devotee. Bill and Orient''s saga infused me with a love of the Appalachian Trail, many miles of which I have hiked with my own dogs, especially Millie. Sometimes I will close my eyes and try to take a few steps, just to feel what it was like to be Bill, but it is an impossible thing to imagine, like trying to imagine what it was like to be Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. No, I was wrong. Bill Irwin and Orient did not hike that great trail alone. I have learned that some of the most powerful human stories are from people and their dogs. It is a dynamic that can produce great personal insight and change.
No wonder then that our dog stories are among the most popular in our repertoire, and have been for more than seventy years. And why not? We''ve been talking about our dogs since we could talk. Prehistoric cave paintings attest to this. So do Minoan pottery and ancient Chinese statuary. Dogs hold an esteemed place in literature. Remember Argos from Homer''s Odyssey? He is the only one to recognize Odysseus after his twenty-year wander, the first dog to appear in literature. Or Dora''s Jip in Dickens''s David Copperfield, who dies at the moment his mistress does. Hard-living Jack London created two of the most memorable literary dogs--Buck in The Call of the Wild and the eponymous White Fang (technically a wolf-dog), two books I must have read a hundred times as a kid.
Who can forget Old Yeller and Lassie? These dogs are canine archetypes--brave and noble and wise. And unforgettable. I''ve worked on a lot of dog stories through the years and in a way, they are all unforgettable--but maybe that''s just me. I hope it''s you, too. But my love of dogs started well before I came to Guideposts. For most of my life I have been in the company of a dog, sometimes multiple dogs, and in periods of involuntary doglessness I have sought them out wherever I could, if only for a transitory fix. If a friendly one came bounding down the street, I''d squat and open my arms, I''m sure with a ludicrous expression on my face, even sillier than the canine in question. Many owners have had to tug their charges away from me.
Occasionally, I would loiter in the vicinity of a dog park, just to watch them play. I remember sitting at a discreet distance in Manhattan''s Madison Square Park, at dusk, observing a sleek Viszla named Ubu (after the Alfred Jarry character, I presume) chasing anything his owner could throw, leaping and snatching the item out of the air as if he could jump all the way to heaven. Ubu''s joy was infectious. So was his human''s. My very earliest recollection of a dog at my side is almost completely obscured by the mists of memory. I was a colicky baby. I would wail and cry and scream for hours upon hours. I drove everyone to the edge of madness, to hear my family tell it.
And with my mom coping with my brother Bobby, who had Down syndrome and was sensitive to disruptions, there was only one sensible thing to do. The house on Hillcrest Avenue in Havertown, Pennsylvania, just a few miles west of downtown Philly, had a deep, narrow backyard with an empty lot bordering the end farthest from the house. That''s where my playpen was relocated, with me placed in it. Oh, I''m sure my wailing could still be heard, especially by my mom, but it was now muted by the aural rhythms of the neighborhood, just another piece of the cacophony. And wail I did, alone in my pen. Except for a visitor. It is such a vague fragment of memory, a deep brownish dog with alert ears that pointed to heaven, white markings, and beautiful dark eyes. There he would stand, seemingly for hours (but what did I know about time?), just staring at me, sometimes lying down and resting his chin on his forepaws.
And his presence co.