"What Wallace Learned"

In which our adopted country hunting dog needs to learn how to become a city dog...

illustation of Wallace in NYC (cropped) by Mark Todd

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Hello Dear Readers—

Happy September! I hope you and your dogs are enjoying some walks out in the crisp pre-autumn air. Today, as usual, I am posting yet another installment (shared as PDFs below) of my “Rex in the City'' series from the late, great BARK magazine. Please feel free to jump straight to the PDFs to read the actual essay.

For those of you who are new subscribers: BARK was primarily a print magazine, so a lot of these pieces never appeared online in digital form. 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.  (And no, I have not published any books on the topics of bondage and S&M….). I’m the Lee Harrington who writes about dogs and meditation and spirituality.

This is one of the final essays in the long-running REX series (it ran for nine years!). And in this piece you’ll see one big shift, which is that we finally start using Wallace’s and Ed’s real names. (Throughout the entire series my editor wanted me to refer to my dog as “Rex” in keeping with the title. And I called Ed “Ted” as if that would protect his identify. But I have long since learned how changing names can backfire, and how even taking a pun too far can backfire. (The title Rex and the City was an obvious pun and homage to the writing style of Candace Bushnell’s “Sex in the City” series which ran in the New York Observer back in the 90s. That print series, of course, became a book, an HBO pheNonemon, and a movie franchise.)

[To read more about why we changed the dog’s and peoples’ name for the Bark series, and how that caused many complications, read here.]

I think this is also the first time I reveal to long-time BARK readers that Wallace had died. He died tragically and suddenly in 2002 (which I write about elsewhere). And—for me—writing about a dog who had already passed had a very different tone than the fresh, comic pieces I was writing about him when he was alive. So we were definitely winding the series down at this point, and the tone of this essay reflects that.

I hope you enjoy reading the piece. Through Substack, I’ve been enjoying this opportunity to re-connect with readers who were long-time fans of Bark and of Rex and the City for so many years. We all share the same love of dogs. And sharing what we love is an uplifting practice.

And please comment and share! The more you share, the more you’ll support my effort to reclaim my own online identity. I still need to convince the Great Algorithm that I am not the Lee Harrington author who writes about bondage. Totally different person, my friends. And yet Google keeps merging me and him into one “entity” who writes about S&M and dogs. This other Lee’s bio now appears regularly attached to my book. It’s devastating. So I really need your support, because one person cannot take on Google alone.

Sending you and your dogs so much love!

Lee

This essay originally appeared in Bark magazine, Volume 43, July/August 2007, Copyright © Lee Harrington (writing as Lee Forgotson and E. M. Harrington). Illustrations copyright Bark and the credited artists. NOTE: I have no affiliation or agreement with any advertisers shown—those are all old ads from the original print edition.