Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog

by Dave Barry

I had a special bond with Mistral because I illegally fed him under the table at suppertime. As a child I was a very picky eater; the only foods I really liked were vanilla ice cream and ketchup.1 But we Barry children were not allowed to leave the table until we cleaned our plates. So I was in big trouble when my mother, an otherwise decent human being, decided to serve us brussels sprouts, which—this has been shown in laboratory studies—are actually the severed heads of Martian fetuses. I could not eat them. I could barely look at them. The rest of the family would finish supper and go watch Gunsmoke on the RCA Victor TV with the massive wooden cabinet housing an eleven-inch, black-and-white, no-definition screen, and I’d be stuck at the table, sitting in front of a plate of cold green slimy alien spheres, an abused child with nothing to look forward to except a slow death by starvation. That changed when we got Mistral.

In my adult years I’ve had a series of dogs, each of them, in his or her own way, the Best Dog Ever. For a while I even had two dogs: a large main dog named Earnest, and a smallish emergency backup dog named Zippy. I wrote a number of columns about these two, the gist of these columns being: “These are not the brightest dogs.”

This patio was surrounded by a screen enclosure, which is necessary in South Florida to prevent the mosquitos from making off with your patio furniture.

So now I had an ally. Now Michelle was constantly hearing a nagging, whiny voice: “Please can we get a dog? Please please PLEASE??” There was pouting and sulking. Sometimes there was sobbing and screaming, and floor-pounding tantrums. That was all from me. Sophie was much more mature about it, but it was obvious that she, too, really wanted a dog.

It was a very low-quality image of a black dog. All that were really visible were the dog’s eyes, which reflected the camera flash, so what you saw were these two glowing orbs surrounded by a black blob. It looked like the Demon Dog from Hell.

I don’t know why they and Lucy could not coexist peacefully. Perhaps tens of thousands of years ago, Lucy’s ancestors were attacked by primitive photo albums, which in those days were much larger and more aggressive than the ones we have today.

When the new sofa arrived, my wife, Michelle, explained to Lucy that she was not allowed on it. Michelle did this by pointing at the sofa and repeating “NO!” in a commanding voice thirty or forty times. “No” is one of the eight words that Lucy definitely understands,

“Bubbe” refers to my mother-in-law, Celia Kaufman, who always gives Lucy a dog biscuit (“cookie”) when she visits us. If you tell Lucy, “Bubbe’s coming!” she will go to the front window to watch the street, awaiting Bubbe’s arrival. She will wait patiently for as long as it takes—I believe she would stay there for days—because she knows that at the end of her vigil Bubbe will appear and give her a cookie. This makes Bubbe Lucy’s favorite human,

Exhibit C: Lucy, who clearly had just jumped off the sofa, was on the floor with her head down, not making eye contact, which is the technique she uses when she wants to render herself invisible to humans.

That was the beginning of the Great Sofa War, which was not a happy time.

So we have won the battle, but I’m not so naïve as to think the war is over.

Lucy turns ten this year. Her once jet-black face is now mostly white, and she has developed droopy jowls, which give her a perpetual expression of Deep Concern:

Dogs aren’t people, but they’re not mollusks, either. Lucy is somebody. Lucy has feelings, moods, attitudes. She can be excited, sad, scared, lonely, interested, bored, angry, playful, willful. But mostly she’s happy. She sleeps more than she used to, and she moves a little slower, but her capacity for joy, her enthusiasm for life, does not seem to have diminished with age.

She would find a way to make the best of it. That’s what Lucy does: she makes the best of things. She’s way better at this than I am. I know much more than she does, but she knows something I don’t: how to be happy. And that’s the idea behind Lessons from Lucy. This book represents my attempt to understand how Lucy manages to be so happy, and to figure out whether I can use any of her methods to make my own life happier. Because—not to get too dramatic—I don’t have that much time left. I turned seventy, which means I’m the same age as Lucy is in dog years.

I really do want to learn what Lucy can teach me. However much time I have left, I want to make the best of it. I want to age joyfully, too.

Every South Florida household has a bug man who comes once a month to spray deadly carcinogens around as part of the ongoing battle between humans and what we call “Palmetto bugs,” which are cockroaches the size of mature squirrels. Without the ceaseless efforts of the bug men, South Florida would be overrun in a matter of hours.

Whatever the reason, my operating assumption, when confronted with people I don’t know, is that I’m probably not going to like them. And the older I get, the more reluctant I am to meet new people, especially when I’m alone and don’t have Michelle or somebody else I know to act as a go-between. When I’m alone in a social setting—say, a crowded hotel bar—I never strike up conversations.

through death and distance, losing and drifting apart from my friends. And what bothers me about this, when I stop to think about it, is that it doesn’t really bother me. The older I get, the more accustomed I am to solitude.

Make New Friends. (And Keep the Ones You Have.)

But I am seriously going to try to be more open to new friendships. I am also going to make an effort—starting today—to stay in better touch with my old friends.

“AARP” is also an abbreviation for “American Association of Retired Persons Standing in Line Ahead of You Demanding a Discount on Every Freaking Thing.”

Lucy—like Dylan—is always finding opportunities to have fun. This is yet another area in which Lucy is happier than I am. So our second Lesson from Lucy is: Don’t Stop Having Fun. (And If You Have Stopped, Start Having Fun Again.)

I plan to have some fun. It’s more valuable now.

In my experience, any trend that reaches the point where large organizations are inflicting it on their personnel has a high statistical probability of being stupid.

