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  SOLID LOVE

  LYNNE WARFEL-HOLT AND HER DOGS AND HORSES

  SATURDAY MORNING WAS special when Lynne Warfel-Holt was a child. That was the morning she would awaken early to watch The Cisco Kid and other TV cowboy shows. “I’d sit on the arm of a chair with a pillow for a saddle and string reins, and I rode,” she remembers. “Or I’d pretend to be a horse, and make Mom put a pan of water on the floor for me to drink.”

  “Animals were part of who I was, but I didn’t have any,” says Lynne, who was an only child. “When I was three, Mom found me trying to make a pet of a big furry spider behind the kitchen range. In Hershey Park they found me sitting with a chained raccoon in my lap. I always felt better with animals.”

  As soon as she could write, she learned to fill out entry forms and mail them in to win-a-horse contests. “Like Ovaltine, where you could win a Shetland pony with a bridle and saddle. Each time I thought, ‘God is going to let me win!’ And at every birthday and every Christmas, they’d ask me, ‘What do you want?’ and I’d say, ‘I want a horse!’”

  When she was seven, her family moved to a farm in Pennsylvania. “I thought for sure now they were gonna get me a horse—they got a divorce instead,” she says.

  In 1957, Lynne watched Walt Disney’s Miracle of the White Stallions three times straight through, weeping, especially when the Lipizzan stallions of the Spanish Riding School trot single file across the ring to Schubert’s March Militaire. “Please don’t let me go back to the real world; here’s where I want to be,” Lynne thought.

  It was decades later—when she was forty-three—that a rescued horse named Twister gave her access to that world. He was a young Arabian-Thoroughbred cross, and Lynne purchased him for seven hundred dollars from a Minnesota animal shelter that had rescued him from starvation.

  “A horse trainer who went with me to the shelter to look at him told me his neck looked like it was on backwards and he was back at the knee. And he had big ears and looked like a half-grown mule—not an attractive specimen,” Lynne says. “But he was so calm and sweet—he has the biggest heart and licks you like a golden retriever—that I decided to take him home.”

  On a December day, knowing Twister was being delivered to her boarding barn, Lynne felt like that hopeful little girl she had been every Christmas Eve growing up. “When he arrived, I bawled like a baby. I was so happy,” says Lynne. “Outside of when my children were born, it was the happiest I’d been in my life.”

  Lynne graduated from seminary intending to become a Presbyterian pastor, but she ended up acting in movies and on radio and stage. Her family includes her British musician husband, two sons, an African Grey parrot, assorted dogs, cats, and guinea pigs, and, for the moment, four horses.

  “I’ve made some bad choices in love relationships; I had all this love nobody seemed to want except my animals,” she says. “People could say about my having a lot of horses and dogs: ‘Oh, she’s another damn bleeding heart or psychologically dysfunctional person with problems she transfers to animals,’ but it is not like that. Animals teach me everything about love, and especially they teach forgiveness and grace.”

  She found Francis, a basset hound puppy, when she began volunteering in rescue for springer spaniels and Gordon setters and helping a friend care for animals from a local puppy mill. The puppy, originally a pet-store purchase, had been through eight foster homes in thirteen weeks.

  Francis’s last home did not allow dogs, “So the woman hid him in her basement,” says Lynne. “She cut his food down so he wouldn’t poop. He weighed about as much as a cat and looked like a skeleton with a head. He could hardly hold his head up; he was so skinny, and he fell on his ears. He would growl and snap if you tried to pick him up when he was lying down or napping on the sofa. He was fearful he was going back into a kennel alone in a basement.”

  “It took him a long while to trust that he was really staying in this wonderful place,” she says. “Now he is one of the most gregarious, cuddly dogs I have ever owned. He is happiness personified and makes me laugh every day—especially when he goofs around with my massive male Gordon setter, Pumbaa, who is also a hugging fool.”

  “Some people say animals can’t answer, can’t communicate with us; the hell they can’t!” Lynne insists. “Animals are the only beings that understand me. I can look them in the eye and it’s like, gotcha? Gotcha! They look at you, and it really is a sentient being saying, ‘I’m so grateful you love me, and I have this life now. God bless you and thank you for helping me.’ Same thing for me. I look at them and I tell them, ‘God bless you because to you I’m not nuts; there is a being that can take what I am.”

