Born to Bark Read online

  Mossy announced to me one evening that she was pregnant again, this time with my son Benjamin, who is one of the true bright spots in my life. When he arrived Rebecca was delighted to have a new brother. One day she took two stools and put them next to where Benn was sleeping. She then sat on one of them and had Feldspar sit on the other. Then she carefully explained what the baby was to the shaggy gray dog. As she spoke, she would first point to the baby and then look back to Feldspar to make sure that he was listening.

  Rebecca carefully explained what the baby was to the shaggy gray dog.

  Feldspar observed Rebecca carefully, playing his part in the conversation exactly the way that dogs are supposed to. I wondered how this conversation might have gone if Rebecca had been older. What would she talk to her dog about? Would she have given the dog a voice to answer her the way that I had always provided a voice and silly answers for each of my dogs? Would she have the kind of therapeutic and self-revealing conversations with her dog that I had found so valuable?

  With two children I felt committed to stay in the marriage for their sakes and also decided that New York City was not the place that I wanted them to grow up. In the early 1970s violent crime was rampant there and the newspapers had published a series of stories exposing the sad state of the public school system. I soon came to believe that if I could move my family to a quieter, more civil locale it would better for my children. A new place and a new home might also help my relationship with Mossy.

  In November 1972 I gave a well-received talk at a conference held by the Psychonomic Society, an organization dedicated to experimental psychological research. While there I let it be known that I was thinking about leaving New York. Even though I was young, my reputation was very good and within three months a dozen institutions had made queries, and six had brought me out to visit them and talk about my research. All six eventually offered me a job in their psychology departments, but one institution really caught my interest: the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada.

  One reason I was attracted to UBC was certainly the department chairman, Peter Suedfeld, an intelligent, cultured, and highly productive researcher. His attitude toward science was similar to mine, and I felt comfortable around him. At one point in our first discussion I told him that my research interests tended to change continually. At the time, I was working on problems involving perception and cognitive processes but would soon be starting some research in neuropsychology and behavior genetics. I asked if that would be a concern. His reply was exactly what I wanted to hear.

  “Stanley, it doesn’t really matter what areas you do research in. As long as you do good work, publish in good journals, and bring honor and respect to this department, you can do anything that you like,” he said.

  UBC also seemed like a good choice because of the core of extremely bright and productive faculty members already there or newly hired. Finally, I was attracted to the city itself. Vancouver is beautiful, with its incredible vista of water and mountains, well-kept parks and recreational areas. Most residential areas outside the downtown city center have quiet, tree-lined streets. A zoo, an aquarium, a symphony orchestra, and a fine arts museum contributed to its cultural life, and major popular entertainers made Vancouver a regular stop on their tours. At that time there had not yet been a big influx of people and the population of Metropolitan Vancouver was around 1.5 million, so housing was still affordable. As the third largest city in Canada, it had all of the services and facilities that one would expect of a large Western metropolis. That year in New York City there had been more than 52,000 violent crimes of which around 600 had been murders, while Vancouver was concerned that their murder rate had just risen to an all-time high of 12 for the year. This seemed like the perfect place to raise my children.

  At the end of the spring semester in June, we packed up and moved to Vancouver, buying a little house with birch trees on the front lawn and a fenced backyard. It was located only about 10 minutes from the university. Once we moved in, we started what was supposed to be a new life.

  As a psychologist I should have known better. Psychological training recognizes that long-established behavior patterns and well-established habits of social interaction do not change simply by changing the place or setting where a person lives. So before long Mossy and I had reestablished all of the same patterns of interacting, or not interacting, that we had hoped to leave behind in New York, and I again sought meaning and feeling in my life by throwing myself into my research and writing.

  To fill the emotional void in my life, just as had happened before in New York, I again became involved with a graduate student, Clare, who, after completing her doctoral work took a faculty position at the University of Victoria, about four hours travel from Vancouver. We did a significant amount of important research and published together for around 16 years.

  Mossy and I continued to drift apart, and our personal exchanges became shorter and more distant. Despite the fact that we now lived in a safe city and a quiet neighborhood, and even though we had a large backyard that was fenced and safe for a dog to be in, Mossy continued to put out papers for Feldspar. Nonetheless, Feldspar had turned out to be the companion for my kids that I had hoped that he would be. I had helped Rebecca and Benn train him to do the basic “sit,” “down,” “come,” and “stay” commands and then also trained him to do some other activities that were simple and practical. I also taught him some ways to entertain and play with the kids.

  One of the things that I like to teach my dogs is to find family members. This is especially useful if you have small children who tend to disappear from sight when something is happening that they are not interested in, like baths, nail clipping, or cleaning up a room. The basic command that I teach is “Where’s” followed by the person’s name. Thus “Where’s Rebecca?” would cause Feldspar to immediately run to where he had last seen her and bark furiously when he got there. Teaching this is a lot of fun because the person to be found gets to play a part in teaching the command while the dog gets to do some running around and receives lots of treats and praise.

