Truth in Advertising

We’ve finally got a dog.

I don’t so much mean that we’ve at long last found a successor to Ellie, as I mean we’ve finally got—in a real if not literal sense—our first dog.

Technically, Ellie was a dog. But in most ways people think of dogs, she wasn’t. Man’s Best Friend? That greyhound was Humankind’s Most Indifferent Acquaintance, as I detailed in my August 26 post. She was beautiful and gentle and the easiest pet imaginable, but she was as affectionate and spirited as the Venus de Milo—and yes, I mean the exquisite stone sculpture, not the Roman goddess it depicts. It wasn’t for nothing that Lynn sometimes described Ellie as our pet rock. Her very name was hugely ironic. After an extensive search we’d settled on Elska—“playful” in Icelandic. The ice part was right, the rest not so much.

I’m a cat guy and would’ve been fine if our dog flirtation had ended with Ellie. But I knew Lynn’s itch to experience dog ownership hadn’t sufficiently been scratched by the Ellie years. In her mind, dogs are to Ellie as a charming rogue is to a sober-minded accountant. Life may be more peaceful with the latter but it promises to be considerably more vivid with the former.

Well, be careful what you wish for. Enter Bean.

Bean is year-or-so-old hound mix who looks much like an oversized beagle. He’d been abandoned by his family outside Raleigh, NC, who moved away and left him tied up in the backyard. (Which Circle of Hell should be reserved for such people? Discuss.) When a neighbor found him, he got loose and promptly ran into traffic. His left rear leg was amputated at NC State University’s veterinary hospital, but he found a foster mom there in Lynn’s friend and former co-worker, vet tech Jen Craver. Jen’s e-mail appeal seeking a permanent home for Bean attracted Lynn’s attention—not just from a humanitarian standpoint but from a let’s-get-Eric-onboard standpoint. She’d remembered a comment I’d once made about how hilarious I imagined it would be were we to adopt a three-legged dog—creating a “one-handed-man-walks-three-legged pooch” scenario that surely would stop pedestrians (if not traffic) and possibly attract circus interest. Long story short, what began as a fanciful sight gag is now reality. We brought Bean home with us last weekend.

Essentially a big, spazzy, unsocialized puppy with major separation anxiety issues and no training other than potty (but thank God for that), Bean is everything Ellie was not. He’s sloppily affectionate and destructively needy, having already chewed to pieces his harness and bedding when Lynn has crated him as part of his training. He’s barked more in six days than Ellie did in the five years we had her. Oh, and his white fur already is all over the place, carpeting whatever space in our house that isn’t already cover in cat hair. (Short-haired Ellie contributed little to that pile.)

In case you’re wondering, why “Bean”? He first was called “Pinto” by the hospital staff because he’s white with dark splotches, like a pinto pony. Jen didn’t like that name, but apparently did like its suggestion of legume. We liked “Bean” immediately, and its endearing quality was emphatically confirmed when my decidedly un-whimsical mom crabbily asked over the phone what the hell kind of name that was for a dog.

Lynn, as both the One Who Wanted a Dog and the vet tech and armchair animal psychologist of the two of us—she reads dog-training books and articles with a zeal I tend to reserve for hot-stove baseball news at this time of year—is in charge of the integration of Bean into polite society, as it were. While my role will expand into dog-walking and other duties as Dr Abbott’s behavioral training yields results, for the time being my contribution to Project Dog is limited to Not Getting in the Way of any incremental progress.

For example, I’m off today, but Lynn is out in the world, working for a few hours. My instructions upon returning from my morning run were to ignore the crated Bean’s frantic whining and thrashing until he calmed down, and only then to let him out. Then, I again was to disregard his manic attempts to celebrate me as his companion and liberator. My orders were to acknowledge him only after he’d stopped jumping around like Richard Simmons at a fat camp. In fact, just a few minutes ago, Lynn called home to see how things had gone. I told her it hadn’t been easy, being cruel to be kind (in the right measure), but that I’d stayed strong. She closed the conversation by exclaiming “Good boy!” It clearly was meant for both Bean and me.

Given his missing limb, Bean’s probably never going to be much of a Frisbee catcher. But our hopes remain high that he’ll one day be the kind of dog we can leave uncrated in our sunroom while we’re gone without his destroying whatever of our possessions the cats haven’t already ruined. We optimistically envision taking him with us on vacation without fearing bad behavior toward people, other dogs or hotel accommodations. (The mere prospect of riding in a car made Ellie shake like a boozehound on a bender.) We foresee being able to walk him at 7 a.m. without bracing for neighborhood-waking barks. He’s young yet, and, we, like all new parents, are working toward milestones with him. They likely will come in time.

Not that we won’t love him in any excesses, just as we loved Ellie in all her limitations. We’re already charmed by his goofy friendliness and his physical adorableness. We’re thrilled that he has no aggression toward the cats, and we already like how he can zonk out in front of the TV at night just as blankly and pulselessly as the rest of us in this house.

There will be fits and starts, advances and setbacks along the way, I know. Lynn’s patience and stamina repeatedly will be tested. But I know my animal behavioralist well, and I’ve no doubt at all that she’s up to the challenge and will savor the results—any results. We’ve finally got a dog, and nothing can trump that.