  “People always scared me,” confesses Lynne. “I’m a real shy person. Because I have a good speaking voice, I seem sure of myself, but actually I am a scared kid on the inside. The animals say, ‘Hey, little girl, you don’t have to be scared.’ They love me. I don’t have to worry about did I say the right thing, the wrong thing, do they agree with my politics? Am I funny or pretty or too fat?”

  While seminary was intellectually exciting, Lynne says there was much she didn’t learn at seminary spiritually. Animals have mended that gap. “They teach me everything there is to know about what God is: love, graciousness, and forgiveness.”

  “My horse Twister is a hundred percent solid love,” she says. “He tries so hard always to do whatever you teach him. He gives huge wet licks if you put your hand out, or he’ll put his nose in your face, never once nipping or biting. He would never be bad-tempered about anything. He’s my seven-hundred-dollar wonder horse. When he’s lying in the field, I can go out and lie on top of him in the sun and nap along with him. He’s the horse I’ll never let go. He’s my friend.”

  Lynne’s most prized possession is an autographed photo of famed primate anthropologist Jane Goodall, with the words, “For Lynne, just hear your heart.” Lynne’s heart is full of animals.

  “I was taught only humans go to heaven, and Rene Descartes said animals are just machines. I got distressed about this until my cousin said, ‘Haven’t you read Genesis 9? “I will create a covenant between you and me and all living creatures on the earth.” God won’t have a heaven where not everything we love is there. God says how much he loves creatures. And Job12: “Ask the beasts and they shall teach thee.”’”

  Showing concern for animals is a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done, Lynne says, citing Mohandas Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animal are treated.”

  Today one of Lynne’s four horses is a Lipizzan, the son of a white stallion from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, and although Lynne hasn’t yet trotted down the center line to music wearing a shadbelly coat and a top hat, she creates music for riders who perform the ancient art of dressage as practiced to perfection in the movie she saw long ago.

  “Dogs give me laughter, and horses give me art, and they all give me love. I am so eternally grateful,” says Lynne. “Everything I wanted when I was four, I have it now.”

  4

  BROUGHT INTO BRIGHTNESS

  BEVERLY AND DON MCCORMACK, ANDREA MCCORMACK, AND THEIR DOGS

  WHEN A POLICE officer in this lakeside village in Minnesota picked up a stray dog, he always knew where it would find shelter. He would call Beverly and Don McCormack, whose fenced yard was home to the springer spaniels Beverly bred and to many lost dogs as well.

  “He’d call and ask, ‘Bev, have you got room for another dog?’ And she’d take it, run an ad, and many times we’d get a call from the owners,” says Don. “For twenty years, our home served as the town’s unofficial dog pound.”

  If Bev and Don provided safety for the lost dogs of White Bear Lake, Minnesota, the dogs provided Don and Bev and their four children with consolation, connection, and delight.

  Andrea, their oldest child, met her husband, Rich, when they were walking their respective dogs. The dogs—a collie nam
ed Siri and a Brittany spaniel named Lucy—were part of their wedding ceremony in a Wisconsin park. “Dogs have been important to each of us,” says Andrea, an artist. “There have been a lot of tragedies throughout the family, and dogs are a stabilizing force for us.”

  Beverly McCormack suffers from dementia but still responds to Duke, the cheerful best buddy of her husband, Don.

  Andrea was severely scalded when she was three and spent six months undergoing skin grafts. Don’s and Beverly’s mothers both died in tragic ways. And Andrea’s brother was convicted and imprisoned for a crime so dark the family will not speak about it.

  A constant in her adult life, a collie goes everywhere with Andrea. Her first was Lucy (the name means light in Latin), and Siri, the current one, is Norwegian for beauty and victory, she says. “Despite the personal trials and tragedies we experienced, the dogs always provided a source of joy and love,” says Andrea. “They showed us that was available to us in the world.”

  “Lucy was like a Zen dog—she taught me to be in the moment, the quality of what love is, the everlasting and ephemeral nature of it,” says Andrea. “Now I am always more conscious of the attention I give to Siri. Dogs live for less time than we do, and in that short time, it’s important to love completely.”

