Mookie Wilson – A Creek Runs Through It

February 23, 2021February 23, 2021

Chapter 9 of Mountain High, Valley Low or My Life as a Wishbone: Tales of Valley Stream and Copake Falls, New York: “How I Spent My Winter Vacation, Part 1: ‘BROOKLAAANNN!!!’”

When I started writing this “e-book” series of blog posts, in August 2020, I was shooting for what’s called “evergreen content,” meaning that the months and years in which the chapters were written wouldn’t really factor into the subjects of said chapters, which are, to date:

An insider’s guide to New York Route 22
Watching the sun set over the Roe Jan Valley
The path along Duffy’s Creek
The Harlem Valley Rail Trail
Cats
Vermin, sprit animals and motherf#$%ing snakes
Christmas trees and mulch
A big rock with a view and a famously deadly waterfall.

Despite these very general and innocuous topics, the damn Pandemic kept sneaking into the narrative.

Yes, the original premise was a guy from Valley Stream, Long Island who had just retired from twenty-five years of teaching and bought a second house in Upstate Copake Falls with his wife because they loved the area, thus becoming human wishbones. But I thought that it wouldn’t matter what particular month or year any of this took place, as long as the setting alternated from one chapter to the next.

But it’s become clear that the Pandemic of 2020-2021 makes “evergreen content” not only impossible right now, but pretty much pointless. This is a time in history that no one alive has seen the likes of, and no matter what (or where) the subject is, it can’t not go through that filter.

So, if you’re an historian who has happened to have come across any of these first nine chapters in the year 2121, you would realize that the guy who wrote them was ultimately just trying to stay alive until the coast was clear.

He drove from Nassau County to Columbia County and back again. He hunted, foraged and gathered at nearby grocery and hardware stores in both places for food and supplies. He walked his dog; he took naps with his cats; he did some writing for Pay Pal peanuts; he read books and magazines, he watched TV, he played some guitar, and he did a lot of crossword puzzles.

As the cold, dark and dreary winter of ’20-21 wore on, he spent most of his time confined to one or the other home and, while the company was always swell, he became increasingly bored and restless as a result. At the same time, he considered himself very, very, very lucky and he tried not to complain.

Nonetheless, person of the future, I have included the following memo, just for you:

To: Mr. or Ms. Historian

Re: The Pandemic of ‘20-21

It sucked.

However, here in February of 2021, despite the disturbing, more contagious and more deadly variants of the Covid-19 virus that keep popping up (how nice), it seems like we’re actually seeing a dim light at the end of this hellish tunnel, though try telling that to a half a million or so dead people, including my father, or the other people who lost family members, or jobs, or homes, or the businesses into which they had thrown their souls.

Still, we can now safely say that the President of the United States is not actively trying to infect and kill its citizenry. Imagine that. Plus, we survived an attack on the Temple of Democracy by ten thousand of most disgusting and ignorant people in the world, stirred into a twisted, violent rage by that same, now ex-President’s Big Lie about the election in which, by the grace of God and Stacey Abrams, he got his ass kicked to the goddamn curb and he knows it.

Their insurrection failed, mostly because once they breached the Capitol, these overwhelmingly deluded and dimwitted organisms were too busy posing for selfies to get around to murdering the Vice President, the Speaker of The House or any democrat they could get their hands on. It was the series finale of the four-year, reality TV nightmare that they inflicted on the rest of us, solely to punish us for electing a black guy twice, and for suggesting that maybe they were the damn problem.

But we survived, and the miserable failed Hitler who tried to kill us all has been as muted as he gets for the time being. Now that we’re back to living in actual reality, we have a real President and a functioning federal government again. Imagine that. More people are being vaccinated than are getting sick, and there are vaccines on the way by July for everybody with the sense to get one.

Plus, we’re past Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and the Super Bowl, so all the unrepentant assholes who just HAD to get together and spread deadly germs in small spaces don’t have any excuses to cough on each other and thereby kill your grandmother for at least the next couple of months.

So things are looking up.

But it’s still necessary to quarantine as much as possible. And it’s still winter. In fact, this has been as close to a good, old-fashioned, pre-climate-change winter as we’ve had in a lot of years. Lots of cold, lots of snow. And by the grace of God and my immigrant grandparents, I live in New York, so I can find ways to enjoy the cold and the snow then come back inside to a warm house, unlike the millions of people in Texas who suffered miserably in the cold this month because the elected officials who are supposed to protect them let their power grid and their water supply freeze up.

Forgive the digression, but it seems that we can determine from this evidence that the average squirrel has more intelligence, more moral fiber, and certainly more empathy than the people who run Texas. Say what you like about the people who run New York. They know not to get caught unprepared for winter weather. Nobody forgets that shit.

Of course, even if this were in a non-Pandemic winter, there would be fewer things to do and fewer places to go, because, well, it’s winter. But in the alternative reality of a non-Pandemic winter, some of my favorite troubadours might have come to places a short car or train ride away from Valley Stream to sing for me, and I would have been able to accommodate them, even on a weeknight and even on a pension. And there would be museums and diners and libraries and movie theaters for the occasional change of scenery.

