As many of you
know, my books all have a Great Dane named Spot, who belongs to Tahoe Detective Owen McKenna. I thought I would mention how I know about Great
Danes.
My earliest memory
is sitting on the floor underneath Thunder, the family Great Dane. I
was three years old.
Photo from akc .org |
While some people
can remember back to when they were two, three ain't bad. Of course,
my memory was of a dog. It doesn't demonstrate a particular aptitude
in the literary arts. I imagine that the first memories of Hammett
and Chandler and John D. MacDonald featured Underwoods and the New
York Times Book Review.
But I took that
early dog memory, used it in acquiring my first dog as an adult, and
I eventually used the breed in my books, to much appreciation from my
readers. Can James M. Cain claim as much?
Probably more.
But I still like
to think that there is a connection between that first memory and my
life as a mystery novelist.
I still recall a
sense of comfort and safety that came from having that giant black
dog standing over me when I was a toddler. (I realize that recent
research shows that memory is a malleable and creative thing, and that
there is no such thing as hard facts in memory. Nonetheless, that is
my memory.)
Twenty-some years
later, my wife and I acquired the first major addition to our family
when we purchased a Great Dane puppy, the first of three Great Danes we had over the years. As our first Dane grew she began to
demonstrate the same stand-over-you behavior.
Is it protective?
Or is it yet another manifestation of how Danes really just want to
be as close to you as they can get?
If my wife and I
sat on the floor, leaning against the couch to watch TV, our Dane would
step over our outstretched legs, blocking our view. (Yes, we had a
13-inch black-and-white TV back then, but when it died, we never
replaced it – a great boon to finding time to write.) If we sat
cross-legged, facing each other to play Scrabble on the floor, our dog would step over my wife's legs, massive dog chest in front of my
wife's face. When my wife coaxed her into moving, often as not she
would sit next to one of us and then flop over sideways halfway onto
our laps, scattering the Scrabble pieces across the room.
“C'mon, you
gotta move,” became a common request. (When a dog weighs 150
pounds, commands are merely requests. You can't pick them up and set
them down elsewhere. They have to want to do your bidding.)
Often at book
signings, my readers will bring their Great Danes. It has been one of
the great surprising joys of this business, something that I never
anticipated. And every single Dane that I've met does these same
things. If you're sitting, they'll try to stand over your lap. Or
they'll lower their head way down so they can rest it on your lap. If
you're standing, they lean against your leg with increasing pressure
by the minute.
Danes are lovers,
and they just want to be in your lap like one of the micro-breeds.
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