Pay Attention to the People You Love. (Not Later. Right Now.)

In the end, all that really matters—all you really have—is the people you love. Not your job, not your career, not your awards, not your money, not your stuff. Just your people.

I can be mindful. I can stop wasting the dwindling minutes of the only life I’ll ever have obsessing over past events I can’t do anything about, and future events that might never happen. I can teach myself to focus on the only time that matters, which is this moment right now, and use this precious time to appreciate, to cherish, the people I love.

Afterward I felt bad about getting so angry at the first person I spoke to. It really wasn’t his fault. It was the fault of the Bomcast executives who decided that their customer service would be provided by people in distant lands whose training consists of being handed a script that appears to be based on an Abbott and Costello routine.

At this point you’re thinking, Dave, isn’t it a bit extreme to fantasize about a cable-TV executive being chopped to death with an ax? Wouldn’t life in prison be punishment enough? Of course you’re right, assuming you mean in solitary confinement.

Apparently back in prehistoric times a primitive blimp did something horrible to Lucy’s ancestors, and she has not forgotten or forgiven. When the Goodyear blimp appears, she barks furiously at it until it goes away, which it always does, because, for all its size and fame, it is a coward.

Let Go of Your Anger, Unless It’s About Something Really Important, Which It Almost Never Is.

So let go of your anger. Even if you think I’m a naïve fool to be optimistic about the future, you should still let go of your anger. It’s not helping your cause, and it’s not hurting the people you perceive as your enemies. Mainly what it’s doing is making you unhappy. Just let it go.

Kim Kardashian, who has the genetically desirable waist-to-hip ratio but also the IQ of a lawn ornament.

Rude.

Try Not to Judge People by Their Looks, and Don’t Obsess Over Your Own.

Life has taught me that there are plenty of beautiful people who are shallow and boring, and there are plenty of nonbeautiful people who are deep and fascinating and fun. Which of course means they’re the truly beautiful ones. The trick to finding them is to be looking with more than just your eyes.

We wonder why you Northerners stay up there, where there’s no uncertainty about the misery of winter: you’re going to get it every year, for months at a time, forever. We’ll take the occasional hurricane over that anytime. Anytime, that is, except when an actual hurricane is heading our way.

It is a statistical fact that the average Florida household consumes 93 percent of its emergency post-hurricane food reserves before the hurricane actually arrives. I think this might be a primitive survival instinct: our bodies want to become much heavier, so that the hurricane winds will be unable to pick us up and turn us into Deadly Missiles. Whatever the cause, we spend the last pre-hurricane day eating our food supply, starting with the most desirable items and munching our way down the hierarchy,

At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I would compare power restoration to the Rapture, which, some Christians believe, is an unknown time in the future when God will snatch the righteous off the face of the Earth and take them up to heaven. Getting your power back is like that, except instead of God deciding who gets raptured, it’s Florida Power & Light.

Without the incessant electronic distractions of modern life, we can, as a family, slow down, reflect, spend quality time together and actually talk to each other. And we do! The main topics we discuss are: • When our electricity will come back. • How much it sucks to not have electricity. • The purpose of our existence. I am of course kidding about that last one. We already know the purpose of our existence: to be on the Internet.

Don’t Let Your Happiness Depend on Things; They Don’t Make You Truly Happy, and You’ll Never Have Enough Anyway.

we didn’t have much in the way of electronic diversions, but I managed to have a happy childhood anyway. My friends and I found plenty of ways to occupy our time: we played sports, we rode bikes, we camped out in the woods around Armonk, we told each other jokes, we farted competitively, we blew up a wide array of things with cherry bombs.23 We had a lot of fun without having a lot of stuff.

I’m going back to books. They’re generally less stupid, and they work during hurricanes.

dogs are honest to a fault. There is no deceit or insincerity in them; they are incapable of lying. If they don’t like somebody or something, they will never pretend that they do. You always know where you stand with dogs.

there are some situations when lying is better than not lying. In most of these situations, the primary reason for the lie is not to benefit you, but to avoid hurting the feelings of somebody else. Otherwise, it’s almost always better to be honest with people—better for them, and better for you.

Don’t Lie Unless You Have a Really Good Reason, Which You Probably Don’t. There are two main reasons why you shouldn’t lie to benefit yourself: 1. It’s wrong. 2. It’s stupid. It’s wrong because even if a lie helps you, it deceives somebody else, and it undermines the trust that holds us all together. If we can’t trust each other, we can’t work with each other, learn from each other, enjoy each other, love each other. Lying makes the world a dodgier, crappier place.

People really dislike being lied to. In my experience, they’re likely to forgive you for doing something wrong if you admit it; they’re far less forgiving if you do something wrong and lie about it.

if you mess up, fess up. Whenever you can, tell the truth. And do not be afraid to say these words: I was wrong. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. I apologize.

We had plans. Life was orderly. Life was good. On Saturday, August 18, two days before we were going to take Sophie to Duke, she woke up paralyzed from the waist down. Just like that. Overnight. She could not move her legs. She couldn’t even wiggle her toes. She was paralyzed.

Sophie apparently had an autoimmune disorder called Transverse Myelitis.28 Something—maybe a virus, maybe something else—had triggered her immune system, which attacked the invader, but then went on to attack Sophie’s spinal cord. The neurologist said they were going to begin treatment immediately. She said they would do everything they could so Sophie would—these were her words—“have a chance to walk again.”

Until finally came the wonderful day when Sophie, without any help, walked. She was a little wobbly, and she couldn’t walk far. But she could walk again.