EverythingDogBlog #52: A Dog Walks. . . .

A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher*, by Sue Halpern (Penguin Group, 320 pp, 2013, $26.95)

A dog walks into a nursing home . . . sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it?

But this book, though humorous in all the right places, is not a joke, but a book to savor. The author manages to sneak in a little bit of the history of nursing homes and a little bit of philosophy. She quotes Aristotle, Plato and Descartes (ah, I have heard of him at least, the mathematician) but these paragraphs you can easily skim over if you didn’t study Liberal Arts. Halpern also mentions Charles Darwin, Mark Bekoff, Carl Jung, Ecclesiastices (The Byrds, Bob Dylan). Whew! Those I understand.

A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home tells two stories: one of a dog and his family and the other of residents in one excellent county-run nursing home.

This book reminds me of Adventures with Ari by Kathryn Miles: both take place in Vermont, were penned by women English professors (I actually had to look up a couple of words), and are on my Unforgettable List. But there the similarity ends.

I have never yet emailed a publisher when I was only on page 25 of a 300-page to tell her how much I loved a book – until A Dog Walks.

What can you do when you have ‘empty nest’ syndrome and your husband travels much of the time? Why, train your dog to become a therapy dog, of course.

And the training is simply side-stitching hilarious, especially when Pransky (the dog) miraculously passes the test to become a therapy dog, thanks to Halpern’s discovery about her dog the day before the 15-part exam.

How does Pransky manage to tolerate the leash at age 6 when he has always has the run of his land?

Because he knows how important his job is and he is a natural at it.

Have you ever wondered just what therapy dogs do?

Their intuitiveness will sometimes ‘permit’ someone to speak who hasn’t spoken for months, or let an older person smile and reminisce about the dogs of her youth.  

How do therapy dogs do what they do?

This book may not answer the question for you but it will whet your appetite to learn more about dog-therapy, perhaps by becoming a member of a team yourself with your best friend.

Yes, the book is sometimes about death and dying but also about the joys of living each day to its fullest. And you will love Sue Halpern, a real human with real foibles who makes mistakes just like I do that I thought nobody else in the world made. At last I’m not alone. Sue is another me with my wishes and desires, and errors.

I have learned through Halpern and Pransky a very important lesson: that when we give, it’s always enough. It’s not based on how much we give but by what part of what we have, we give. Some of us give time, some of us give money. But the important thing is to give something of ourselves. To whom, it does not matter. How much, it does not matter. That it be heart-felt does matter.

I did mix up the east wing and the west wing of the nursing home, however. It’s a good thing I don’t live there because one wing is for the physically incapacitated and the other is for Alzheimer’s patients.

And I did forget who Sophie was and the names some of the residents. . . .

For all my dog-training colleagues reading this, Halpern also read Leslie McDevitt and says that she stumbled on the most important dog training book ever in Dr. Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation.

And rather than investing in a choke chain, she invested in a Gentle Leader head halter that allows the dog to correct herself when pulling on leash. Yippy-skippy!

In the beginning, . . .

In the beginning were the seven mortal sins so it is only fitting that Halpern writes seven chapters: Restraint, Prudence, Faith, Fortitude, Hope, Love, and Charity.

She also relates the health scare that Dog Pransky survived but which prevented the family from attending the much-anticipated annual Nursing Home Barbeque, but most of all we meet the residents themselves and learn what naturals dogs are at doing just the right thing at just the right time: laying a paw on someone’s lap and a head with soulful eyes on another, doing tricks for a third, and lying on the bed beside someone who needs it.

Our elders have much to teach us for they lived history. So do our dogs have much to teach us. Are you ready to learn? This book is a start.

Tomorrow: Angels on a leash. . . .

(* I received this book from the publisher.)