Free You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness by Julie Klam

mostly I’d just pull him away. Initially, though, it was a shock to me. Every time he did it, I thought it was an aberration, there was something provocative about the particular dog he was biting; it was not his fault. But then I started getting it, that he was the one with the behavioral issue. So I had one of my talks with him.
    “Listen, you have got to get it together. You’re not going to have any friends! No one’s going to want to hang with you. They’re already starting to think you’re a jerk. It’s not my problem, it’s yours! If you don’t want to behave, you’re going to be the one who is embarrassed out there in the world.” I used every psychological trick in the book. No little dog was smarter than me! In the end, he decided he preferred his method of communication, and I was right. No one invited him to any of the big doggie birthday parties.
    With Violet, it was different. (Strange, but true!) I had a greater responsibility for developing her social and emotional skills. Otto would never be going places without me, but we assumed, one day, that Violet would.
    By the Monday after the first easing-in week, my daughter’s response to my leaving her at school was no less dramatic than the climactic scene in Sophie’s Choice . In Violet’s four-year-old mind, I was leaving her. Plain and simple. She cried and clung to my leg so that the teacher had to pry her off me and hold her, and then I would leap out, as the assistant shut the door behind me to keep her from escaping. I walked down the hall as her screams echoed, “Nooooooooo!!! Mooooooooommmmmmmmmm! Please!!!!!!!!!”
    First she had gotten upset when we arrived at the classroom, and the next day she worked her way back to getting upset when we arrived at the school, then when we walked up Broadway, then when we were leaving the apartment, waking up, the night before, etc. . . . When I got her to school, the kids looked at me like I was dropping off a wild thing. They stared at us as they settled into their puzzles and counting games. Those first few weeks, the teacher wouldn’t put her name on her cubby because she didn’t think Violet was going to stay in the class. For me and for Violet, getting her to school was the hardest thing we’d ever had to do.
    The teacher suggested having Paul take her, since maybe she wasn’t attached to him in the same way and he could just leave her. On the day we decided to try this method, they left and all was quiet. All morning I didn’t hear a peep from him, so I figured the drop-off must have gone smoothly. At around noon he called me from his cell phone. He was just leaving school. He actually did worse than I did. So the task went back to me.
    When it was clear that she was going to school whether she cried or not, Violet settled in and became a model student, which for pre-K pretty much means not biting or spitting (and for this she won Student of the Month for September!). I happily turned my attention back to rescue.
    I arranged my first transport for a sweet, senior Boston named Daisy. She was coming from Somethingsburg, Pennsylvania, and ending up in Nowheresville, New York. I figured it out on Google maps and set a plan into motion; it would kick off Saturday starting at 7 A.M. Friday night we were sitting down to dinner and I got an e-mail. Subject: PROBLEM WITH DAISY’S TRANSPORT. It seemed that the mother-in-law of the guy lined up to drive the third leg of the trip on the New Jersey Turnpike was in the hospital. The third leg was the hardest to fill, so unless Daisy was hiding her ability to fly, we were going to have to cancel the trip. That wasn’t good. Her foster family had worked very hard to find someone willing (and qualified) to adopt this senior rescued dog with a possible two years of life left—condition of that life not guaranteed. If we canceled the transport, we’d lose all of the people who had set that Saturday aside to make that trip.
    If I had a car, I’d have