From the Archives | What My Skittish Puppy Teaches Me About Writing

We are all complicated and weird and unpredictable. And so is the very best writing.

This is a happy story about a dog.

I promise it’s happy even though it’s not all the way happy. Nostory is ever all the way happy. But this is not a sad story. I promise.

Actually, it’s a love story. A love story about my dog, Frannie, an eight-pound maltipom with an eight-ton personality, and the eight—no, nine!—ways she’s made my writing better.

I guess it’s easy to learn from Frannie because I love her. Specifically, I love her teeny-tiny underbite, her talkative tail, and those little dream barks she makes when she’s all the way asleep.  Also, the way she taps me with her nose communicate, or wedges her warm little body against mine, as she is right now.

I love Frannie endlessly, but … I did not want her.

It was 2019, and the youngest of my adult children, Billie, had recently moved back from China with their partner, Tao. The trees were all riled up over autumn, and Billie and Tao were deeply in love. Their plan was to live with my husband and me (who’d had an empty nest for like five minutes at the time) for a couple of years while Billie finished school and Tao got his footing in a new country.

There were lots of known unknowns and even more unknown unknowns. Like, how, one day, one of Tao’s colleagues at Tea House, the restaurant where he worked, mentioned a friend of a friend’s cousin’s colleague’s niece or some such having some puppies that really, really needed homes. Something about how two college kids who were dating thought it would be cute if their not yet spayed or neutered dogs hooked up, too. Something about how one of their moms had been housing the puppies and needed them taken like now, because they were five months old already and it was too much for too long.

Something about there’s only two left and Look at this video, it would be this one, see? and The smaller one with the gray spots, the one doing all those little flips! and She uses puppy pads! and Please, please, please, please?

Our family dog, Louis, a very hungry boy and a life-long expert food thief, was fifteen then, already in diapers and losing use of his back legs. He was also fully deaf and mostly blind. We weren’t sure how much time we had left with him. But since he still loved eating and eating and eating—eating with gusto and cunning and desperation—we figured his will to live was still strong. We figured he was going to stay awhile.

But with Louis’s diapers and weak legs, how on earth would we manage another dog?

We’ll do it! She’ll be mostly our dog, you guys will barely need to do a thing.

The plan probably would have worked as designed, had it not been for the fact that Frannie had never been socialized … at all. Not even a little. In fact, we soon learned she had only ever used puppy pads—she had no idea what outside even was because she had barely ever left the big kitchen playpen where she was raised with her Pomeranian mom and several maltipom littermates.

It took a minute for us to understand the significance of this deficit.

Jon and I are dog people now, but before Frannie, we were just … people who had a dog. We really didn’t know much. Louis had always been easy going. His vet called him a marshmallow. Other than his thieving and conniving and the digestive outbursts that followed, Louis was just easy.

Frannie, on the other hand, was not.

Even still, Billie gets the credit for expertly house-training Frannie to go potty outdoors (I did not want to use puppy pads). In fact, we even taught her to ring a bell at the back door. Cuteness overload, and so effective, too.

Frannie’s so smart! Also incredibly gentle, affectionate, playful, and funny.

If only she weren’t so terrified.

Of all the predictable things, of course, like the mail carrier, the doorbell, other dogs. But also so shadows, dust, shoeboxes, moths, sneezes, screen doors, neighbors’ voices, and all things that weren’t in that spot yesterday.

The way Frannie expresses her fear? Mostly barking. Incessant, hysterical, and shrill. Barking, barking, barking.

So we took her to puppy school, where she also barked.

She barked and barked and barked and barked and barked.

So we Googled and read blogs and articles and messaged our trainer and read more blogs and articles.

Since, I work full time from home, I also cried. I called Jon at work—he still went into the office back then, early winter, 2020—and cried.

I cuddled Frannie beside me at night, and cried.

Louis grew weaker and blinder, but kept eating. His diapers worked to keep the urine in only about half of the time.

I thought that was getting very stressful.

Then, something truly stressful happened: COVID.

Frannie, who was earning the world’s slowest progress award for barely making a dent in her delayed socialization program, now went into lockdown and could not longer come within six feet of any other people or dogs for ten billion years.

Billie and Tao broke up and got back together and broke up again, all while quarantining in our house with us.

Tao moved to Philly for a job. Billie bought a condo in St. Paul and got licensed for foster care. Louis’s fur thinned out and his back legs got even weaker and we stopped taking walks and started carrying him up and down the stairs.

Frannie kept barking.

Louis kept eating.

It wasn’t until the end of summer of ’21 when Louis’s pain and immobility overwhelmed him. With broken hearts, we filled his bowl with a giant brownie (his favorite contraband food), three scoops of ice cream, and clouds of whipped cream, because despite that his 17.5-year-old body was failing, his appetite was not. Then we held him and kiss him goodbye and wept together as the vet eased him on his way.

Meanwhile, with vaccines and time, the world was creaking back open, and we were back to work with Frannie, exposing her to all the new people, places, and experiences she’d missed her whole life.

Since then, Frannie has taught me a lot—and she’s teaching me still, starting with 9 essential lessons on writing.

1.     Nobody Loves to Be Barked At