❉
❉
Marley & Me
Life and Love with
the World’s Worst Dog
❉
John Grogan
❉ An e-book excerpt from
In memory of my father, Richard Frank Grogan,
whose gentle spirit infuses every page of this book
❉
Contents
Preface: The Perfect Dog
vi
1. And Puppy Makes Three 1
2. Running with the Blue Bloods
3. Homeward Bound
4. Mr.Wiggles
5. The Test Strip
6. Matters of the Heart
7. Master and Beast
8. A Battle of Wills
9. The Stuff Males Are Made Of
10. The Luck of the Irish
11. The Things He Ate
12. Welcome to the Indigent Ward
13. A Scream in the Night
14. An Early Arrival
15. A Postpartum Ultimatum
16. The Audition
15
21
33
47
55
71
83
101
115
131
145
159
175
191
211
❉
v Contents
17. In the Land of Bocahontas
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
229
18. Alfresco Dining 247
19. Lightning Strikes 261
20. Dog Beach 275
21. A Northbound Plane 293
24. The Potty Room 339
22. In the Land of Pencils 307
23. Poultry on Parade 323
25. Beating the Odds 355
26. Borrowed Time 367
27. The Big Meadow 379
28. Beneath the Cherry Trees 391
29. The Bad Dog Club 403
417
Preface
The Perfect Dog
❉
In the summer of 1967, when I was ten years old, my fa-ther caved in to my persistent pleas and took me to get my own dog. Together we drove in the family station
wagon far into the Michigan countryside to a farm run by a
rough-hewn woman and her ancient mother. The farm pro-
duced just one commodity—dogs. Dogs of every imaginable
size and shape and age and temperament. They had only two
things in common: each was a mongrel of unknown and indis-
tinct ancestry, and each was free to a good home. We were at a
mutt ranch.
“Now, take your time, son,” Dad said.“Your decision today is
going to be with you for many years to come.”
I quickly decided the older dogs were somebody else’s
charity case. I immediately raced to the puppy cage.“You want
to pick one that’s not timid,” my father coached. “Try rattling
the cage and see which ones aren’t afraid.”
I grabbed the chain-link gate and yanked on it with a loud
clang. The dozen or so puppies reeled backward, collapsing
vii
❉
PrefacePreface
on top of one another in a squiggling heap of fur. Just one re-
mained. He was gold with a white blaze on his chest, and he
charged the gate, yapping fearlessly. He jumped up and excit-
edly licked my fingers through the fencing. It was love at first
sight.
I brought him home in a cardboard box and named him
Shaun. He was one of those dogs that give dogs a good name.
He effortlessly mastered every command I taught him and was
naturally well behaved. I could drop a crust on the floor and
he would not touch it until I gave the okay. He came when I
called him and stayed when I told him to. We could let him out
alone at night, knowing he would be back after making his
rounds. Not that we often did, but we could leave him alone in
the house for hours, confident he wouldn’t have an accident
or disturb a thing. He raced cars without chasing them and
walked beside me without a leash. He could dive to the bot-
tom of our lake and emerge with rocks so big they sometimes
got stuck in his jaws. He loved nothing more than riding in the
car and would sit quietly in the backseat beside me on family
road trips, content to spend hours gazing out the window at
the passing world. Perhaps best of all, I trained him to pull me
through the neighborhood dog-sled-style as I sat on my bicy-
cle, making me the hands-down envy of my friends. Never
once did he lead me into hazard.
He was with me when I smoked my first cigarette (and my
last) and when I kissed my first girl. He was right there beside
me in the front seat when I snuck out my older brother’s Cor-
vair for my first joyride.
Shaun was spirited but controlled, affectionate but calm.
He even had the dignified good manners to back himself mod-
estly into the bushes before squatting to do his duty, only his
head peering out. Thanks to this tidy habit, our lawn was safe
for bare feet.
❉
Preface Preface viii
Relatives would visit for the weekend and return home de-
termined to buy a dog of their own, so impressed were they
with Shaun—or “Saint Shaun,” as I came to call him. It was a
family joke, the saint business, but one we could almost be-
lieve. Born with the curse of uncertain lineage, he was one of
the tens of thousands of unwanted dogs in America. Yet by
some stroke of almost providential good fortune, he became
wanted. He came into my life and I into his—and in the pro-
cess, he gave me the childhood every kid deserves.
