REX AND THE CITY, Part XXI - How We Spent Our Summer Vacation

In which we visit our country friends, who insist that we have to keep our city dog outside in an actual doghouse. And troubles ensue...

MUST LOVE DOGS is a reader-supported publication. If you have the means and you value this work, I’d be so grateful if you’d consider becoming a paid subscriber. This will help me sustain these offerings and continue writing.

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 that I’m sharing on Substack 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.)

This particular installment is a fun story about visiting Ted’s college friends at their plantation in South Carolina just a few weeks after we had adopted Wallace. Our dog still had extreme separation anxiety, so we felt it was important to bring him along. Not realizing that people in the rural South sometimes have different ideas about having animals indoors (let alone sleep in beds!), Ed and I had to come up with creative solutions to the potential problems.

This piece, by the way, did not make it into the book. I think I felt at the time (meaning, at the time when I was assembling select pieces from this serial column to be incorporated into the memoir), that this whole piece was a bit too in-jokey to me and Ed, like one of those stories old college roomates tell that is only funny to them. But as I re-read this piece, and remembered this particular visit to South Carolina, I found myself laughing out loud again and again. (And yes, I know it’s weird and slightly narcissistic to laugh at one’s own sense of humor, but hey, we need to keep ourselves amused and light-hearted to survive in this whack-job world.) My dog had such a huge personality. So did Ed. So did our friends. So now I think the reason I did not include this story in my memoir is that I did not want our friend Clark (called “Wesley in this piece) to know just how flagrantly we violated his no-dogs-in-the house rules). 

I should also clarify to my new subscribers that the dog referred to as “Rex” in this series was actually named Wallace and Ted was/is actually named Ed. The reason for this is explained (to the best of my ability) in a previous post. These days pseudonyms just don’t fly, because we can all know everything via Google.

And now, on to the piece itself, pasted below as PDFs. Apologies that almost all of the PDFs look slightly crooked. I must have been having a particularly wobbly moment when I was scanning those pages.

This 21st installment of the REX AND THE CITY/REX IN THE CITY series—“How We Spent Our Summer Vacation” —originally appeared in Bark magazine, Volume 36, May/June 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.

I am always at my best in between places, in those hours when you are on your way to some place promising but have not yet arrived. In those between hours, I always feel free and adventurous. I love the blissful sensation of having left my real life behind.