  When we taught Felfy to do the “Where’s” command, I would first say, “Where’s Rebecca?” Rebecca was standing across the room and would enthusiastically call out “Felfy come!” When he arrived, she would wave a treat at him until he barked and then give it to him. Then we might repeat it with “Where’s Benn?” and Benn would call the dog and again wave a treat until he barked. After a while the kids could hide just out of sight or in the next room. I would say “Where’s Rebecca?” in a voice loud enough that she could hear it, so that she knew it was time to call him. Repeated over a period of days, we finally got to the point where the kids no longer had to call Feldspar and he would hunt them down and begin to bark to earn his treat on command.

  The “Where’s” command came in particularly handy whenever we used to play hide-and-seek, with the role of “it” usually falling to me. When it came time to find my son, I would ask, “Where’s Benn?” The little terrier would run to his hiding place and bark, usually eliciting screams of “Felfy, go away!” followed by howls of “Daddy, you’re cheating!”

  Terriers are not as scent-oriented as many other breeds, but they appear to be very attuned to the location of things. Once they have found something interesting in a location they will immediately check out that place the next time they enter the area. Watching Feldspar convinced me that he was basing his responses on some kind of spatial memory or mental map, rather than simply searching around randomly until he found the child. He only resorted to searching when something that he wanted had actually become lost. This became clear when Rebecca learned how to outsmart both her father and her dog. She would let Feldspar see her hiding place and wait until I called him back to me. Then, when he was out of sight, she would change hiding places. Thus Feldspar might return to the closet where she had first hidden and bark to indicate this, but in the meantime Rebecca might have switched to the bathroom across the wa
y. She was still easy to find, though, because she could not keep from giggling at how well her deception had worked. By using Feldspar to do my advance scouting I was clearly not above cheating, but the idea was to enjoy the playing of the game, so in those cases when Rebecca had been so creative, I would pretend not to know where she was, just to reward her for her cleverness.

  One day I also tried to teach Feldspar how to square dance, which didn’t turn out so well. This human-canine square dancing actually involves a simple set of moves, but it results in what looks like a complicated musical routine done to traditional country dance music. I usually chose from two or three Irish jigs or reels played with a fiddle, banjo, guitar, and double bass. All of these had a similar sound, and I believe that the nature of the music serves as an extra reminder to the dog as to what he is expected to do.

  First, I taught Felfy to heel, which is just to stay by my left side when I walk. That allowed us to perform some dance maneuvers like “promenade,” where couples walk side by side around in a circle. Then there is the “forward and back,” where I call the dog to face my front and then he and I move a few steps back and then a few steps forward to face each other again. There is also the “dosado,” where the dog starts in front of me again and we pass right shoulders as we circle around and return to the starting place. Finally, there is the “sashay,” where, starting from the heeling position, the dog and I circle each other and return to our places. When you string together these four simple actions in various combinations, you provide the illusion that the dog is square dancing. The fact that all of these maneuvers are in response to subtle hand signals makes it look as if the dog is spontaneously performing his part of the complex dance routine on his own.

  Felfy was well on his way to learning his steps, so I decided to teach him one little additional trick that heightens the illusion that the dog has a sense of rhythm and is truly dancing. This involves having the dog stand still and alternately lift his right and left front legs as if he were keeping time to the music. My hand signal was simply waving my index fingers up and down, which looks much like I am keeping time as well. The first stage of teaching this was to use that same motion of my index fingers to lightly touch Feldspar’s front paws so that he would reflexively lift the paw, for which he would be rewarded. Of course, with a small dog this involves a lot of bending down as if trying to touch my toes.

  No one was home that evening, which was how I had planned it, because I wanted to surprise my kids with a performance after Feldspar had learned the entire “dance routine.” The music was playing loudly and I was bending over touching Felfy’s front legs and getting little paw lifts as planned. Suddenly I felt a tremendous sharp pain in my back and found myself lying on the floor. My back hurt so badly that I was unable to get up again.

  I lay there on the floor in a state of rising panic, afraid that I had lost my ability to stand and walk. Feldspar seemed to recognize that something was wrong and came over to lick my face. I told him, “I really should have taught you how to dial the 911 emergency line.”

  After what seemed like hours, but was probably more like thirty minutes, the pain subsided enough that I could drag myself over to a chair and use it to pull myself up. I sat there hurting, and felt around to my lower back, where my fingers encountered an area of quivering muscles. Feeling these muscle spasms actually was reassuring, since it suggested that muscles were the problem, not a more devastating spinal problem.

  The next day my doctor confirmed my suspicions and announced, “Welcome to the low back pain club. You now have a lifetime membership.”