The troubadours are all home streaming on Instagram, and while there are theoretically places to go for that change of scenery, I haven’t died from coronavirus yet, and I don’t want to, nor do I want to experience any of the long-term effects that survivors are going through, so I’m not going anywhere I don’t have to go until they get to the 55-65 group and I can make an appointment at the CVS as easily as when I got my flu shot, even if that means five or six more months of semi-hermitage.

For now, everybody who was working at the King Kullen supermarket, the Pets Supplies Plus and the Raindew Variety Store a year ago is still alive and working there today, and we all wear our masks, and nobody hugs anybody. During the Valley Stream weeks, I go to these places, I get what I need, I go home, I stare out the window and I wait for spring.

But I do love winter weather. As a matter of fact, I love all weather. Every season has its unique charms, and to embrace each one of them when they arrive is among the great privileges of being alive. I wouldn’t live anywhere else but the Northeast for that reason. I’ve never been to Florida, have never had any burning desire to go to Florida, and I sure as hell am not going there any time soon. Apologies to my Floridian friends, but to me, living in a place without true seasonal extremes is, how shall I say, wack.

Admittedly, as someone with very little natural insulation, I sure didn’t enjoy waking up at 4:45 am to commute to work in winter weather, though it did get the initial shock of cold over with every day. Now I have to rely on my personal trainer to get me out under the sky and moving every morning. He does this by lying on the floor and staring at me forlornly until I put on my boots and my big coat, which is a really effective strategy if you’re thinking about starting a personal training business, but you’d have to be a Labrador retriever.

We go for walks, we enjoy the weather, then we come back inside so the one of us who isn’t covered in thick fur and blubber can warm up for a while. But as I enjoy my first extended winter vacation since I was four years old, there’s just isn’t much to report on from Long Island. Any “evergreen content” I could come up with involves places I can’t justify going to or people I can’t justify seeing.

So this chapter is about basketball.

And since it all starts with reading the morning Long Island Newsday, it counts as a Valley Stream chapter.

It all started on the morning after Christmas Day on Duffy’s Creek. I was flipping through the paper and Mookie was getting his leg scratched. Upon reaching the sports pages, and since I didn’t have to be anywhere fast, I read an article about the Brooklyn Nets.

Now, I flip through every single page of the newspaper every single day in Valley Stream. When I’m upstate, I substitute the Berkshire Eagle and the Register Star, so if you want to know about the new restaurant in Pittsfield, Mass or what people are upset about in Hudson, I’m your man. This obsessive-compulsive disorder of mine also allows me to always know who’s winning and who’s losing among the New York Sports teams, who they’re big stars are and how much money they’re making.

I’m a baseball guy. I’ve been a baseball guy since Mrs. Milne brought the TV on the cart into our first-grade classroom so we could all watch the Mets play the Orioles in the 1969 World Series. I went home that October afternoon to check if the Mets were on my TV, and sure enough they were, and they’ve been there ever since. Thirty-one years after that, I set my personal record by being at Shea Stadium twenty-five times to root on the 2000 Mets, including three playoff games and the last game of the World Series against the Yankees, which was the last professional baseball game played in the 20^th Century.

They lost.

I’ll take it one step further. I’m one of those nauseatingly sentimental baseball guys. The ones that get all blubbery watching “Field of Dreams” and have the Ken Burns documentary on DVD. At our wedding, Trisha and I gave out autographed baseballs as table gifts, and we had a friend bring along his catcher’s mask and glove so my best man could throw out the first pitch to him.

I named my dog Mookie, then I stood on a line in a sporting goods store to show Mookie Wilson himself a picture of my dog.

So being a baseball snob, I was conditioned to believe that every other sport was inferior. Football, soccer, basketball and hockey were categorized together in my narrow little brain as “the back-and-forth games.” They were faster than baseball, as is your average sloth, but all they essentially did was go back and forth.

I pretended to like football from high school and into my twenties because nearly every single person I hung out with was a football fan. That’s not an exaggeration, and I’m not sure how that happened. I never really had a favorite team, and I don’t watch it anymore. I think it would be better if they just played flag football instead of trying to pulverize each other, but I digress again.

Way back when, I taught English as a Second Language to rich kids from all over the world who were pretending to go to school so they could get visas and hang out in New York. They, and my brother-in-law, who was born in Chile, taught me to appreciate World Cup Soccer, particularly in 1998, when France beat Brazil in the finals. Again, like football, I could sort of see what the fuss was all about, but it didn’t light my soul the way a base hit up the middle with two out in the ninth does.

Then I started teaching in Queens. There were plenty of good baseball fans among the kids, and more and more soccer fans as immigration increased (not to mention cricket). But “ball” in the city is basketball, and to hundreds of the junior high school kids that I crossed paths with, basketball was a serious a matter as the heart attack I would’ve suffered if I’d played them one-on-one.

When sizing me up, shortly after demanding to know my age, hometown, marital and housing status, they’d ask me, “you got game?”. And I, at 5’9’’ and 120lbs. at the time, would smile and reply matter-of-factly, “no, I suck.” Then they might ask me who my favorite NBA team was, and I’d have to tell them delicately that I was a baseball fan and didn’t really follow basketball, and they’d look at me sort of the way you’d look at somebody who says, “I really don’t think Tom Hanks is that good an actor.”

