REX AND THE CITY, Part XIV - Wallace Finds His First Girlfriend

Musings on how sweet it is to watch dogs fall in love (especially when you yourself are in love. Ish)

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Hello Dear Readers - 

Here is yet another installment (shared as PDFS below) of my “Rex in the City'' series from the late, great BARKmagazine. For those of you who are new subscribers: BARK was primarily a print magazine, so a lot of these pieces never appeared online. That’s why I am sharing this series. You can also find most of these pieces—in revised form—within chapters of my memoir REX AND THE CITY, published by Random House in 2006 with a 10th anniversary paperback edition published by Diversion Books in 2016. 

If you’re following this series with a close eye, you’ll see that with this 15th installment I am no longer publishing under my married name, which was Lee Forgotson. Here I used the name E.M. Harrington, and if I try to explain why I did this it just won’t make full logical sense. So I won’t go into detail. I’ll just clarify that part of the reason is that those of us who were writing for BARK sometimes contributed multiple pieces per issue, so we would use multiple names. But all of these decisions to use pseudonyms—indeed, even my dog Wallace’s name was changed to “Rex” for the series—have come back to bite me in the rump. Because that darn insidious monster called the Algorithm is constantly merging my identity with another author named Lee Harrington who specializes in books about S&M. This is another long story I will write about elsewhere. I am not condemning the other Lee’s path—everyone has his/her/their unique path to liberation. But the Algorithm has caused a lot of problems for me as an author. The other Lee, you see, transitioned from female to male (and again, I support anyone who transitions to their true natures), so a lot of people think I became him. Hard to follow, right? But it’s also hard to convince the Algorithm that the other Lee and I are two separate “entities.” Ugh…it makes my solar plexus clog up just to think about this. So let’s return to the topic of dogs and this week’s installment.

I’ve been witnessing a lot of back-stabbing at one of my workplaces. Our manager has the very unskillful habit of saying negative things about employees to other employees and it is creating a vibe of discomfort and mistrust. So it was fun to re-read this piece and remember how refreshing it is to watch two dogs meet one another for the first time, and witness how fully and wholeheartedly they can become friends. Like total love at first sight. If only people were like that. (They are, actually, but ignorance clouds our minds and makes us petty sometimes.)

This Rex #15 is primarily about Wallace meeting his first girlfriend--a New Skete GSD named Hannah. She, too, gets a pseudonym for this piece.  As does our dogsitter, who shall remain nameless, because I can’t remember her real name right now. (Ed would remember, so I will ask him. Ed being “Ted.”

This piece admittedly has an odd structure because I was trying to somehow connect this particular essay with the larger timeline of Ed and I having just gotten engaged.  This was an artificial structure and, in hindsight, I can see that it wasn’t even necessary to impose a timeline on this particular piece.  (I’ve written in previous posts about the strangeness of re-reading one’s own published non-fiction, because I read it both as an editor with a keen eye toward structure and also as the same person who once lived these experiences more than twenty years ago.  It’s like reading one’s journal, but journals that have been shaped by other editor’s eyes.) In any case, each time I reread one of these pieces, I remember just how much I loved my dog, and Ed, and New York City. I just really never loved myself enough.  

After my marriage dissolved and Wallace died, I left New York and spent a year at a Buddhist meditation center, to start to understand why I disliked myself so much, and how I could return to my own true nature of equanimity.  Again, another long story.  

Now, on to REX IN THE CITY. 

This 14th installment of the REX AND THE CITY/REX IN THE CITY series—“Wedding Bell Blues” originally appeared in Bark magazine, Volume 28, Fall 2004, Copyright © Lee Harrington (writing as Lee Forgotson and E. M. Harrington). Illustrations copyright Bark and the credited artists. I have no affiliation or agreement with any advertisers shown—those are all old ads from the original print edition.