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Terry Bain, with Pretzel and Sadie. You Are a Dog was released Oct. 19. It is published by Harmony Books, a subsidiary of Random House.

Nosing Around Terry Bain '89 gets into the heads of the family dogs, and gives them a voice by Ivey Slowoski related links You are a dog Web site Chapter One. Terry Bain ’89, of Spokane , Wash. , writes a novel, a dramatic story about a small-town sheriff. It takes 10 years, but when he shops the book around to literary agents, he gets no takers. When not writing novels, Terry is a frequent contributor to an online humor magazine, where he writes a funny essay about how dogs think, based on the family dog, Pretzel. It goes over big. Everybody likes it. He shrugs. What the heck, maybe there’s a book in it. He sends out a proposal. Quicker than Pretzel gobbles hotdogs, Bain has a publishing contract and a deadline. It’s late spring 2003. The finished book is due in November. Chapter Two. Terry writes furiously. With two kids and a pregnant wife at home, he struggles to work on the book and spend time with his family. His wife, Sarah Blain Bain ’89, is his number one supporter, helping him find time to write and arranging for him to work at a church office. For his birthday, Sarah organizes a trip to New York for Terry to see his agent and publisher. The book, You Are a Dog, written in second person, is about life from a dog’s point of view. To a dog, Bain postulates, all humans have multiple personalities and are known by what they do. In the Bain family there is He Who Leaves the Seat Up So You Might Drink, and She Who Drops Food From Her Plate, and Those Who Would Bathe You. Pages of witty, insightful dog reasoning pile up. The book takes shape. That summer, the Bains’ baby is stillborn. The loss is painful but the couple endures, and the tragedy finds its way into the book in a touching chapter about Pretzel comforting the family. Chapter Three. Summer 2004. The Bain family has gained a bonus dog and a cat. Advance copies of the book arrive for proofing and press review. On the cover is a border collie that does not belong to the Bains (the first thing everyone asks), but looks a lot like the new dog, Sadie, who is pictured above checking her favorite escape route. Sarah, in charge of promotion, sends a copy of the book to Arches. The editor loves it. The editor’s wife loves it. Terry agrees to allow the magazine to print excerpts, which follow. Wag tail. The vacuum Do not underestimate the vacuum. She Who Battles the Vacuum The vacuum is evil. You bark. The vacuum doesn’t appear to mind you barking but you bark again. The vacuum wants to eat you and eat the sofa and eat the children. She Who Battles the Vacuum is trying to control the vacuum, but the vacuum is not in her control. It keeps moving, trying to shake free. You are not afraid of the vacuum. It is after the children. It will eat the children at its first opportunity. You bark and scare the vacuum. The vacuum is not invincible, and eventually, after it has searched every inch of the house for the children, the vacuum will give up and return to the hall closet. Lurking Every time they open the hall closet, you half expect the vacuum to leap out at your people, or to leap out at you. So you watch very carefully. You are not willing to allow them to be hurt or otherwise terrorized by the vacuum. Sometimes they will bring the vacuum out, and you think they are finally going to rid the house of this monster. It appears they are going to punish it in some way by pulling on its tail. But every time they push its tail into the two small holes in the wall, the vacuum realizes what is happening and comes to life. If there is one thing you know about your time with your people it is this: you must, eventually, rid this house of the vacuum. The sofa The sofa is Position One. The sofa is a safe place. The sofa calls to you. “Sleep on me,” says the sofa. But it says it slowly, in dog language, the language of sense, of comfort and good odors, of dog and person and child. The sofa makes you feel as if you are with your people even when your people are gone. So you listen. You accept. All this is yours. Toilet You drink from the toilet. You know there are other uses for the toilet, and you can smell them when you drink from the toilet. Fortunately, these are naturally occurring odors that do not concern you. When It Is Encouraged by He Who Leaves the Seat Up So That You Might Drink Since you drink from the toilet, the children do not always see the need to refill your water bowl. So long as only He Who Leaves the Seat Up So That You Might Drink is home, this is not actually much of a problem for you. When It Is Discouraged by She Who Puts the Seat Down The advantage of drinking from the toilet is that the water is always fresh. The disadvantage is that some of your people do not apparently want you to drink from the toilet. This confuses you, especially since they must know that the children have neglected to refill the water bowl. When water sits in your bowl for too long, it becomes stale, and you will not drink it. The toilet seems like a satisfactory alternative, until you begin to drink and She Who Puts the Seat Down begins shouting from the living room, “Did you leave the toilet seat up?” You know this means she will come into the bathroom moments from now, shooing you out and closing the lid. Even if she does this, she will not replenish fresh water in the water bowl, but will wait for the children to do it. You must drink quickly. The Pill You are not going to eat this.What is it? It’s white. And so small. It can’t be food. There is no edible food that is white. Except white bread. You love white bread. Whatever that is, you aren’t going to eat it. Anyway, it isn’t enough to fill you up even if it was food. If you ate it, you would still be hungry. But it isn’t food and it isn’t an insect. It doesn’t even move. Insects move. Unless they are curled up hiding from you like a roly-poly bug. But roly-poly bugs are vile and inedible and anyway they don’t move fast enough for you to notice them so you don’t eat them. Your people can put it in your mouth and rub your throat all they want, but you aren’t going to eat it. No way. They’ve tried this before and when they were finished, you simply rolled it out from the back of your throat and dropped it on the kitchen floor. Oh, and sure, of course, you’d much rather have that peanut butter sandwich anyway. Now that you’ll eat. What were they thinking? That tiny nugget of nonfood or the peanut butter sandwich on the white bread (the only really good white food, and it is so very good) with the big glob of peanut butter in the middle. Is that even a choice you should have to make? Can they not make this choice for you? You wonder what they’re going to do with the white thing now that they have given up trying to feed it to you. You don’t see it anywhere and maybe they ate it themselves. You would have to eat a lot of those if you didn’t want to be hungry anymore. Your people are sometimes the most ridiculous people you know. Shalom You do not greet as others greet. You are not interested in what has happened between the time you last saw your people and their return home. You are not interested in scolding them. You do not want to hold them accountable for having been away for so long. You simply want them to know how utterly overjoyed you are that they are alive, that they are in your presence. And it is not a face that you wear. It is a truth that you hold. You are filled with the most joyous kind of joy when they appear, a kind of peaceful joy, an everlasting peace that begins with this moment and goes on forever. When the car arrives in the driveway after being gone for fifteen minutes to the grocery store, when the taxi door opens and you hear the sound of her shoes on the sidewalk and her voice saying something incomprehensible to the driver, when you wake in the morning and remember where you are, whose bed you have slept at the foot of, and how easy it is to wake them with a lick in the face, the sun still early on the horizon, the day still partly night, you find your shalom in this moment, and though you cannot put it into human words you hope to share it with your expression, with the face and body of joy that you are not sure a human person can understand except as children. It is a joy that people seem to block from returning to you, even at their most joyous. It is a joy that you wish you could spill into their hearts because it feels so much like the thing they are truly missing.

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