In my first year of teaching in Rockaway, I was asked to referee the faculty-student basketball game. To this day, I have to rely on the refs to tell me when I’ve seen a personal foul on a basketball court. But I was going to do it, because first-year teachers don’t say no. Thankfully, my assistant principal, who like me majored in Mets baseball but unlike me had a minor in NBA studies, took over and bailed me out. If I had refereed that game, knives would have been drawn before halftime.

Nevertheless, for the benefit of having something else to talk about with the kids when it wasn’t baseball season, I always knew what was going on. I knew who all the NBA stars were in the 90’s and the 00’s: Jordan and Pippin on the Bulls, Hakim Olajuwon on the Rockets, Shaq on the Lakers, Patrick Ewing on the Knicks, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, etc. etc. I’d know who was in the playoffs and occasionally watch the games. And I could always tell the kiddies that I watched the great Knicks teams of my childhood, because I did: Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Earl the Pearl Monroe, Walt Frazier and Phil Jackson. Ask your grandparents, kids. Those guys could have made a basketball fan out of a duck.

Jason Kidd was the biggest star for the New Jersey Nets when I was a young teacher. The Nets had a couple of good seasons around that time, but they were usually overshadowed by the Ewing and the Knicks and their annoying courtside celebrities at the Garden.

But I already had a soft spot for the Nets because I had actually seen them play a couple of times when they were the Long Island ABA team, with Julius Erving (Dr. J.), his cool afro and the red, white and blue ABA basketballs. The first time was at the Island Garden, right next store to the place where we’d get our Christmas trees in West Hempstead. Once in a while, my father, never a sports guy, would get free tickets to see the Nets when they moved to the brand-new Nassau Coliseum, and we’d go so my mom wouldn’t be able to tell him that he never did anything besides yell at me.

New York basketball in the late ‘00’s and early ‘10’s was mostly average if not outright bad, so not even the kids at school weren’t talking about the Knicks or the Nets. By this time of course, they all had iPhones and Xboxes and Play Stations, so most of them spent their free time out in an alternative-reality ether, which I couldn’t even begin to relate to. But I did think it was pretty cool when the New Jersey Nets became the Brooklyn Nets and chose black, white and grey as the team colors. Snazzy-looking uniforms if you ask me.

And in my last couple of years in Ozone Park, a new assistant principal came in and put together a team that no middle school in Queens could beat. One of the best students in my Year 25 classes was the star, well on his way to 7 feet tall, the dean’s list of whatever college he goes to and maybe the NBA draft. You couldn’t help but soak up a little basketball appreciation working at MS 202, and maybe part of the reason I’m watching it now is that I miss that city vibe, painful as it is for me to admit.

Fast forward back to where we were sixteen paragraphs ago: Not going to the city, sitting on the couch, flipping through the Newsday and scratching the dog on the morning after Christmas. From the article about Brooklyn Nets, I found out that Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, who had both signed with the Nets after winning championships with other teams, were playing together for the first time, and that they had won their first two games of the 20-21 season with neither the Warriors nor the Celtics putting up much of a fight. They had a former great player as a first-year coach (Steve Nash, whom my wife calls “the stern fellow”) and the buzz was that this could be their year.

So being trapped at home by a Pandemic, I decided to watch the next game, on a Sunday night against the Charlotte Hornets. I saw one of the Nets’ best players, Spencer Dimwitty, suffer a nasty season-ending knee injury, then I saw those Nets still standing come roaring back from a 14-point deficit in the fourth quarter, only to lose by two points, 106-104.

Trisha, who justifiably had to break my chops for sitting on the couch watching a back-and-forth game, said, “Wow! This is just like the Mets!”

But it was fun watching another live competition on TV again besides Jeopardy. (It was enough that we’re still grieving Alex Trebeck). So I watched the game after that. And they lost again, in overtime. Nether Durant nor Irving was playing, so I got to know some of the other guys. You can’t help but notice D’Andre Jordan, who is 6’8” with shoulders big enough to tattoo entire verses of scripture on them and a more impressive ponytail than my wife’s. I quickly adopted him as my favorite.

Jan 7, 2020; Brooklyn, New York, USA; Brooklyn Nets center Deandre Jordan (6) reacts in the third quarter against the Oklahoma City Thunder at Barclays Center. Mandatory Credit: Nicole Sweet-USA TODAY Sports

And though I’m already sick of the broadcast team on the Yes Network, they did teach me some of the better nicknames: Joe Harris, who seems to never miss a three-point shot, is “Joey Buckets.” Jeff Green, 34 years old and playing in his 13th season, is “Uncle Jeff.” Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot is “TLC”, ‘cause how the hell could you say all that when you’re calling basketball play-by-play? I give Ian Eagle, the voice of the Nets, credit for calling TLC’s baskets “French Dips” and “French Connections”, but other than that, the broadcasters all giggle too damn much and between them and the pathetic fake crowd noises I’m muting the TV more and more every game.

As my first weeks of being the accidental basketball fan unfolded, Durant and Irving were back on the floor together for a game against the Washington Wizards in which they both missed shots with seconds to play and lost by one point, 123-122.

Just like the Mets.

But I started to see what makes these guys special. “KD” is 6’10’’ and moves like a man who has oil flowing through his veins instead of blood. “Kai” is 6’2’’, and one of the most gifted natural athletes I’ve ever seen playing anything. He reminds me of the last line of the song, “The Cape” by Guy Clark: “He did not know he could not fly, so he did.”