The love affair lasted fourteen years, and by the time he
died I was no longer the little boy who had brought him home
on that summer day. I was a man, out of college and working
across the state in my first real job. Saint Shaun had stayed be-
hind when I moved on. It was where he belonged. My parents,
by then retired, called to break the news to me. My mother
would later tell me, “In fifty years of marriage, I’ve only seen
your father cry twice. The first time was when we lost Mary
Ann”—my sister, who was stillborn.“The second time was the
day Shaun died.”
Saint Shaun of my childhood. He was a perfect dog. At least
that’s how I will always remember him. It was Shaun who set
the standard by which I would judge all other dogs to come.
C H A P T E R 1
And Puppy Makes Three
❉
We were young. We were in love. We were rollicking in those sublime early days of
marriage when life seems about as good as life
can get.
We could not leave well enough alone.
And so on a January evening in 1991, my wife of
fifteen months and I ate a quick dinner together
and headed off to answer a classified ad in the
Palm Beach Post.
Why we were doing this, I wasn’t quite sure. A
few weeks earlier I had awoken just after dawn to
find the bed beside me empty. I got up and found
Jenny sitting in her bathrobe at the glass table on
the screened porch of our little bungalow, bent
over the newspaper with a pen in her hand.
There was nothing unusual about the scene.
Not only was the Palm Beach Post our local pa-
2 John Grogan
per, it was also the source of half of our house-
hold income. We were a two-newspaper-career
couple. Jenny worked as a feature writer in the
Post’s “Accent” section; I was a news reporter at
the competing paper in the area, the South Florida
Sun-Sentinel, based an hour south in Fort Laud-
erdale. We began every morning poring over the
newspapers, seeing how our stories were played
and how they stacked up to the competition. We
circled, underlined, and clipped with abandon.
But on this morning, Jenny’s nose was not in the
news pages but in the classified section. When I
stepped closer, I saw she was feverishly circling
beneath the heading “Pets—Dogs.”
“Uh,” I said in that new-husband, still-
treading-gently voice. “Is there something I
should know?”
She did not answer.
“Jen-Jen?”
“It’s the plant,” she finally said, her voice carry-
ing a slight edge of desperation.
“The plant?” I asked.
“That dumb plant,” she said. “The one we
killed.”
The one we killed? I wasn’t about to press the
point, but for the record it was the plant that I
bought and she killed. I had surprised her with it
one night, a lovely large dieffenbachia with
3 Marley & Me
emerald-and-cream variegated leaves. “What’s
the occasion?” she’d asked. But there was none.
I’d given it to her for no reason other than to say,
“Damn, isn’t married life great?”
She had adored both the gesture and the plant
and thanked me by throwing her arms around my
neck and kissing me on the lips. Then she
promptly went on to kill my gift to her with an as-
sassin’s coldhearted efficiency. Not that she was
trying to; if anything, she nurtured the poor thing
to death. Jenny didn’t exactly have a green thumb.
Working on the assumption that all living things
require water, but apparently forgetting that they
also need air, she began flooding the dieffenbachia
on a daily basis.
“Be careful not to overwater it,” I had warned.
“Okay,” she had replied, and then dumped on
another gallon.
The sicker the plant got, the more she doused
it, until finally it just kind of melted into an ooz-
ing heap. I looked at its limp skeleton in the pot
by the window and thought, Man, someone who
believes in omens could have a field day with
this one.
Now here she was, somehow making the cosmic
leap of logic from dead flora in a pot to living
fauna in the pet classifieds. Kill a plant, buy a
puppy. Well, of course it made perfect sense.
4 John Grogan
I looked more closely at the newspaper in front
of her and saw that one ad in particular seemed to
have caught her fancy. She had drawn three fat red
stars beside it. It read: “Lab puppies, yellow. AKC
purebred. All shots. Parents on premises.”
“So,” I said, “can you run this plant-pet thing
by me one more time?”
“You know,” she said, looking up. “I tried so
hard and look what happened. I can’t even keep a
stupid houseplant alive. I mean, how hard is that?
All you need to do is water the damn thing.”
Then she got to the real issue: “If I can’t even
keep a plant alive, how am I ever going to keep a
baby alive?” She looked like she might start crying.
The Baby Thing, as I called it, had become a
constant in Jenny’s life and was getting bigger by
the day. When we had first met, at a small newspa-
per in western Michigan, she was just a few
months out of college, and serious adulthood still
seemed a far distant concept. For both of us, it
was our first professional job out of school. We ate
a lot of pizza, drank a lot of beer, and gave exactly
zero thought to the possibility of someday being
anything other than young, single, unfettered con-
sumers of pizza and beer.
