"Sit, Stay, Heal: One Dog's Response to 9/11"

from my memoir REX AND THE CITY

Hello Beloveds -

This week I’m pausing the serial installments of “The Chloe Chronicles” so that I can share an old essay from my “Rex and the City” series, in honor of the anniversary of 9/11. For those of you who are new to my work, my column “Rex in the City” appeared in the late great Bark magazine in the early aughts, from around 2000 - 2004 or thereabouts. In the very beginning I was writing under my married name, Lee Forgotson (I never changed my name legally when I was married, but chose this “pseudonym” to appease my then-husband).  After I left my husband in 2002, I reverted back to publishing under my own name, Lee Harrington--not to be confused with the author Lee Harrington who writes about S&M. Anyway, I digress.  

My “Rex and the City” columns were quite popular in their day, and earned me the title of “Best Humor Writer” from the Dog Writers Association of America.  (A sweet and true honor). Eventually I was approached by an agent and a publisher to turn the columns into a book--the memoir REX AND THE CITY which was published by Random House in 2006.

This essay, entitled “Sit, Stay, Heal: One Dog’s Response to 9/11” appeared in Bark magazine Issue # Nov 2011, and also in the Bark magazine anthology Dog Is My Co-Pilot: Great Writers on the World's Oldest Friendship (Crown: 2003), and also appears as a bonus chapter in the 1oth anniversary edition of REX AND THE CITY, published by Diversion Books: 2016.  September 11th, for those of us who lived in NYC at the time of the attacks, is seared into our memories. Some traumatic memories can be hazy, or patchy, or even completely repressed.  But I remember every second of those days--and I especially remember how my dog--of all people--was the one who tried hardest to bring me back.  My dog’s name was Wallace, by the way, not Rex. The book/column title is a bit misleading in that regard. And I seem, in this lifetime, to have a lot of weird karma with names.

Enjoy.  And please do share and spread the word.  I still haven’t done any promotion for my “new” Substack newsletter - now several weeks in the making. So I would appreciate your words of mouth.  Take care!

xxoo,

Lee

 “Sit, Stay, Heal: One Dog’s Response to 9/11”

© 2011 Lee Harrington

Although my then-husband Ed and I lived only a few miles from the World Trade Center back in 2001, most of my initial experiences of September 11th came from the television set. And I watched it alone. Ed, who worked for CBS News, had left our Brooklyn apartment as soon as he heard about the attacks, and he didn’t come back for days. He couldn’t—city officials had sealed off all the bridges and tunnels, and the subway and bus systems had been shut down as well. Ed was trapped at his office—sleeping on a thin sofa at night and prowling through the streets of Lower Manhattan by day, getting footage for the news program.