And because I flip through every page of the newspaper every day, I knew about some things in the first week of January. I knew that there was this player out in Houston, James Harden, who was unhappy with the direction of his team and wanted to be traded to the Nets so he could play with Durant and Irving. But Durant was ineligible to play for a week because he’d been exposed to Covid-19 and Irving was taking some time off, which everyone said was directly related to the Capitol Insurrection.

So I find a happy little pastime to take my mind off all the misery and keep me entertained through the winter, and the misery kicks the door in and trashes the room. But I kept watching anyway, as I had nothing else to do.

Irving never directly said that he didn’t want to play because he was upset about the Insurrection, but that’s what was widely assumed. It didn’t help that he got also caught breaking covid protocols to go to his niece’s birthday party. There were a lot of big mouths on Twitter questioning his commitment to the game and his inner fortitude.

Here are some things I’ve learned about Kyrie Irving: His mother was Sioux, and he supports the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota in their fight against the Dakota Pipeline, which has earned him the Sioux name “Little Mountain.” He burns sage before games. When the WNBA players opted not to play last year out of covid concerns, he donated $1.5 million towards covering their salaries. He gave $300,000 to Feeding America and helped launch Share A Meal, a NYC charity that has delivered 250,000 meals during the Pandemic. He’s trying to eat a plant-based diet and he had to apologize for punking the press into believing he was a flat-earther, which is funny as hell.

And I’ll tell you what: If I were an African American professional athlete in this country, I would think that it’s a constant moral dilemma knowing that, at the same time at which I’m serving as a hero and a role model to kids who badly need one, I’m also providing entertainment for rednecks married to karens who pull their kids in close if they see a guy who looks like me coming up the street and yahoos who tried to destroy the country because my people outvoted their people. That wouldn’t be an easy thing for me to reconcile. The same guy who tried to kill a policeman with the pole of an American flag on the steps of the Capitol probably had shit to say about Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the National Anthem. I wouldn’t want these unrepentant assholes rooting for me to throw a ball through a hoop, either.

So I’ll appreciate the joy of watching the joy that Kyrie Irving gets out of playing basketball at a level that few mortals can, and as far as I’m concerned, he can take the day off anytime he needs to.

Meanwhile, in Kyrie’s absence during the first weeks of January, KD was trying to carry the team, but they were treading water. I continued to get to know the other guys, including Landry Shamet, to whom I like to yell, “Dammit, Shamet!” when he misses, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I also came to appreciate Travis Allen, a young center with afro that would stop Dr J. in his tracks, and Caris LaVert, sort of a Kyrie-Lite, but very talented.

Then I met The Beard.

Brooklyn made a big trade on January 12, giving up Allen and LaVert and all their draft picks for the next hundred years to get James Harden. The only thing I knew about him was that he looked like the guy you want to be around when the party gets going. The bubbleheads on TV and the articles in the Newsday were all speculating as to how an elite, MVP player who led the league in scoring three times would get used to sharing the ball. Harden replied that he just wanted to win a championship, which is the only thing he hadn’t accomplished.

It was an interesting subplot. I kept watching the games.

You might know this already: The man is a magician, a grand imperial wizard of basketball. He passes the ball behind his back and over his shoulder without looking, he passes under other guys’ legs, he passes across court through a crowd of large, sweaty men to put it right into the unguarded hands of Joey Buckets for the three, or up over the basket where DeAndre Jordan brings it home with a pony-tail flyin’, bible-thumpin’ slam dunk. He hits field goals and free throws like my dog marks telephone poles and I pour cups of coffee and he regularly tricks his opponents into fouling him when he drives into the paint.

Watching Harden, Durant and Irving come together, I finally “got” basketball on the same level I’ve always understood baseball. A baseball game is a Beethoven Symphony. There are slow, quiet movements where you’re drawn into a particular instrument, but you know if you follow along, they’ll be great bursts of joyous noise that will lift your soul and set your spirit free, or sometimes make you weep.

Basketball is jazz.

Forgive me for just figuring this out at 57. I was busy learning other stuff.

A quick Google search credits this idea to a joke by Michael Scott on “The Office”, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wynton Marsalis were both on it before that. Marsalis said that both basketball and jazz “reward improvisation and split-second decision making against the pressure of time.”

To say that two basketball teams are just going back and forth is to say that a jazz ensemble is just playing “When The Saints Go Marching In” over and over again. One of the things I love about baseball is the endless possibilities. As the great Mets’ announcer Bob Murphy would say, every time you come to the ballpark, there’s a chance that you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. You could subsequently say that about every time the ball leaves the pitcher’s hands. But I never realized until watching the Brooklyn Nets this year that basketball is also full of endless possibilities, every time the shot clock starts.

My Netsies went on a tear through the Western Conference this month, winning five games straight on the road against some of the best teams in the league. The last game of the road trip was tied with two minutes left and ended with Harden throwing himself into Paul George of the Clippers to force him into an offensive foul, thus taking two points off the board and getting two free throws, of which he hit both, after somehow missing two other free throws just minutes earlier, plus a shot by Irving that would have bounced off the rim if DeAndre Jordan hadn’t reached up like he was touching the hand of God to guide the ball through the hoop.

