Mornings With Barney by Dick Wolfsie (e book reader .TXT) 📕

my wife, knowing full well that this plea would fall on deaf (but floppy) ears, but I hoped it might sway my wife’s growing reluctance to Barney’s taking up permanent residence.

“If you keep up this behavior,” I said, shaking my finger at him, “I will have to take you to the pound and when you get there you will have to be in a little cage all day and there will be no human food and there’s a good chance that if no one adopts you within a couple of weeks, they might have to . . . well, you know ... put you to sleep.”

At first his tail started wagging, which probably meant he thought I was saying, “give you a treat,” not “put you to sleep.” But then I swear that Barney’s eyes shifted to Mary Ellen. “Is he serious?” he wanted to know. I wasn’t, of course, but my point did not go unnoticed by my wife. I felt bad about using this threatening approach, but I was hoping to appeal to Mary Ellen’s basic love for animals. Not this animal, of course. But animals in general.

Except for that inadvertent emergence on the screen, Barney made only one other television appearance that first week. Part of my routine each morning, other than the three-minute live shots every half hour, were a series of teases—short bits with me promoting my upcoming segment on the news. “Next on Daybreak, a munchkin from The Wizard of Oz.” You wanted to hook the viewers, keep them watching.

In one interview at a bakery, I walked viewers through the process of making fresh bagels with the manager of the new store. For one of the tease shots for the upcoming segment, I took Barney from the car and stood with him outside the store. When we went live for the tease, I allowed him to lap up the remaining contents of a container of cream cheese. As he happily inhaled the treat, I shamefully said: “Coming up on Daybreak, beagles and cream cheese.”

Dreadful, I know, and it was just the beginning. We had 6,000 more teases left in our career together.

By the end of February, Mary Ellen and I were sleeping in separate rooms on weeknights—not because the romance was cooling, but because my Daybreak gig required a 3:30 AM departure from our house. Barney and I had become roommates in the guest room. He would nudge his butt up next to me in anticipation of what he hoped would be a normal night’s sleep for a furry carnivore: sixteen straight hours, no problem. I’ll urinate 200 times when I get up tomorrow, he must have figured.

And so the first few months of this sleeping arrangement created a tricky human-canine conflict: I didn’t always want to get up and go to work, but I had to. Barney didn’t want to get up and go to work with me because nature had granted him the ability of endless slumber, but he had to. And I had to make him.

It was tough staggering into the downstairs bathroom at 3:30 AM that first winter. I never wore makeup on camera, so that sped up the morning process, but my departure was ultimately slowed because our older home had a detached garage filled with debris left by the previous owner. My car was left out each night, so I had to scrape my windshield on most cold mornings. Barney, knowing he was part of my scheduled exodus, would either retreat under the covers or head upstairs for the master bedroom in expectation of sharing a bed with my wife . . . a hope even I had pretty much relinquished Monday through Thursday. One of my favorite lines from Happy Days is when Mr. C. makes a romantic gesture to his wife while watching TV one evening. “Oh, Howard,” she coos at his touch. “It’s only Thursday.”

So, morning after morning of that particularly brutal Indiana winter, I dragged two asses out of bed every day—mine and Barney’s. I wanted to maintain marital harmony. The weekend was always just around the corner. I might get lucky.

By March, I was sensing that Mary Ellen had softened a little in her antipathy toward Barney and that a conciliatory final gesture might cement the deal. I enrolled Barney in obedience school. As it turned out, Barney was smarter than I was. If I had known how being “bad” would be part of his charm and would add to his success on camera, I might have given this more thought, but at that point I was just eager to win points with my bride.

The woman who took the call at the school was a legend in Indianapolis, running the oldest existing dog training facility in the state. I was impressed with the sales pitch, including the money-back guarantee. She had gone through about half of her spiel when she asked the breed of my pet. When I said beagle, there was dead silence on her end of the phone . . . then a good-natured laugh. “I was just kidding about the guarantee.”

She explained that beagles were tough to train but that with dedication and perseverance and $40 an hour, it might be possible to overcome 2,000 years of evolutionary instinct in six hourlong sessions. Darwin must have been rolling over in his grave.

“Oh, and there is homework,” she told me. “You are the one responsible for your dog’s behavior. We just give you the tools.” The tools I needed were an Oreck vacuum cleaner and a backhoe, but I was going to try to make this work.

Those six weeks were the most humiliating of my life. Barney just saw this as a chance to sniff a few . . . well, you get my point.

As mortifying as the experience was, I have always wished that I would have videotaped the final day—graduation, if you will. In the “stay-and-come” test, all the dogs were lined up. It was quite