  In 1997, Beverly was diagnosed with frontal lobe dementia, a degenerative neurological condition. It was rapid and devastating. Her biggest concern when the family sought a nursing home for her was that she could be near a dog. For six years, before dementia made her incontinent and incoherent, she lived in a nursing home with two dogs and a cat.

  Don, a retired postal worker and insurance agent, lived alone, missing Bev and their animals. Then his neighbor went to the dog pound, he explains, to adopt a cat. She found herself a cat and found something else for Don. “There was an eight-month-old puppy there that she liked,” says Don. “‘Well, say good-bye,’ they told her, ‘because tomorrow he goes—his five days here are up.’ She couldn’t stand that, so she bought him, too, and she gave him to us.”

  Duke is a German shepherd mix with a golden wolf-like coat and honey-colored eyes; the tips of his ears fold downward, and he greets everyone with a half grin, half pant, his gently curled tail wagging.

  Andrea, Don, and Duke visit Bev these days at the Alterra Memory Enhancement Center, a nursing home in North Oaks, Minnesota. The façade of dementia care there is cheery: the hallway to Bev’s room consists of Victorian-style shop fronts, rocking chairs beckon on miniature verandahs, gas fires crackle on sitting-room hearths. The walls are hung with black-and-white photos of Charlie Chaplin, Lauren Bacall, George Burns, and other stars of a gentler century. Through the windows are views of bird feeders and wind chimes.

  Don, in his eighties, is trim and neatly dressed in a denim shirt, pressed khakis, sneakers, and a baseball cap. Duke and Don pass across the cobblestone floor of the lobby. A young woman shouts, “Breathe! In and out. In and out!” to seniors sitting in a circle and then leads them in “Row, row, row your boat.” Some join in, others sit and stare. In the background, like a distant bird, a frail voice cries, “Help, help, help!”

  “Should I put him on the schedule?” asks Maureen, a staffer whose name tag identifies her as a life enrichment coordinator. “When we do exercise and Duke comes in, they all stop. They’d rather see the dog.”

  Bev is in her seventies, slight and soft with fine-skinned pink cheeks and large eyes. Her jaws work constantly, while her eyes move from Don to Duke to Andrea to us and back to Duke. The only sounds she makes are faint groans and an occasional breathy “yeeaaaahhh,” more air than consonants. Duke pokes his nose across the coverlet close to her cheek, with an intent, happy, willing look on his face. Bev’s eyes roll toward him, fix on him.

  “They keep those rolls of cloth in her hands because she digs at her hand,” Don explains. “And the first time she saw Duke here, she stopped digging at them and put her hand out and smiled.”

  Now that Bev’s memories are darkened and tangled by her disease, Duke provides sunlight. “I’m not sure she recognizes me,” says Don, “but she recognizes him!”

  Two young, sturdy women wearing back supports lift Bev from the bed to a wheelchair; there is the rustle of diapers as they adjust her. The assistants smooth her flowered red dress and white cardigan and belt her upright into the chair. She is rolled through the home—to meals, to a window—Duke’s toenails clicking on the tiles as he walks alongside her chair.

  “The perverse blessing of my mother’s illness is that she has lost memory of the bad things,” Andrea says.

  Now, at home, Duke goes everywhere with Don—chews his shoes, tips over the waste baskets, follows him from room to room, waits outside the bathroom, rides in the car on errands. Recently, Don found lumps under Duke’s chin: diagnosed with a fast-moving lymphoma, Duke has been undergoing chemotherapy and radiation. He has eleven treatments to go and is in remission at the moment. “He’s only five; he’s too vital and vibrant and intelligent not to try and save him,” says Don. Then he concedes, “Treatment is probably as much for me as for him.”

  “He gives me a way to fill a need—he has to eat, go outside—he makes me responsible,” says Don. “He’s more buddy than he is dog.”

  5

  UNDERCOVER PARTNERS

  CARRIE AND HER DOG, GRISSOM; RICK AND HIS DOG, ALLY

  WHEN CARRIE AND Rick are working, their youth, their size, and their cute pets present an unassuming, friendly picture: girl and boy walking dogs. Grissom, Carrie’s dog, is a muscular liver-and-white mix of springer spaniel and Labrador with a dash of terrier, while Rick’s dog, Ally, is a petite gold mongrel.

