Joan Bauer's Journal

Yawn If You Love Dogs

My dog Max is terrified of garbage trucks. No matter what I do -- talk soothingly, give him his favorite treats, put him in another room of the house -- he acts as though the Evil Death Star has come to suck him into its atmosphere.  

I got a book about calming dogs' fears, and one of the things it mentions is yawning. Seriously. Dogs yawn sometimes when they are trying to calm themselves, so the books suggests that we humans yawn when our dogs are nervous. This is supposed to show the dog there's nothing to worry about.   

I've tried doing this when the garbage truck comes on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I walk casually into the room yawning, trying to be subtle. "I don't know why I'm so tired, but it sure feels good to yawn. Why don't you try it, Max?" But he looks at me and bolts from the room. I follow him yawning, and since it's early in the morning, yawning comes naturally to me. However, have you noticed that the more yawning you do, the more tired you become? So by 7AM, I'm ready to go back to bed while Max is shaking at the top of the stairs, hoping the garbage truck can't find him. I sit on the stairs with Max and move into deep yawning, stretching out my legs and my arms. He looks at me like I'm crazy.  

The garbage truck is backing up now, brakes screeching, and Max tears downstairs to sit in the shower stall. Yes, that's what I said. I go to the window and watch the garbage guys hurl my trash can half way down the street, then they roar off to terrorize more dogs in Brooklyn. So I go to work on my novel and I hit this confusing part in the story. I'm not sure what my character should do. I sit there, yawning a little, stretching, and then it becomes clear what my character needs -- a dog.    

The Wrong Voices

Max my dog is licking my hand like it's a popsicle, particularly interested in my engagement ring -- it belonged to my husband's grandmother. I had to take the ring off when I had neurosurgery over twenty years ago after a man in a Volvo station wagon rammed into my car, injuring my neck and back. I remember the fear rumbling through me when I handed my husband the ring. I remember being wheeled down the hospital hall with Evan walking next to me. It was our seventh wedding anniversary and we were trying to kid about how next year we were going to go someplace where the food was better.

But today from all the memories of that horrid time, I'm recalling the voice and face of a lawyer. It was several months after my surgery, my insurance company said I had to sue the man who hit me. It was this lawyer's job to make it seem like I had lost no earning potential from the accident. Back then, I was a new writer making hardly any money. My lawyer had coached me on how to handle this and I was confident I could, that is until the sneering questions began.

Oh, so you're a writer are you?  How much money have you made?

How is it exactly that you spend your days -- being a writer, I mean.

What have you written that I'd know?

I'm trying to understand how you think this little accident set you back...I mean, professionally...is that the right word?

Those words cut through me. I felt like crying. I didn't respond well at first; I was tongue-tied, confused. And then I got mad. "Look, I've been killing myself to get the words right, to yank the stories out of my gut. It takes hours and days and years! You want me to bring in my boxes of drafts? I'm a writer, sir. Nothing you say can't make it so."

He asked if I would send him a copy of my first novel when it came out.  What a turkey.  I'm not comping you.  "I think you'd better buy it yourself," I told him. He laughed a lawyerly laugh. When I got home that day, I wrote like a thing on fire.

There will always be voices out there telling us we don't matter. It can be the memory of a snide lawyer, an inner critic, something from the past that keeps pulling us away from who we are and what's important. We've just got to learn to turn down the volume when the wrong voices rise up and get to work. But that car accident? It was the event that got me into writing for young people. I don't recommend it as career enhancement, but it was one of those ejection seat moments that propels you to a special place.

"So," people ask me. "How did you start writing for kids?" Well, you see, this guy in a Volvo plowed into my car a long time ago, and something in that just jarred the stories free.

Max and Me

I have a puppy which is why I'm sleep deprived. He gets up with the dawn and there's not much that can stop this. The first shafts of light appear and something in my puppy, his name is Max, is stirred deeply. I explain to him that dawn isn't really all that exciting, it's something that plenty of people successfully ignore, but he is focused on seizing the day and so I, too, enter in, throwing on workout clothes and flip flops and stumbling outside to greet the Brooklyn morning. We’ve managed to beat the paper boy, the garbage men, the pigeons. I stand in my little urban yard and look at Max’s unbridled glee; I yawn and reach for consciousness. “It’s still kind of dark,” I mention. This doesn’t matter; I open the front gate and we head down the street past two books left on a stoop about how to break into the music business, past a Twinkie wrapper -- an icon of my childhood. Max marks his territory; with each pee, he looks to me satisfied.

Max Was Here

And I realize this is what a writer does (most of us are housebroken); we write our books and stories and poems and put them out there, marking the spot. And then it occurs to me that having a new puppy is a lot like getting a new idea. Because a new idea will wake you up early and demand your attention and take you places you’re not always ready for. My life feels so hectic these days with deadlines and travel and checking off items on a TO DO list rather than living full. Max bounds ahead, straining at the leash. I remember when we first got him -- he was among other puppies, but he out-cuted the others. He came up to us with confidence as if to say, Your search is over. I am the one.

The best ideas are like that, too -- they crawl into your lap and lick your face and win your heart and drag you to the place where they can do their business. Living with urgency is one of the gifts of having a puppy. That, and a new sense of home.

“You know,” three neighborhood children said to me when we first brought our puppy home, “Max is the most popular name for a dog anywhere in the entire country.”

“Do you think if I take him to the park and call his name a hundred dogs will come running?” I asked.

Yes, they were sure of it. I explained to them that Max is a family name – in my first novel I named a pumpkin Max. But I smile at the greater truth. It's taken me decades to become trendy.