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

of dog that had made me famous. But wait. Trouble can mean a lot of things. I pushed for details. “Look, there’s a lot of tension in my house,” she continued. “My husband and I are getting a divorce. And he keeps running away.”

“The dog or your husband?”

Forgive me. A straight line of such immense potential could not be ignored. But it worked. She hung up the phone. Toby was mine. I was thrilled. Or was I?

Those first few weeks were like reliving the nightmare of the previous twelve years. He was as bad as Barney in every way. In one way, he was worse. Barney had been housebroken. How and when he acquired that skill, we never knew. But Toby had a whiz-anywhere attitude.

Halloween night, Brett, Mary Ellen, Toby, and I sat at the front of our driveway passing out candy to skeletons, ballerinas, and devils. Toby sat calmly next to us, wagging his tail at every ghost that floated by. Suddenly, as if he had been frightened, he turned and bolted for the front door.

“What’s the matter with Toby?” asked a neighbor who had joined our little group. “Why does he want to go back inside?”

“He probably has to go to the bathroom,” said Mary Ellen. It was her funniest line of our marriage.

Could Toby have become another Barney? He certainly had all the required bad habits and mischievous inclinations. But as I tell people almost daily, Barney was not something I had planned. True, once he came into my life, I nurtured and enabled the very behavior that made him a household word. But as Lee Giles put it, “You could never have that kind of magic again,” which is another way of saying what the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus declared, “You never step in the same river twice.” I suppose this is a bad analogy when you are talking about dogs, but when it came to Barney, I could only step in it once.

End of the Tail

Beginning in 2006, I was back on live TV doing remotes on Saturday and Sunday mornings as I had for twelve years with Barney on weekdays. It was still a hoot, but the howl was missing and I still sometimes got the eerie feeling Barney was looking over me, just making sure I was doing something silly.

Every day, viewers came up to me to tell me how much they missed the two of us on the morning news. They still do. And when people saw me with Toby in public they assumed he was a star-in-training, a dog who would jump-start their weekend mornings. “No, he’s just my dog. He’s not a TV dog,” I explained. Most folks just nodded their heads. “You’re right, you could never replace Barney.” But the notion of having a partner again was hard to let go of. Should there have been a new Barney? Could Toby have filled that role? Would the management at the station have considered a dog on the weekend segments if I had pushed it? What a guy like me doesn’t need is something like this to obsess about.

Instead, I found something new to obsess about. I felt the need to capture all my memories of Barney while they were still fresh. But how? Should I write a book? I had already put together a paperback scrapbook that included many of the weekly humor columns I had written about him over the years. But an entire book? Like in some kind of order, with chapters and a theme? This is not what people with ADD do in their spare time.

I wrestled with this dilemma for weeks, while a patient publisher waited for my decision. My good friend and college buddy Mark Olshaker, a writer himself, pushed me to do this. He said my hesitation was just fear of success. My wife said I was afraid of failure. Then my agent called and said he was afraid the deadline for my decision was the next morning at 9.

That afternoon, I picked up USA Today and there it was on the front page: Uno, an adorable little beagle, had just won the Westminster Dog Show, the Academy Awards for canines. The accompanying article praised the little pooch, making it clear that a beagle had never won this coveted honor.

I watched Uno on TV all day, interacting with his fans—so full of personality, so full of life. So what was I waiting for? This was a sign, pure and simple. I decided to write this book.

I continued to follow Uno’s coronation the next week, watching the coverage over and over again as he captured everyone’s heart, just like Barney. Yes, he was best in show, but he also could have won noisiest in show (not to mention nosiest) and the hungriest. No beagle had been in contention before, although back in 2003, there had been a rumor that one was being considered but the owner let him outside for a minute to exercise and he didn’t come back for three months.

One of Uno’s biggest rivals was a poodle named Vicki, who apparently had her own video on YouTube. I wish that such Internet opportunities had been available when I had Barney. I would have started a Web site called MyMess.com, a place where beagle owners could post photos of the destruction their hounds wreaked that day, as well as where they were last seen before wandering off.

From the TV exposure he received after the victory, we learned a great deal about Uno. He loved having his picture taken, for example. “He just eats that up,” said his owner. Barney felt the same way about publicity. But he devoured the pictures. And two lens caps and a leather carrying case.

Prior to this event, Uno had already won several ribbons, all of which I am sure he buried in the backyard. Beagles really aren’t impressed with awards. In 2002, the winning dog was a German shorthair pointer. I could imagine