Nets 112- Clippers 108. A half-game behind Philadelphia for first place with 20 wins and ten losses. If you’re thinking about jumping on the bandwagon, I was the last one on the back, so I’ll help you up.

One of my favorite bands is The Band. There were five guys, each an exceptional player on one or more instruments. There are hardly any solos in The Band’s songs. But each musician is aware of what the others are doing, and they seamlessly create space for all the sounds to come through individually at the same time you that hear them in harmony.

All these years, I had no idea they were playing basketball.

In baseball news, the Mets are loaded with talent and personality this year, and their new owner is a nerdy hedge-fund guy with wads of money who wants desperately for everyone to like him.

In basketball news, there will be 300 masked, socially-distanced fans at the Barclays Center tonight when the Nets play the Sacramento Kings, the first time spectators have been present in a year. When the Pandemic is over, I’ll be a half-hour train ride away, at least part of the time. Maybe a way to get that change of scenery next February.

It appears that I’ve become a basketball fan. People can evolve. While the Boys of Summer are doing their stretches down in spring training, and President Biden is shoveling us out from four years of the toxic, deadly incompetence and corruption that at times felt like a blizzard that would bury us alive, I’m enjoying the happy, swashbuckling exploits of Brooklyn’s Boys of Winter.

Trisha always knows what night there’s a game on. When Jeopardy ends, I walk out to the kitchen to heat up a cup, and on the way, I yell out, “BROOKLANNN!!!”

I also shop, cook and clean, so she’s letting me stay for now.

Of course this means conflicts are bound to occur in my pathetically, disgustingly cushy little existence. What happens when June comes around, I’m still refreshing the CVS website for my vaccine, Jacob DeGrom is throwing a perfect game with only 80 pitches in the sixth and the Nets, who have never won a championship, are up 3-1 in the finals? And what if both of those games are on the West Coast and the next morning promises perfect kayaking conditions on Long Island or a perfect morning for a bike ride on the rail trial in Copake Falls?

Bob Murphy had another great line. Every spring, there’d be six good pitchers for five spots, or five outfielders for three spots, and all the talk would be about how the manager would decide who plays and who sits.

Bob referred to this as a “happy problem.”

I suppose that’s my wish for everyone of good will right now. May we all live to see days when we have happier problems.

July 12, 2015July 12, 2015

Call That Dog Jesus: The Story of Mookie the Yellow Lab

This is the story of Mookie Dog. It’s a really good story about a really good dog, but it takes awhile for him to show up. To tell it right, I have to start the story five years ago at Taconic Valley Lawn and Garden Supply and True Value Hardware on Route 23 in Hillsdale, NY, a few miles up the road from our summer vacation cabin at Taconic State Park in the small, magical hamlet of Copake Falls, NY. Then I have to take a big detour to my childhood, with a stop in 1986 before coming all the way back to the last five years. I can only ask you to stick with it. If you like a good dog story, I believe I’ve got one you’ll enjoy today.

As for Taconic Valley Lawn Care and True Value Hardware, heretofore known simply as “the hardware store”, I always make it a point to visit while we’re staying at the cabin in Copake Falls. There’s always some excuse why I have to go walk around this great little hardware store once a year. This past year it was because the coffee maker at the cabin sucked and we forgot to bring the one from home, and I regarded that as affront to all that’s good. Without coffee, my life is just not sustainable, but I digress. This is about dogs. I’ll stay on topic.

The hardware store has a resident dog, an “Irish” Jack Russell Terrier named Darcy. There’s a reason I put “Irish” in quotes, which I’ll get to later. Darcy is a great little dog, and she had a face that reminded me of the only dog I’d owned to that point, Ace the beagle mix. Ace was the nicest thing my parents ever did for me, and they did thousands and thousands of nice things for me. I bugged them for years to get a dog. I really wanted a beagle, first because Snoopy was a beagle, second because every beagle I met made me want a beagle. One summer day in 1971, they went on a secret mission to Animal Haven in Queens Village and surprised their 8 year-old boy that afternoon with a year-old dog with big brown eyes and a happy smile. He was named Ace because it was nickname the older guys like my brother were calling each other and I thought it sounded cool. You think a lot of things when you’re eight.

Ace lived for fourteen years, until I was 22. In his younger years he caused a lot of trouble. He had accidents on the kitchen floor more times than I could count, and every time he did, my poor parents, cleaning up a big puddle of piss off their linoleum before dragging themselves out to work, screamed at him and screamed at me, because that’s all they could think to do. Ace stole food whenever he could, he ate the food Herman the cat left behind and got the last piece of everything I ate, and he got very, very fat. He bit a couple of kids in the neighborhood, but they had it coming. He liked my mother better than me because she was the main food and walk source, because I was an irresponsible little jerk, as all children are. But he was my dog. We played, we wrestled, we napped and we talked. For the first five years, we spent hours and hours and hours together, just hanging out. We both enjoyed watching game shows after school on cold winter days. And he was always happy to see me, even when I became a teenager and my attention turned to too many other things, none of them very good.

