Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House by Daum Meghan

Author:Daum, Meghan [Daum, Meghan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780307454843
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 8101053
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2010-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

For six weeks, I lived in a two-story Spanish Colonial in the foothills of Beachwood Canyon, just below the Hollywood sign. I was dogsitting. The plan was to look after two border collies until their owner, a friend of a friend who was working in New York, “sent for” them (this conjured the nonsensical but nonetheless disturbing image of packing the dogs into steamer trunks), after which Rex and I would have the place to ourselves. This was supposed to happen within a few weeks of my arrival, which is why I was paying $1,450 a month rent, an amount that was too high considering the dog care duties and too low considering the size and location of the house. Perhaps as such, the dogs were never sent for, and I continued to pay rent anyway. I was supposed to be writing articles or thinking up ideas for screenplays or television pilots. But because I found it nearly physically impossible to walk three dogs simultaneously, I often went on three or four separate walks a day, which cut into my writing time significantly.

Speaking of dogs, I’m obliged here to give a little shout-out to Rex. He had grown up to be a large, yaklike creature, and he was unequivocally my favorite thing in the world. I’d had pets growing up, but they all were cats (in keeping with my parents’ relentless musical motif, two consecutive orange tabbies had been named for Bach’s Magnificat—Niffy One and Niffy Two) and were of course aloof and subtle and noninteractive in the ways cats often are. But having a dog was a whole other story. Having a dog was like having a child that was at once fearfully mature (can be left alone for hours at a time) and entirely feebleminded (notably low IQ). And though I had little interest in an actual child of my own, I loved Rex as if he were precisely that. Just three years old, he’d logged thousands of miles in the back of the car and lived at seven different addresses. Throughout this, he never peed indoors, never wandered off, never so much as chewed on a rug. Docile to the extreme and a nonbarker (at twelve weeks old, he’d barked nonstop for an entire day and then given it up entirely), he was a canine Zen master. He was a calming force among all people and even most other dogs. He could lower your blood pressure simply by leaning against your leg. And for these reasons—not to mention the fact that I was the kind of person for whom loving a dog was infinitely easier than loving a human—I had not for one second entertained the thought of not taking him along on my moves.

I had, however, occasionally allowed myself to think about how many more housing options would have been available to me sans pet, especially sans long-haired, slobbering, eighty-five-pound pet. Today as back then, one of the wonders of Los Angeles is that housing, though

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