“Is that Beezus?”

It was a cold January night. I had my collar up and my hat down, and was trying to convince my dog to pee. This is more challenging than it sounds, as my dog had recently started doing the fakey: she squats as if she is going to pee, and then changes her mind. She was on her third or fourth fakey when another dog owner approached us.

“That’s Beezus, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It is,” I replied, stroking her inquisitive Ridgeback behind the ears. Beezus pulled up from her squat, leaving the sidewalk dry beneath her.

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We had taken her to the vet, worried that this new behavior was the symptom of a bladder infection. Nope, said the vet. The problem was psychological, not physiological.

This wasn’t surprising. Beezus can charitably be called odd.

A few years ago, Sally and I contemplated getting a dog. She had never had one, and I grew up with one that I wasn’t especially fond of. But, we both loved our friends’ dogs, and it was on my list, #35 – Own a dog. One Saturday, we went to a mobile adoption event at the Petco on the Upper East Side. Just to look.

We went upstairs and met the people from Northshore Animal Shelter. Our plan was to talk with them about how realistic it was for us, living in a tiny Manhattan apartment, to adopt a dog. They assured us it wouldn’t be a problem, and pointed us towards the puppies.

There were three that I could see, all long-haired and very vocal. Neither trait was appealing, but I asked what breed they were.

“Those 3 in the front are shepherd mix, and the one in the back is a boxer mix.”

“Boxer?”

Several of my friends had boxers, and I love every boxer I’ve ever known. I squatted down and saw this mild-mannered, short-haired, fawn-colored little puppy wedged into the corner of the crate. The guy from Northshore took her out and handed her to me.

She was incredibly calm. No trembling, no whining, she just curled up in the crook of my elbow, and fell asleep. I talked with the guy for another half-hour or so, about quality of life issues for a dog living in Manhattan, about the adoption process, about whether our life could accommodate a dog.

He asked for 2 references, people he could call who would verify we were capable of being responsible dog owners. While he was on the phone with them, I asked Sally, who had been circling us and taking pictures with her phone, what she thought.

“Are you going to put this back in that cage?!?”

She thrust her phone under my nose and showed me this:

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“I thought it was her. I see her with the dog-walker all the time.”

One thing about owning a dog in Manhattan, and having a full-time job, somebody has to take your dog out at least once during the day. Most people hire dog-walkers to come and grab their dogs in the afternoon, take them out for a quick walk, and then drop them back in the apartment.

Beezus wasn’t quite so easy.

When we first got her, she did little more than whine, as most puppies do when first separated from their litter. In fact seeing her sitting calmly in the crate while the other 3 puppies yipped away was a big reason we were attracted to her.

For the first couple weeks, she was sick and lethargic. We also discovered that she had been spayed the day before we got her, so her mellowness was probably just the general anesthesia still in her system. One day, I was goofing around after getting out of the shower. Sally pulled off my towel, and I ran away from her, mock-giggling like a school girl.

From the top of the stairs came an ungodly sound. Part baying, part yelping, and a whole lot of barking, it froze us in our tracks. We turned and looked, and Beezus was standing there, this horrible sound coming out of this tiny puppy. She had found her voice.

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“Did you know she’s in the New Yorker this week?”

“Ummm….. what?”

“Yeah,” said my neighbor, “she’s mentioned by name. The writer was interviewing the dog-walker and she’s with him and gets a name-check.”

After Beezus found her voice, she never lost it again. If we left her in the apartment for longer than an hour, she would start barking, and wouldn’t stop until one of us got home. When our neighbors complained to the landlord, we decided to leave her with a dog-walker all day. It was that or face eviction.

She barks when the neighbors walk by our door. She barks when an unfamiliar man approaches her on the street. She barks at sanitation workers, mail carriers, police officers, anybody in a uniform. She barks at balloons.

We’ve tried everything humane to address it, but nothing has worked. Our vet told us we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that we have a barky dog.

All of our neighbors know her. Many of them don’t like her, and I can’t blame them. But those who like her, love her. If she trusts you, she is the most loving, submissive dog you’ll ever meet. After I decided to stay home with CJ and we cut out the regular dog-walking dates, one of her walkers cried when she dropped her off for the last time.

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“I was in bed last night,” my neighbor continued, “reading the new issue, and I said to my husband, ‘I know that dog!’”

Beezus finally peed, and I took her to an all-night newsstand. I picked up 4 copies of the New Yorker, thumbed through one until I got to Talk of the Town. There in the fourth paragraph of “Shaggy Dog Story” is my dog:

Beezus, a mutt….

Many people have asked how we can live with a dog in Manhattan. Where else could we live, and get our dog mentioned in the New Yorker?

Many more people have asked how we can live with a dog that cannot be left alone. I have asked myself that same question many, many times.

I stood in front of the newsstand and looked down at her. She looked up at me and wagged her tail.

Sally’s question came back to me, and I asked it of myself again.

What was I going to do, put her back in that cage?