 |
| Not our dog. Wheatie is invisible. |
NO DOG: Jonathan and I don’t have a dog, but we wish we did. So
we did the next best thing.We have an invisible dog, named Wheatie. Wheatie is
a Wheaton Terrier: invisible, so constantly adorable and very low maintenance. (We forget to
feed her, she doesn’t care.)
 |
| Solly and Daisy |
PUPPY LOVE: My colleague/producer Mary has real dogs. Crazy, bouncy, hilarious
rescue Labs who are an adventure every day. Very high maintenance, but Mary
cannot talk about Daisy and Solly without smiling.
POOCH PHILOSOPHY: The dog-person thing is pretty intriguing.
What I have learned from Mary is that there’s more to dogs than dogs. And now I
am learning it from Matthew Gilbert, too.
BOW WOW. Matthew Gilbert.
Made me laugh every day as TV critic for the Boston Globe. Fearless, opinionated,
hilarious and insightful and a beautiful writer, he made our love of TV be like
a community. Something we all shared, discussed, cared about—and it was okay.
TV was good. And we were grateful.
DOG CHOW: A few months ago, at a dinner party, (after we
dissected The Wire and Game of Thrones and The Americans) Matthew told me about
his new book. A book? About TV? (That had to be it, I figured.) Nope. He
explained it was about how he’d been forced to detach himself from TV—by a dog.
COME! I latched onto this
instantly. We have dog lovers at Jungle Red, I said. We have readers. We have people
who love to read about dogs. Come visit! I implored. And he agreed.
GOING TO THE DOGS. So now, Matthew Gilbert, in his new life. How
going to the dogs led him to a whole new place.
Off
the Digital Leash
Hi, my name is Matthew, and I am a TV
junkie.
Like many of my friends, I feel like I was
raised by TV. I remember watching reruns of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as a kid and
wanting Rob Petrie to be my father. He was a goofy string bean of a man, and I
loved him for his stumbles, for his macho-free masculinity, for the rare birds
in his life like his co-writers Buddy and Sally.
You’ve been there, no doubt, fed by the
dependable love of the remote-controlled breast. You’ve visited that place of
comfortable numbness, where the world is like another TV show. It’s not a bad
place. I’ve made a very satisfying career out of it as the TV critic for the
Boston Globe. I watch many, many hours of TV a week, and I love it. I love the
medium, and watching stories unfold over time, especially now that those
stories – like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones” – are so
good.
But since I’ve been taking my yellow lab Toby
to the dog park, I’ve developed a daily ritual of going unplugged for an hour
or two, of leaving the digital bubble. It has been a great development, a daily
“off.” I’m away from the TV and computer screen when I’m at the park, and I
also try not to use my cell phone. It’s a regular intermission from that state of
electronic thrall.
Toby goes off the leash, I go off the
digital leash.
It’s not the only thing I’ve gotten from
the dog park. As I describe in my new book, “Off the Leash: A Year at the DogPark,” I’ve learned how to play, how to relax among groups of people. But this daily
intermission from the virtual, this spot of sun through the cloud, has been so
eye-opening. These screens and devices we obsess over are very high-tech tools
with which to make a very primitive kind of flight. They enable emotional
distance; you’re in a room or on a street or at a park, and a very beautiful
park at that, but only partially there. I knew that state intimately, long
before cell phones arrived.
Toby’s name has “to be” in it – that had
been my idea when my husband Tom and I named him, thinking of a Globe editor
who’d killed himself shortly before we got Toby; that friend, so overwhelmed
and resigned, had chosen not to be. Time to be, I thought, at least for a few
hours a day, while the dogs are wrestling joyfully at my feet. Stay in the
moment of the park, at the park.
OFF
THE LEASH is a group portrait of dog people, specifically the strange,
wonderful, neurotic, and eccentric dog people who gather at Amory Park,
overlooking Boston near Fenway Park. And it’s about author Matthew Gilbert’s
transformation, after much fear and loathing of dogs and social groups, into
one of those dog people with fur on their jackets, squeaky toys in their hands,
and biscuits in their pockets.
Gilbert,
longtime TV critic at The Boston Globe, describes his reluctant trip
into the dog park subculture, as the first-time owner of a stubbornly social
Yellow Lab puppy named Toby. Like many Americans, he was happily accustomed to
the safe distance of TV viewing and cell-phone web surfing, tethered to the
digital leash. But the headstrong, play-obsessed Toby pulls him to Amory, and
Amory becomes an exhilarating dose of presence for him. The joyous chaos of
wrestling dogs and the park’s cast of offbeat dog owners – the “pack of freaks”
– gradually draw him into the here and now. At the dog park, the dog owners go
off the leash, too.
Dog-park life can be tense. When dogs fight, their owners – such as the
reckless Charlotte – bare their teeth at each other, too. Amid the rollicking
dog play, feelings tend to surface faster, unedited. But Gilbert shows how
Amory is an idyllic microcosm, too, the home of enduring friendships and, as
the droll but vulnerable Hayley knows, romantic crushes. Meeting daily, a
gathering of dog owners can be like group therapy, or The Office, or a
standup concert.
As a TV critic, Matthew Gilbert is well-known by his readership for his
humorous and wry writing style. A charming narrative that will appeal to anyone
who has ever enjoyed watching a puppy scamper through a park, OFF THE LEASH is
a paean to dog lovers and their pets everywhere, perfect for fans of Marley
& Me and Merle's Door.
