REX AND THE CITY, Part XX - Rainy Day Dog

How to keep a white dog clean in NYC. Finding indoor rainy-day activities for a very hyper city dog. Staying sane with said hyper city dog and a hyper-critical male inside a 300sf apartment.

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Greetings, Dear Readers!

Once again I am sharing yet another installment from my beloved Rex in the City series which ran in the late, great Bark magazine for several years in the Aughts. For those of you who are new to Substack: Bark was primarily a print magazine, so a lot of these columns never appeared online. Many of these personal essays did get incorporated into my memoir REX AND THE CITY which was published by Random House in 2006. (With a second edition published by Diversion Books).   But I also wanted to make all of the original (and heavily edited) essays from the Bark series available online, posted below the original PDFs. (If there is an easy way to convert all these PDFs into digital and algorhythm-able text, please do let this Luddite know.)

I should also clarify to my new subscribers that the dog referred to as “Rex” in this series was actually named Wallace. The reason for this is explained to the best of my ability in a previous post.

This installment, like all of my essays in the Rex series, is about how to handle a rescued, exuberant, and very hyper hunting dog when one lives in a 300-sf apartment in NYC with an equally exuberant male human. I hope you readers find something to relate to in this piece, and much to smile about as well. As I reread this piece, and reflect back on my life in NYC back in the late 1990s, I am reminded of all the efforts I made to ensure that my formerly abused rescue dog had a good quality of life in NYC. I am sure that a lot of you dog people can relate to such efforts. When we rescue dogs, they become our children. It’s a beautiful thing to devote one’s life to the happiness of another being, and it’s a beautiful thing to do so in New York City, where the possibilities (and the struggles, and the rewards) are endless.

This 20th installment of the REX AND THE CITY/REX IN THE CITY series—“Rainy Day Dog” —originally appeared in Bark magazine, Volume 34, Jan/Feb 2006, 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.