dogs of our lives

John Grogan, on the "Damn, isn't married life great?" dieffenbachia he bought for his wife, which met its demise in much the same way many of my own leafy green friends have: "She had adored both the gesture and the plant ... Then she promptly went on to kill my gift to her with an assassin's coldhearted efficiency. Not that she was trying to; if anything, she nurtured the poor thing to death. ... 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."

It's like my college self watching an episode of "Sex in the City," going, Carrie is me! Neurotic fool in love with big bad Big! ... Except here I'm wanting to shout, Jen Grogan is me! Neurotic fool who thought she could raise a dog when she couldn't even stop overwatering a plant!

It was an odd afternoon: Mart and I went to Sam's Club where he bought a book and I ... didn't. Typical trip to Sam's with Scott: After wandering around the aisles poring over the cheapest cleaning products possible and consuming an entire dinner's worth of frozen food samples, we lament our general lack of funds - and then he looks the other way while I throw a paperback book into the cart just before we check out. I don't dig the Sam's Club staples: local cookbooks, every Jodi Picoult novel ever written, and entire pallets of Tuesdays With Morrie. But usually there are at least a couple of things I can't not buy. Example triumphs: a John Adams biography; Blue Latitudes by the hilarious Tony Horwitz; The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke by Suze Orman.

Anyway, today Mart picked up Marley & Me, which I shrugged off as a Book Club darling (yes, I am the same person who decided to inaugurate this blog with Sweet Valley Twins). I decided to save my pocket change for Jamba Juice. Just skimming it tonight after dinner, though, reminds me that snobbery toward books can lead to great losses. From reading three randomly flipped-to pages, I can see that this is a book I will see myself in, learn from, and have an awesome time reading.

There were times in the first year of Jug ownership that I despised our dog. Though I didn't demand his eviction like Jen demanded Marley's, there were times I fantasized about leaving the front door open and hoping Kona would find his way into the elevator and down to the ground floor, where one of the 145 or so people in this building who think he is so gosh darned cute would scoop him up and steal him. I am coming to terms with the dog; I think I even love him now, as all dog owners should love their dogs. But I can't wait to read about other souls in this world who at any point in their lives may have felt the same way about their dog as I did about mine.

Unfortunately of course Mart has first crack at Marley and Me, but as soon as I can get my hands on it, I will.