  He then paused and asked, “Now, what exactly were you doing when you hurt your back?”

  As soon as I said, “I was teaching my dog to square dance,” he gave me a look that we save for people who are too stupid or unbelievable to warrant any attempt at further communication.

  I tried to add some information to make my previous statement seem less outrageous, but he waved his hand dismissively at me and said, “Well, whatever it was, don’t do it again.”

  Thus ended Feldspar’s dancing lessons.

  My life could have easily continued in the same vein that it had been going for many years. I was completely immersed in my work, which gave me a focus and a sense of accomplishment. I had earned a lot of respect, honors, and accolades for my research. On the other hand, my marriage was now pretty much in name only. For the sake of my children, whom I love dearly, I still thought we should stay married, at least until Rebecca and Benn were in their teenage years and could understand and deal with a divorce.

  Over a period of a month or so, however, I began to notice that I was becoming more easily fatigued. It was becoming difficult for me to maintain my concentration when writing or doing data analysis over the long sessions of work that I had become accustomed to. I was also emotionally less responsive, and fewer of my usual activities interested me. I had had an infection a few months earlier that had produced some of these same symptoms and began to wonder if it had come back. The doctor didn’t seem to be very concerned, but he sent me off for a number of tests. A few days later he called me and told me to pick up a form from his nurse, because he wanted some additional tests. I did, and then spent some time in a medical lab giving blood, and then in the hospital for a battery of other tests.

  At the end of the week I found myself sitting in my doctor’s little examination room. He was holding a manila folder and looking at its contents. The concerned look on his face and the fact that he avoided eye contact suddenly had me worried.

  “The tests came back positive,” he started.

  “Positive?”

  “Well, that’s actually negative for you,” he said, still looking down at the folder.

  “Negative?”

  The doctor took a breath and then seemed to gather his composure as he remembered what he had been taught in those medical school courses with titles like Bedside Manner 101 or the more advanced course Bad News 202.

  “Your immune system does not seem to be working well, and you have developed a systemic infection.”

  “Systemic?” I was beginning to feel that I was just an echo following his statements and turning them into questions.

  “That means that the infection is pretty widespread. It is not something where we can isolate the affected region and cut it out. I have concerns about using more antibiotics, at least any that we’ve used before, because your reaction to them may be part of the problem.”

  “The problem?” There was that echo again.

  “Look, the infection is advanced … There has been some organ damage … Under normal circumstances this might be reversible, but your body doesn’t seem to be cooperating. I will do what I can to make you comfortable, but our course of action—if any—is not clear. I will contact some people that I know in the Centre for Disease Control and at the Medical Schools here and in Toronto and Halifax. Maybe one of them may have an idea. But for now I would suggest that you get your affairs in order.”

  “Affairs in order?” came the echo.

  “It is really difficult to put a timeline on this thing. However, if we don’t find a method of treatment that works, you have around eighteen months at most. The good news is that with pain management, you should be able to function pretty much as normal up until around the last two months.”

  Normal? How could anything be normal when I had a death sentence hanging over me? I wanted to talk to someone about this—to vent my emotions—but who? I had no intention of telling my friends, family, or Clare about this. When people know that a person is dying, everything that they do around that individual changes. Human beings do not like to confront the idea of death, so when we know that someone is dying we tend to stay away from him and choose to not interact, because every contact with a dying person reminds us of our own mortality. If I had had a dog of my own, we could have talked … But the only dog that I lived with really belonged to my kids and, although I was fond of him, I did not feel close enou
gh for that reliable talking cure.

  Later, as I stood in the pharmacy waiting for three little bottles of pills, my mind was racing as I tried to sort things out. Eighteen months—what could I—should I do in the remaining eighteen months? Did I want to remain in my cold, loveless marriage for the last eighteen months of my life? Did I want my children to watch me waste away in front of them? The answer to these last two questions was clearly “No.”

  I pocketed my pills and went to a newsstand. I prowled through the “Apartments for Rent” section of the classified ads. I had to find one that was close to the university and my kids. It had to be one that I could afford, since if I ended my marriage I would be using a good chunk of my salary to pay for family support. The second apartment that I looked at appeared to be acceptable. It was on a quiet street, and it had a tiny but functional kitchen, a big living room, and a small bedroom. It was completely empty, so the landlord told me I could move in on Friday, which was only two days away, and he would not charge me for the four days before the new month began.

  Over the next two days I scrounged around to find furniture. The building that my office was in was being renovated. Bookshelves had been broken down and piled up for disposal, free for the taking. Furniture from the wing that had been gutted was available from the university’s surplus center and being sold for a pittance just to clear things out. For a few dollars I managed to buy some wooden chairs, a table, something that could pass for a sofa, and so forth.