Excerpt: 'Good Dog. Stay.'

Nov. 19, 2007 — -- Newsweek columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anna Quindlen has determined that the life of a good dog is much like the life of a good person. The only difference: The dog's life is shorter and more compressed, according to her new book, "Good Dog. Stay."

With humor and wisdom, Quindlen reflects on how her life has unfolded in relation to her black Labrador retriever, Beau. The book discusses the lessons she learned by watching him, like learning to roll with the punches and to measure herself in terms of the present, not the past or the future.

To find out more about the book, read the excerpt below.

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed. In the fifteen years since Beau had joined our family, nine pounds of belly fat and needle teeth, he had grown ancient by the standards of his breed. And I had grown older. My memory stutters. My knees hurt. Without my reading glasses the words on a page look like ants at a picnic. But my blood pressure is low, my bone scan is good, and my mammograms are so far uneventful. I love my kids, and they love me, and we all love their father, who is still my husband. Starting out, I thought that life was terribly complex, and in some ways it is. But contentment can be pretty simple.

And that's what I learned from watching Beau over his lifetime: to roll with the punches (if not in carrion), to take things as they come, to measure myself not in terms of the past or the future but of the present, to raise my nose in the air from time to time and, at least metaphorically, holler, "I smell bacon!" I'm not what I once was, and neither, by the end, was he. The geese are making a mess of the pond, and the yellow Lab gets to run every morning with her master. The first couple of times she was walked by herself were particularly sad. Bea misses Beau terribly, I suspect, but I may just be projecting again.

Each morning I used to check to see if the old guy was actually breathing, and each day I tried to take his measure?was he hurting? was he happy? Was the trade-off between being infirm and being alive worth it? And when the time comes to ask myselfsome of those same questions, at least I will have had experience calibrating the answer. Sometimes an old dog teaches you new tricks.

Excerpted from GOOD DOG. STAY. by Anna Quindlen. Copyright © 2007 by Anna Quindlen. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.