When Ace was about seven or eight, he suffered a slipped disc in his neck and was in terrible pain, and he got my attention again. He couldn’t bend his neck at all and would yelp in pain just going down the front step for a walk. It was awful. I gave my parents all the money I had from various jobs and presents, about $300, when they suggested that they might have to put Ace down because an operation was prohibitively expensive. I wouldn’t hear it. He was my dog. He got better after the operation, but he got old fast after that. At the end, he was pretty much blind and deaf, and was losing control of his bladder. I wrote something nice about him right after he died that still exists written in a notebook somewhere. I’ll eventually dig that up and put on this blog someday, because I can.

Ace died in January of 1986. This is where the Mets come in, briefly. 1986 was the last time the Mets won the World Series. It was of course, the World Series when Mookie Wilson hit the ground ball up the first base line that went through Bill Buckner’s legs, one of the most famous moments in baseball history. Mookie was my favorite player on that team. As a matter of fact, I’ll submit that he was one of the coolest guys that ever played major league baseball. Having followed him from his rookie season, when the team was beyond bad, it was especially sweet that he was part of that ultimate Mets Magic Moment. It was also quite redemptive as he had also lost playing time to Lenny Dykstra that year, but I’m digressing again. The point is that I decided in October of 1986 that my next dog would be named Mookie, and told anybody who would listen. I had no idea that it would take 25 years before I finally got that dog. This is where Darcy at the hardware store in Hillsdale comes back to the story.

I was bonding with Darcy that particular July day in 2010 and so was our only-child son, The Dude, who was six years old. The fact that he was paying attention to this dog in a positive way was worthy of note to me, as he was well into the behaviors and thought-processes that got him labeled as high-functioning autistic, more than likely Asperger’s Syndrome even though it doesn’t exist anymore. We were dealing with daily meltdowns, at home and at school, and constantly correcting and explaining some really wacky behavior. Plus, his limited experience with dogs left him very wary of them. Dogs were just one more thing, of the many, many things, that The Dude couldn’t figure out how to integrate into his sensory-processing machine.

But I got to thinking: Maybe a dog was exactly what he needed. I asked the hardware store guy about Darcy’s breed. He said he was an Irish Jack Russell Terrier, which he said were smaller and calmer than regular Jack Russell Terriers. I took him at his word and started doing some Internet research when I got home. What I found out was that there was really no such thing as an Irish Jack Russell terrier, that it was actually a made up breed that people used to pass off little mutt dogs off as pure breeds. I wouldn’t tell that to the guy at the hardware store of course, and Darcy was still my prototype dog. Then my wife Trisha, God bless her, who had never had a dog, who was very unsure about getting a dog for The Dude, who knew that no matter what she said she would probably someday have a dog because apparently I told her on our second or third date that I was going to get another dog someday and name him Mookie, did what she does a lot. She said something that made a lot of sense and made me see things in a completely different way. This is what she said: “If you’re going to get a dog, get a real dog. Get a golden retriever or a lab. I don’t want a little yappy dog, and beagles howl.”

All right then. Back to the Internet. I started searching breeders. I decided Mookie would be a lab. Now there’s a contingent out there, and I very much support them, that would read this and wonder why I didn’t rescue a dog from a shelter, as there are so many that need rescuing. It’s a fair question, and here’s my answer: I had exactly one chance to get it right. With a kid as full of issues as The Dude was when he was six, and a former aspiring-crazy-cat-lady wife who believed she would merely tolerate a dog and not consider anything canine as a part of the family, I knew that it was a crapshoot to adopt a dog who I had not raised from a puppy, or a dog who had demons that were waiting to come out. No matter how well North Shore Animal League could match me with a dog, the control freak in me decided that I had to get a purebred Labrador Retriever, and I had to raise him from a puppy, and avoid the mistake my parents made, which was trusting a little kid, by nature irresponsible little jerks, to help take care of a dog. Mookie would be The Dude’s dog, but my responsibility.

I found a very nice breeder right in Copake who agreed to let us visit when we came back up that year in August. I told her point blank that I was not leaving with a puppy, that I only wanted our son to meet the dogs and that we’d be getting a puppy the next summer. She was totally cool with that, and I grew to find out that, in general, people that hang out with Labrador Retrievers are generally cool. So one morning we drove out to the breeder’s house on the country road that leads to Copake Lake, The Dude was already in a snit, though it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet, and he didn’t want to go meet the doggies. To make matters worse, when we pulled into the backyard, in our Ford Minivan That Broke Down A Lot, the first thing The Dude noticed was the Intex inflatable pool set up in the backyard. From the time he was an infant until he was 7 or 8, The Dude was petrified of all things inflatable, particularly balloons. You could not even say the words “inflate” or “deflate” in his presence without him scattering like a cat when the front door opens. So Daddy brings his six year-old boy to go meet the dogs and the puppies, and his six-year-old boy refuses to get out of the car. At this point the breeder lady was already at her back door coming out to greet us. I left the doors to the minivan open and walked up to her deck. Trisha stayed about halfway, or else as usual I was just walking faster.

The breeder lady had two big goofy labs with her at the back door, a yellow female and a black male, plus several barking dogs in a kennel alongside the house. She opened the door graciously so we could all come in and meet the dogs.

