What the Dogs Have Taught Me: And Other Amazing Things I've Learned by Markoe Merrill

Author:Markoe, Merrill [Markoe, Merrill]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307498694
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Communication Attempt Number 1

Available the same night I called her was “Marcia,” a retired teacher in her sixties who one day heard animals talking to her as though she “was channeling them.” Her ad for “psychic communication with your pets” was running in the “Counseling, Education and Spiritual Resources” section of one of those free Los Angeles New Age publications that sit in giant piles on the floors of coffeehouses and gyms.

“Cats will carry on a conversation with you like you won’t believe,” she tells me, when I call to make an appointment. She recalls that the talkiest animal she ever met was a six-month-old guinea pig who had a feeling that she was supposed to mate but wasn’t sure what was expected of her. Luckily, Marcia knew enough about the details of guinea pig dating to be able to offer helpful advice.

“Dogs do speak and understand English,” she tells me, as I look around the room at an immense amount of circumstantial evidence to the contrary. To converse with my dogs, Marcia will speak to them all on the phone. None of my dogs gets many phone calls, so this is shaping up as a special occasion.

That evening at the appointed time I called Marcia’s number. She suggested we begin by asking my dogs who wanted to go first. I did, but no one looked up from licking their body parts. Not wanting to hurt Marcia’s feelings, I assigned the task to my biggest dog, Lewis.

“Hold the phone up to his head,” said Marcia. This could only be accomplished by hanging on to his collar to keep him from running out of the room. While I restrained him, I could hear Marcia cooing soothingly through the receiver, seemingly unaware that the expression on Lewis’s usually friendly face indicated he thought the telephone was a torture device by which he was going to meet a painful death.

“You’re a big boy, aren’t you,” I heard her say to him, repeating the information I had given her. “How do you like being a big boy?” (“Do you know what he said to me?” she asked me later, chuckling. “He said, ‘It gets me around.’ He has a very laid-back sense of humor.”)

As soon as his part of the phone call was finished, Lewis put his tail between his legs and ran into the backyard. Marcia now picked up the conversation with my smallest dog, Winky. “He said he likes music, especially slow waltzes,” she reported, making me wonder where he had come into contact with waltzes of any speed. But since he seemed in the mood to talk, I asked her to find out why he was loose on the highway the day I found him.

“He told me that the maid on a big estate left the back door open,” she said. “Apparently he wandered off and couldn’t find his way back.”

Certainly a plausible enough story, were it not for the fact that he said something different to Dawn Heyman.

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