Bride & Groom

book, its title invited the accusation of malevolent culinary premeditation. It was called 101 Ways to Cook Liver. I am, however, entirely innocent of evil intent toward my fellow human beings. I’m a dog writer. Indeed, I may never recover from the fumes I breathed while testing what are, in fact, more than 101 recipes for dog treats.
    My column runs in Dog’s Life magazine. Holly Winter? I do freelance articles as well, and I contributed the text for a book of photographs of the lavish Morris and Essex Kennel Club dogs shows of the 1930s. Contributed: gave in return for royalty payments insufficient to buy one of those coffee mugs you get for donating to public radio. Honest to doG Almighty, I’ve tried writing about people, but I lack the knack. Anyway, as dog books go, 101 Ways to Cook Liver had gotten me a decent advance, and as Mac McCloud kept reminding me, my book would sell and keep selling if—and only if—I promoted it even half as energetically as I trained, exercised, groomed, and showed my dogs. Mac’s first book, Dogs with Dr. Mac, had been holding a solid sit-stay on the canine best-seller lists since its publication two years earlier. Bruce McCloud, D.V.M., who’d just published his second book, Ask Dr. Mac, did more for me than merely hand out advice: He suggested that we cooperate in making our work known to the dog-loving public and generously arranged to have me included at signings, readings, and interviews to which he alone had initially been invited. Readings. Well, 101 Ways to Cook Liver didn’t exactly lend itself to public performance, but I was already getting pretty good at following a principle that Mac had drilled into me, which was always to refer to my book as 101 Ways to Cook Liver and never as “my book.”
    The first event that Mac and I did together was a launch party and signing on Saturday, August 17, at The Wordsmythe, a big, important bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts, that probably wouldn’t even have stocked my book (pardon the lapse) without Mac’s influence. From an author’s viewpoint, August isn’t the ideal publication date, but then neither is any other month that falls outside the Christmas-shopping Advent, when even poverty-stricken or skinflint library addicts—me, for example—actually spend money on what they purport to love, thus enabling those of us who labor in the fields of canine literary endeavor to feed our dogs and, if the harvest is bounteous, ourselves. But, as Mac emphasized, August wasn’t outright bad. Our books would still be on the shelves when doting nieces and nephews browsed for the perfect holiday gift for Auntie So-and-So who was so-and-so crazy about dogs. On the other hand—paw?—my second-floor tenant and first-best friend, Rita, had to miss the launch party because she was away on vacation, as were millions of other potentially book-buying and indubitably fortunate residents of Greater Boston, where the temperature was now, at quarter of five in the afternoon of August 17, a stinking ninety-five degrees.
    Steve and I had parked my new air-conditioned car in the shade cast by the back wall of a funky movie theater and were walking my sweltering dogs along the sidewalk toward The Wordsmythe. I had Rowdy’s leash, and Steve had Kimi’s. Of the four of us, the only one who looked cool in any sense of the term was Steve. He was tall and lean, with wavy brown hair and changeable blue-green eyes, and he wasn’t even sweating. I was cursing the weather, as were Rowdy and Kimi, who, being Alaskan malamutes, are congenitally predisposed to define climatological perfection as ten below zero Fahrenheit with a killer wind. World’s most incredible question about the Alaskan malamute: Where did the breed originate? It was a question I got asked all the time, as did Steve, the relatively new owner of his first malamute, Sammy—properly, Jazzland’s As Time Goes By, and just as properly, my Rowdy’s young son. Kimi and Rowdy weren’t swearing aloud, but didn’t need to. They are big, beautiful wolf-gray show dogs who typically stride boldly along with their glorious white tails soaring above their backs. Now, their heads drooped, and their tails sagged. Although I’d spent hours grooming them in preparation for their first appearance as my PR team, they were “blowing coat,” as it’s called, and my efforts had left me with dogs who seemed mysteriously to be shedding more hair than they’d had to begin with. Furthermore,