I need to point out the beautiful realization I had in the moment that followed. I had already read all about the amazing things that Labrador Retrievers do. People absolutely gushed about them. I’m one of those people now. I had immersed myself in the stories of how Labbies can bring all sorts of wonderful changes to the lives of autistic kids. I read about how they were noble, intelligent, empathetic dogs with the mystical, intrinsic power to completely transform people’s lives through their presence. One writer referred to them as “God’s most perfect creatures.” This is all true. But the most beautiful thing about Labrador Retrievers is that they can accomplish all of these things while being complete fucking goofballs at the same time.

The two big dogs saw the back door open. They looked out and saw a little boy in a van with the doors wide open. 180 pounds of black and yellow happy dog bolted past me in a blur, passed my shocked wife, ran like lightning off the deck, across the yard and right into the back seat of the van, where they proceeded to jump all over my son, lick his face up and down, then climb into the back of the van, where they waited for the ride that they assumed we were all going to take. The Dude did not know what to think, but he knew that he had to live in that moment, that being in a snit about an inflatable pool or God knows what doesn’t mean a damn thing to two big happy dogs who see a little boy in an open van. It was not all about him anymore. The dogs were drawing him out of his autism, whether he liked it or not. I knew at that moment that this getting a dog thing was a plan that would work. How well it would work, I had no idea yet.

The Dude finally came inside (as the big dogs had taken over the van) and we had a nice visit with the breeder and her husband and son. We held puppies and asked a lot of questions. My plan was to bring home a puppy the following July. (I have a job which affords me nine to ten weeks vacation every summer – I suppose it wouldn’t be difficult to guess what that is. Hint: Not a Ski-Lift Operator – so a puppy brought home in July would have intensive training for the first two months). The breeder highly recommended Glenerie Labradors of Saugerties, NY, just across the river from Copake. I had already seen their website. Their dogs are absolutely stunning. Big, gorgeous English Labs that looked like they should be floating in kayaks or exchanging Christmas Presents with well-groomed preppy people in LL Bean catalogues. Go look for yourself at www.glenerielabradors.com then come back and I’ll tell you the rest of the story.

Ah, you’re back. Where were we? I know: By November of that year, I had a contract with Ed and Cindy Noll of Glenerie Labradors for a Labrador puppy the following July. My first choice was a yellow lab, ‘cause they’re just so damn good-looking, and they have big, soft brown eyes like Ace the Beagle mix had (which very well may have been Labrador eyes). Plus we hoped for a male, since the dog would function as confidant to The Dude. On May 8, 2011, Glenerie Broadway Girl aka Roxy, a pretty-as-they-come black lab, had her first litter of puppies. The father was from a breeder called Brookberry Labradors in Northern New Jersey. His name was Perfect Impression aka Logan, a big yellow guy with a massive head and the expression of a crazy good old boy out on the town. One of those puppies, a yellow male, became Glenerie Gets By Buckner aka Mookie. The Noll’s, despite being true blue Yankee fans, were very good about that.

I only spoke to Ed Noll on the phone only once, but it was a memorable conversation. He told me about labs that had been bred as companions for war veterans suffering from PTSD. One dog in particular had figured out when his guy was about to have the recurring nightmare that he dreamed every night. The dog soon trained himself to wake the guy up every night before the nightmare started. Ed Noll did not realize that he was speaking to a man whose sleep had been interrupted every single night for the previous five years by a little boy flying down the stairs and jumping into bed between he and his wife. He may have known that the dog he was selling to that man would, within a year, learn to stay with that little boy all night, every night, either asleep next to him on the bed or laying by the door waiting quietly and patiently for the man to take him for downstairs for pee business and breakfast, while the boy slept on and learned to love his own room.

Ed Noll was also the first to pass on the credo that I now know many people besides myself live by, which is especially amusing to me, living on Long Island among thousands of little yappy terriers who all bark their heads off when they see Mookie coming: “Mr. Duffy,” he said to me, “if it ain’t at least 50 pounds, it ain’t a dog.”

Cindy Noll greeted me nine weeks later at their house in Saugerties. Ironically, she was giving me a dog named Mookie to take home and then heading down to the Bronx on a Metro North train to catch the Yankee game. The best piece of advice she gave me was this: “He’s a mound of clay. You can make him into whatever you want him to be.” This is something that you cannot say of human children.

My mound of clay and I spent a lot of time going over the basics in the Summer of 2011. And he learned them amazingly well. You hear about how smart these dogs are, but when you actually hang out with one day after day, it will blow your mind. My training approach was a little bit Cesar Milan, establishing that I was the boss through “exercise, deeescipline and affection”, a little bit Monks of The New Skete, making sure the dog knows he’s a dog and not your equal, and a lot of Pat Miller’s “Power of Positive Dog Training”, which suggest that there should always be something in it for the dog. I immersed myself in dog training books for a year and then just went with my instincts. I could’ve done better, but I could have also done a whole lot worse.

From the start, Mookie loved getting things right, and a “good boy” and a good rubby went as far as treats. Cindy told me, “he’s a cuddler.” and it became clear from the outset that Mookie would always tolerate and often enjoy being hugged, dogpiled, scratched and belly-rubbed by The Dude, as well as myself and the entire rest of the human race. From the beginning, he has been all about pleasing people and trying to do things the way we liked them done. He never chewed furniture, he has never taken food that wasn’t offered to him, he had maybe three accidents before he was perfectly housebroken and he has never showed one iota of aggression towards people besides a low growl when someone walked too slow past the front window or otherwise seems out of place.