But years passed. We had barely begun dating
when various job opportunities—and a one-year
postgraduate program for me—pulled us in differ-
5 Marley & Me
ent directions across the eastern United States. At
first we were one hour’s drive apart. Then we were
three hours apart. Then eight, then twenty-four.
By the time we both landed together in South
Florida and tied the knot, she was nearly thirty.
Her friends were having babies. Her body was
sending her strange messages. That once seem-
ingly eternal window of procreative opportunity
was slowly lowering.
I leaned over her from behind, wrapped my
arms around her shoulders, and kissed the top of
her head. “It’s okay,” I said. But I had to admit,
she raised a good question. Neither of us had ever
really nurtured a thing in our lives. Sure, we’d had
pets growing up, but they didn’t really count. We
always knew our parents would keep them alive
and well. We both knew we wanted to one day
have children, but was either of us really up for
the job? Children were so . . . so . . . scary. They
were helpless and fragile and looked like they
would break easily if dropped.
A little smile broke out on Jenny’s face. “I
thought maybe a dog would be good practice,”
she said.
As we drove through the darkness, heading north-
west out of town where the suburbs of West Palm
6 John Grogan
Beach fade into sprawling country properties, I
thought through our decision to bring home a dog.
It was a huge responsibility, especially for two peo-
ple with full-time jobs. Yet we knew what we were
in for. We’d both grown up with dogs and loved
them immensely. I’d had Saint Shaun and Jenny
had had Saint Winnie, her family’s beloved English
setter. Our happiest childhood memories almost all
included those dogs. Hiking with them, swimming
with them, playing with them, getting in trouble
with them. If Jenny really only wanted a dog to
hone her parenting skills, I would have tried to talk
her in off the ledge and maybe placate her with a
goldfish. But just as we knew we wanted children
someday, we knew with equal certainty that our
family home would not be complete without a dog
sprawled at our feet. When we were dating, long
before children ever came on our radar, we spent
hours discussing our childhood pets, how much we
missed them and how we longed someday—once
we had a house to call our own and some stability
in our lives—to own a dog again.
Now we had both. We were together in a place
we did not plan to leave anytime soon. And we had
a house to call our very own.
It was a perfect little house on a perfect little
quarter-acre fenced lot just right for a dog. And
the location was just right, too, a funky city neigh-
7 Marley & Me
borhood one and a half blocks off the Intracoastal
Waterway separating West Palm Beach from the
rarified mansions of Palm Beach. At the foot of
our street, Churchill Road, a linear green park and
paved trail stretched for miles along the water-
front. It was ideal for jogging and bicycling and
Rollerblading. And, more than anything, for walk-
ing a dog.
The house was built in the 1950s and had an Old
Florida charm—a fireplace, rough plaster walls,
big airy windows, and French doors leading to our
favorite space of all, the screened back porch. The
yard was a little tropical haven, filled with palms
and bromeliads and avocado trees and brightly
colored coleus plants. Dominating the property
was a towering mango tree; each summer it
dropped its heavy fruit with loud thuds that
sounded, somewhat grotesquely, like bodies being
thrown off the roof. We would lie awake in bed
and listen: Thud! Thud! Thud!
We bought the two-bedroom, one-bath bunga-
low a few months after we returned from our hon-
eymoon and immediately set about refurbishing
it. The prior owners, a retired postal clerk and his
wife, loved the color green. The exterior stucco
was green. The interior walls were green. The
curtains were green. The shutters were green.
The front door was green. The carpet, which they
8 John Grogan
had just purchased to help sell the house, was
green. Not a cheery kelly green or a cool emerald
green or even a daring lime green but a puke-
your-guts-out-after-split-pea-soup green ac-
cented with khaki trim. The place had the feel of
an army field barracks.
On our first night in the house, we ripped up
every square inch of the new green carpeting and
dragged it to the curb. Where the carpet had been,
we discovered a pristine oak plank floor that, as
best we could tell, had never suffered the scuff of
a single shoe. We painstakingly sanded and var-
nished it to a high sheen. Then we went out and
blew the better part of two weeks’ pay for a hand-
woven Persian rug, which we unfurled in the living
room in front of the fireplace. Over the months,
we repainted every green surface and replaced
every green accessory. The postal clerk’s house
was slowly becoming our own.