  In reality, Carrie and Rick are undercover deputies in a county drug enforcement division—“narcs”—and Grissom and Ally are canine detectives—“dope dogs.” “Seek dope!” is the command. When Carrie and Rick give it, their two small dogs seem electrified. Tails wagging, they scamper nose to the ground in zigzags or leap onto shelves or dig at piles of rubbish.

  Dogs that detect drugs are trained to sit when they find what they are looking for. When Grissom sits, he thinks he has found his squeaky baseball toy, a reward that Carrie keeps in her fanny pack.

  Behind the smoked windows of her SUV, Carrie takes a break, her forty-caliber Walther tucked in with her Mountain Dew between the front seats, Grissom chewing his squeaky toy in a kennel in the back.

  Drug-sniffing dogs Grissom and Ally are more than business partners with Minneapolis narcotics department detectives Carrie and Rick—they are beloved members of the family.

  “It’s a lotta long hours and the most dangerous people,” Carrie says. “Dealers have absolutely nothing to lose.” It’s also sometimes frustrating—not for Grissom, who always gets his satisfying treat—but for the officers. “The government spends a lot of court time and effort and doesn’t get a lot out of it,” Carrie explains. “We see dealers go to court and get second and third and fourth chances.”

  Grissom got his own last chance when a narcotics detection dog trainer visited a suburban animal shelter seeking a replacement trainee for a retiring dog. The trainer was searching among the throwaway dogs for the right personality. Grissom had already been adopted out and returned to the shelter numerous times, bombing out of the job of being a good companion animal. He had too much energy for people who had insufficient time to work with him, and he also had a sort of canine attention deficit disorder.

  “He had very bad manners,” says Carrie. “He was a mess. He was unruly. He still doesn’t like to sit. Now he loves his job; he would work until he died.”

  Grissom has ridden with Carrie at a hundred miles per hour pursuing drug dealers down back roads. And he sleeps next to her bed. In between, he mostly uses his hunting skills and extraordinary nose to search for drugs and drug-scented money. “Last month,” says Carrie, consulting her log, “we found around twenty-seven thousand dollars in cash, three hundred grams of marijuana, and fifteen ounces of crack.”

  Carrie,
who earned a child psychology degree prior to becoming an undercover officer, likes her job despite the hours, the danger, and the contact with people with what she calls “simple thought processes and immature temperaments.”

  “It’s fun to solve mysteries, to evolve and work through a challenge, to be creative and get somebody,” she says.

  To Carrie and Rick, it’s work, albeit enjoyable work. To Grissom and Ally, it’s play. Grissom is an optimist; it’s easy to see in his happy grin and his confident, bouncy walk. Even tucked in his kennel in the rear compartment of her SUV, he seems to smile, and he listens keenly, gnawing a rubber toy, his yellow eyes on Carrie’s face.

  Recently, the optimistic rookie got his U.S. Police Canine Association certification—graduation day for Grissom. To earn it, he passed a field test, finding two drug stashes among five cars, and two drug stashes in three rooms. That degree hung on the close-knit communication between Grissom and Carrie.

  “A lot of testing is about me, my behavior and handling skills,” she says. “Ninety percent of the time if he does it wrong, it will be my fault, anything from not putting him on the scent cone to not pointing to the right things for him to look at. Grissom is mellowing out, taking more time and getting more detailed on his own. At first, he would go through the rooms at two hundred miles an hour, so hyper and excited. Now he knows nobody will make him leave until he is done, and there will be another day.”

  Carrie grew up in an apartment with a single mother and was “deathly allergic to all animals,” she says, but she yearned to have a dog. “I just love them, and now I love being Grissom’s buddy,” she says. “Steve, the police dog trainer, kept telling me he’s goofy-looking and weird and mangy. I think he’s just so cute! I love him and wouldn’t know what to do without him.”

  In addition to police work, Grissom has developed a repertoire of pet tricks: he can sit, stay, lie down, and shake, and he’s mastering roll over. Carrie, who is partner, parent, and friend to Grissom, says, “I’m so very attached. I drop him off tonight at the kennels for the first time, because my husband and I are going out of town, and I know it’s harder on me than on him.”