EXCERPT: 'Come Back, Como: Winning the Heart of a Reluctant Dog'
One family's struggle with a loveable but unruly dog named Como.
Nov. 1, 2009— -- Steven Winn and his wife, Sally, wanted to fulfil their daughter's dream of gettting a dog, so they adopted a scraggly terrier mutt named Como from a local animal shelter near San Francisco. But their daughter Pheobe's dream soon turned into a family nightmare.
"Come Back, Como" is the story of one man's quest to win the trust of an unruly dog. Through maddening adventures and terrifying events, Winn and his family discover the rewarding effects of learning to live with a rebellious pet in "Come Back, Como: Winning the Heart of a Relecutant Dog."
Author Steven Winn is a journalist and fiction writer based in San Francisco.
After reading the excerpt below, head to the "GMA" Library to find more good reads.
Chapter One: How It Didn't Begin
I wanted Ecstasy.
That, it seemed clear to me, was the direct route to the other things I wanted, too. I wanted family harmony and companionship. I wanted laughs now and stories to tell later. I wanted rituals and something new to photograph on holidays. A reason to be outdoors and a potential bond with neighbors and strangers.
I wanted a twelve-year-old daughter made happy and fulfilled beyond all she had patiently imagined and a wife beaming back at me in the mutual glow of a marital mission accomplished. I wanted reunions and separations—and more joyful reunions. A counter to my own bouts of loneliness and isolation. An end to this endless search.
But most of all, and for all those reasons and more, I wanted Ecstasy—suddenly, unmistakably, irrefutably. And there it was, in matchless canine form, gazing up at me from a cement floor on the other side of a hurricane fence at an animal adoption shelter in Redwood City, California. Part beagle and part corgi, this was the dog, I instantly felt certain, that we had been looking for all along.
For a long, soulful moment we communed through the diamond-shaped openings between us. A little shiver, a tremor of cross-species connection, ran up my spine as our eyes locked through the fence. This was it. This animal would soon become part of our family.
She was, first of all, a delight to behold. Saucer-eyed and crowned with perfect isosceles triangle ears, she had a soft white coat touched here and there with irregular brown spots, like morsels of chocolate melting into a creamy dough. She was exactly the size and weight we were looking for—lap-sittable at something under twenty pounds.
She looked healthy and untraumatized, holding my avid, appraising stare without going into some needy spasm or fearful cringe or one of those teethbaring, cage-rattling fits that had startled and alarmed us on numerous occasions during our quest to adopt a pet.
This dog did none of it. To her great credit, in my estimation, she did nothing much at all. Seated about two-thirds of the way back in her narrow enclosure, she looked serenely untroubled by me, by the starkness of her environment (bare floor, dim overhead lighting, battered metal food and water dishes, ratty looking blanket, and stippled rubber barbell), or by the tumult of wild howls, frantic barking, and claws scrabbling on cement that lent this perfectly respectable shelter, like the many other respectable and some not-so ones we'd visited over the past three months, the air of an asylum for the four-footed criminally insane.
In the midst of it all, this dog—"our dog"—remained comfortably seated. Very comfortably, in fact, with a rounded haunch tucked under on one side and her two back paws casually lolling on the other. She looked as if she were sunbathing out on some warm California beach, half hypnotized by the waves rustling in the distance. As if dimly aware of an admirer, the object of my new affections blinked softly and stood up on her stubby little corgi legs.
She moves, I marveled, and remembered Phoebe's first wobbly steps on her aunt Judy's front lawn in Milwaukee ten years before. Like that sublime waddle, this was poetic locomotion—leisurely and stress-free, a casual stroll around her confines.
As those short legs scissored back and forth beneath her plumply rounded form, a slightly oversize head bobbing as she went, I was freshly enchanted. There were none of the distressing behaviors we'd seen so often—no fretful pacing or sudden lunges at potential adopters, no leaping up on the fence or sad-eyed sulking at the back of the cage. Here was a dog so calmly self-possessed that nothing would rattle her.
What could be better for a family that had never had a dog and a daughter whose shyness and quiet disposition had made Sally and me uneasy in the first place about the unpredictable havoc a pet can wreak?
Plus, this one was cute and sort of comically disproportionate, now that she was up and in motion—beagle bigger in some places, corgi smaller in others. I smiled and started calling out to her:
"Here, girl. Here, girl. Come on, girl." She declined my invitations, went back to where she'd been sitting when I found her, and sat back down.
That was endearing, too, in a way. She seemed to know her own comfort zone and how to find it. Even as I was being charmed, that reflexively skeptical part of me did wonder for a moment:
If this dog is so great, why hasn't anyone adopted her? But I throttled that impulse and went on adding up all her positive attributes.
Maybe she'd just arrived at the shelter, I told myself, and we would be the lucky family that got her. She was beautiful. She was kind. She was loyal. All that shone through. I pictured her in our house, resting on the carpet in the living room, plodding into the kitchen to be fed, resting some more on the carpet. The dog's name, "Ecstasy," was hand-lettered on a sign wired to the door of her cage. Below that was another captivating line:
"House-trained. Gentle. Good with children."
"Phoebe. Over here. Quick!"
I called out to my daughter in an urgent, stagy whisper calculated to rise above the barking, braying, and choral whimpering of the other dogs and still not attract the attention of any other potentially competitive dog seekers. This was our third visit to this shelter, located twentyfive miles south of our home in San Francisco, and we knew the way things worked here.
You had to act briskly and furtively when a promising dog bobbed up in the sea of snarling pit bulls and broken-down setters that looked as if they'd been through the animal equivalent of the Crimean War and held out no hope for a happy conclusion. Good dogs went fast, as we always said.
One day we'd be here to catch one. Now here it was. Phoebe came around the corner from the next row of cages and stood next to me. She was silent for a long time, staring in at the dog of our dreams. Finally I couldn't contain myself. "So, what do you think?" I asked. "Isn't she adorable? See if she'll come to you."
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