Once we got the joint just right, of course, it
only made sense that we bring home a large, four-
legged roommate with sharp toenails, large teeth,
and exceedingly limited English-language skills to
start tearing it apart again.
“Slow down, dingo, or you’re going to miss it,”
Jenny scolded. “It should be coming up any sec-
9 Marley & Me
ond.” We were driving through inky blackness
across what had once been swampland, drained af-
ter World War II for farming and later colonized
by suburbanites seeking a country lifestyle.
As Jenny predicted, our headlights soon illumi-
nated a mailbox marked with the address we were
looking for. I turned up a gravel drive that led into
a large wooded property with a pond in front of
the house and a small barn out back. At the door, a
middle-aged woman named Lori greeted us, a big,
placid yellow Labrador retriever by her side.
“This is Lily, the proud mama,” Lori said after
we introduced ourselves. We could see that five
weeks after birth Lily’s stomach was still swollen
and her teats pronounced. We both got on our
knees, and she happily accepted our affection. She
was just what we pictured a Lab would be—sweet-
natured, affectionate, calm, and breathtakingly
beautiful.
“Where’s the father?” I asked.
“Oh,” the woman said, hesitating for just a frac-
tion of a second. “Sammy Boy? He’s around here
somewhere.” She quickly added, “I imagine
you’re dying to see the puppies.”
She led us through the kitchen out to a utility
room that had been drafted into service as a nurs-
ery. Newspapers covered the floor, and in one cor-
ner was a low box lined with old beach towels. But
10 John Grogan
we hardly noticed any of that. How could we with
nine tiny yellow puppies stumbling all over one
another as they clamored to check out the latest
strangers to drop by? Jenny gasped. “Oh my,” she
said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so cute
in my life.”
We sat on the floor and let the puppies climb all
over us as Lily happily bounced around, tail wag-
ging and nose poking each of her offspring to
make sure all was well. The deal I had struck with
Jenny when I agreed to come here was that we
would check the pups out, ask some questions,
and keep an open mind as to whether we were
ready to bring home a dog. “This is the first ad
we’re answering,” I had said. “Let’s not make any
snap decisions.” But thirty seconds into it, I could
see I had already lost the battle. There was no
question that before the night was through one of
these puppies would be ours.
Lori was what is known as a backyard breeder.
When it came to buying a purebred dog, we were
pure novices, but we had read enough to know to
steer clear of the so-called puppy mills, those
commercial breeding operations that churn out
purebreds like Ford churns out Tauruses. Unlike
mass-produced cars, however, mass-produced
pedigree puppies can come with serious heredi-
tary problems, running the gamut from hip dys-
11 Marley & Me
plasia to early blindness, brought on by multigen-
erational inbreeding.
Lori, on the other hand, was a hobbyist, moti-
vated more by love of the breed than by profit.
She owned just one female and one male. They
had come from distinct bloodlines, and she had
the paper trail to prove it. This would be Lily’s
second and final litter before she retired to the
good life of a countrified family pet. With both
parents on the premises, the buyer could see first-
hand the lineage—although in our case, the father
apparently was outside and out of pocket.
The litter consisted of five females, all but one
of which already had deposits on them, and four
males. Lori was asking $400 for the remaining fe-
male and $375 for the males. One of the males
seemed particularly smitten with us. He was the
goofiest of the group and charged into us, somer-
saulting into our laps and clawing his way up our
shirts to lick our faces. He gnawed on our fingers
with surprisingly sharp baby teeth and stomped
clumsy circles around us on giant tawny paws that
were way out of proportion to the rest of his body.
“That one there you can have for three-fifty,” the
owner said.
Jenny is a rabid bargain hunter who has been
known to drag home all sorts of things we neither
want nor need simply because they were priced
12 John Grogan
too attractively to pass up. “I know you don’t
golf,” she said to me one day as she pulled a set of
used clubs out of the car. “But you wouldn’t be-
lieve the deal I got on these.” Now I saw her eyes
brighten. “Aw, honey,” she cooed. “The little
guy’s on clearance!”
I had to admit he was pretty darn adorable.
Frisky, too. Before I realized what he was up to,
the rascal had half my watchband chewed off.
“We have to do the scare test,” I said. Many
times before I had recounted for Jenny the story of
picking out Saint Shaun when I was a boy, and my
father teaching me to make a sudden move or loud
noise to separate the ti
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