Chapter 4

Dee-lightful

Of course Dusty and I weren’t the most difficult team Dee had ever trained. There were plenty of dogs whose exuberance could not easily be funneled into a structured activity, and there were handlers whose thickness made your average two-by-four look like Stephen Hawking. “Try that again with the dog on your right,” Dee would call out after a botched jump, which the handler would then repeat in exactly the same way. “Your other right,” Dee inevitably corrected him. Her patience seemed, well, not infinite; occasionally she’d get steamed, but never by forgetfulness or clumsiness or even stupidity. The only times she’d come close to losing her religion were when people casually abandoned their dogs on the course. When one such handler snarked about how her Shiba Inu should “know better” than to screw up, Dee would have none of it. “He doesn’t know better,” she snapped, the set of her jaw forbidding all argument. “That’s why you’re out there. That’s your job. To help him.”

She never let us forget that this was an activity for dogs, which meant that their enjoyment was paramount. She wouldn’t allow any scolding, rebuking, or, God forbid, striking of the animals. Whatever they learned would be learned through encouragement and praise. They would have fun.

She had the imperturbability of a medieval saint, spiced with the whiplash wit of a 1940s movie sidekick. She was North Side Chicago girl, born and bred, which explained both her grit and her grin; it’s a tough breed but a good-humored one. She had a typical Midwestern face too—open, earnest, bight—and I never knew her to muddy its sunniness with makeup. It helped enormously, when your dog was subverting your every attempt to enlighten him on some point or other, to have such a face over your shoulder, cheering you on. Even more encouraging was her back-length blond ponytail—by far her defining feature—which would wag like a tail when she wildly applauded your hard-earned successes.

Like most dog people, Dee had a special affinity for a certain breed, and as is often the case, the affinity was cemented in childhood. Ironically, the fatefully introduction almost didn’t happen. When she was seven, her family set out to adopt a collie but had to renege because of her mother’s allergies. (As a collie lover, I have to wonder why they didn’t just replace the mother.) A miniature poodle was then considered but rejected as too small. Finally, they found a breed both the right size and suitably hypoallergenic: the Airedale, king of terriers. A female named Annie came into Dee’s life and set in motion an enduring love affair.

Airedales—and dogs in general—were a constant in her life ever after. Her college boyfriend (now her husband) gave her a puppy for graduation, and so her subsequent identity-seeking years—which find most of us drifting temporarily away from the profound canine friendships of our childhood (and into the kind of behaviors we have to spend the next few decades living down, if not surgically correcting)—benefited from the constant presence of at least one indestructible touchstone.

And Dee did indeed undertake some extensive identity seeking, passing through both law school and a spell as a dancer. She wouldn’t readily admit to the former (“I don’t want people to judge me,” she quipped) but credited the latter with giving her a head start on building her agility prowess. In fact she claimed to be able to tell which of her students had also trained in dance—or gymnastics or martial arts or any similar endeavor. They possessed a kind or integrated whole-body awareness that made them agility naturals. I longed for Dee to ask, after marveling at one of my runs, whether I’d studied karate or participated in any triathlons, but the most she ever asked me were things like “do you want to sit down and catch your breath?”

Marriage to a breadwinning husband provided her the luxury of time to discover her destined place in the world. But even as she wafted through a succession of office jobs, the future was never really in doubt—just waiting for her to stumble on to it. In fact, almost literally so. Among the handful of possessions to survive her transition from childhood to adulthood was a copy of the pioneering text The Koehler Method of Dog Training—a method she later came to regard as too “yank ‘em and crank ‘em” but whose presence among her belongings was a testament to her early interest in the pursuit that would become her career.