Within four weeks, he learned Sit, Stay, Wait, Lie Down, Come, Go Get It, Bring It, Drop It, Leave It, Shake Hands, High-Five, Look At Me, Give Me A Hug, Heel, Walk With Me, Cross, Back Up, Go Home and Go For A Ride In The Car.

He has two flaws, one that seems pretty hard-wired and the other that I have to admit I could have trained out of him but I thought it was just too much fun. I wanted to strike the balance between noble therapy dog and happy fucking goofball, and I think I did. He does know that “off” means to please cease jumping on a given person and trying to look deep into his or her eyes and lick his or her face, but I found some people (as I do) really enjoy that sort of thing (we call it “getting the Full Mookie”) so he’s still allowed to do it sometimes. And he chases our three cats (The Dude’s Therapy Cats – who’ll get their own blog posts in due time) around the house whenever he can, but they sort of goad him into it sometimes. Other than that, our mound of clay is just about the perfect dog. He has even charmed my mother-in-law, who is a wonderful woman but not easily charmed by dogs. When we stayed at her house for a week after Hurricane Sandy, Mookie was the perfect houseguest, though he was as confused as all hell by the whole thing. He knew his job was to be where we were and help keep our little family going, but while we displaced, he was going to sweet-face his way onto the couch.

When Mookie was 12 weeks old, we brought him upstate for a day for our annual trip up to attend Copake Falls Day, when the whole little town comes out and throws itself a day-long party. St. John’s of The Wilderness Episcopal Church hosts a big old barbecue at the end of the day. We were a little nervous about bringing Mookie that first year, so we put him in an ex-pen away from the people and the food. One by one, every little kid at the barbecue walked over to the ex-pen and sat down where the cute little labrador puppy could look deep into their eyes. Then one by one the parents of those little kids, who weren’t coming when called because they were busy staring at the cute labrador puppy who was looking deeply into their eyes, brought plates of food over to their children, then came back and sat down with their own plates of food and let the little labrador puppy look deep into their eyes, too. Trisha looked at the scene and said, “let the little children come to me.” And because we enjoy building on each other’s jokes, and we’re both pretty funny, I replied, “Call that dog Jesus.”

Jesus aka Mookie has been with us for four years. The effect he has had on my son’s struggle to make peace with his head and with his world is immeasurable, as we don’t know what it would have been like without Mookie, but we can tell the difference he has made. It’s sort of like how I feel about the Obama Presidency. A lot of things were screwed up anyway, but I feel that they would have been a whole lot more screwed up without him. The Dude has still had lots of trouble in school, he’s still had lots of meltdowns, still gets lost in his own head, but he’s come miles and miles in his ability to interact naturally with the rest of the human race through having a dog ambassador.

Mookie has been my ambassador to the human race as well. The year before we brought him home I was researching dog parks and I came across a petition started by a young fellow named David Sabatino, who had started a group called Envision Valley Stream. I am by nature not a joiner, but I joined forces with David – who by nature joins everything – and along with a group of like-minded people we worked with the village government to create a community dog park in Valley Stream, and through the Valley Stream Dog Park, which opened in the spring of 2012, I met a whole lot of other people. The Dude enjoys hanging out with Mookie and the other dogs at the park, and he’s sort of developed a little Temple Grandin thing with dogs, cats and animals in general. Animals have brought out the empathy, kindness and humor inside him that people weren’t having much luck getting to. The whole experience of walking through this world with Mookie has made us both better people. And Trisha loves a dog now.

As for Mookie, the dog park is as much the people park for him. He is on a insatiable quest to “say hi” to as many people as possible in the years that he has. The entire purpose of leaving the house for Mookie is to hunt for people to say hi to, and wag his tail and look deeply into their eyes when he finds one. Since we bring him everywhere we possibly can, I would stipulate that he has personally greeted close to two thousand people in four years. He’s aslo unbelievably photogenic and I put so many pictures of him on facebook that I eventually gave him his own page. You can see for yourself at https://www.facebook.com/mookiethedog.

Our dog Mookie has comforted people in the nursing home where my mother passed away and where my father still lives, and he has attracted huge crowds through playground fences. He makes roving packs of teenage boys walking from the high school up the street turn into six-year-olds. He once even found a stray kitten abandoned by his mother because the kitten came out of the bushes and started following him along the Duffy’s Creek Path. We brought the kitten to my vet, who got it adopted. I don’t know any other dogs who have rescued kittens, but if you have one like I do, you got something there.

This fall, I’m hoping to get him through his Canine Good Citizen test so we can eventually get Therapy Dog International status and bring him around to more people who need him as he gets older and slows down a bit. Right now, he sleeps upstairs in my eleven year-old son’s bed, making sure the demons stay at bay for another night. Tomorrow morning, he’ll sit next to me on the couch while I read the Sunday paper and I’ll give him scratchies and rubbies with my free hand. Then we’ll go for a good long walk around the neighborhood, and possibly knock one or two more people off the “say hi” list. I’ll watch as the person’s face lights up when his or her eyes meet Mookie’s. The person will say something like, “what a beautiful dog!” or “”he’s a real sweetheart.” And I’ll say what I’ve been saying for years now: “He loves you, too.”

Call that dog Jesus.

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