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Philadelphia Inquirer columnist John Grogan is a lucky man. He had the good fortune to get a bad dog. A very bad dog.
Grogan also had enough sense to know that bad dogs make good copy.
Marley & Me, Grogan's memoir about a feisty yellow Labrador retriever who came into his life to terrorize and torment, is riding high on best-seller lists across the country. It will appear at No. 1 this week on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. And while not-so-honest memoirs are all the news these days, this one rings terribly true.
Thanks to Marley, bad dogs now have a voice. Movie rights to the Lab's life have been sold, and Grogan even has a website (marleyandme.com), where fans post their own bad-dog stories.
There's Emmeline talking about her golden retriever, Luke, whose favorite pastime is "counter surfing" for food. He has eaten everything imaginable, including two watches and a tube of Neosporin. And there's Pam talking about her black Lab, Bandit, who has perfected that old dog trick of pulling back the carpet to better get at the padding below.
Our 1-year-old wheaten terrier, Maggie, doesn't have enough material yet for a bad-girl memoir. She's young. Still in training.
But there's great potential.
We already have a couple of short chapters. Just last week I took the slipcovers off the sofa, covers that were filthy because the sofa is Maggie's first stop upon returning from the park every morning. Her routine never varies.
She runs up the stairs, jumps up on the sofa, barks as if to proclaim to the world "I'm home!" then scurries down to the kitchen to make sure her breakfast is being prepared.
The slipcovers are a utilitarian godsend, catching the dirt on top while hiding the stains and rips and holes that dot the old piece of furniture underneath.
Later that morning, however, I realized the house was silent. Dogs are like children: not to be trusted when quiet. So I walked into the living room, and there was Maggie furiously pulling stuffing out of a hole in the now-exposed couch.
It had snowed inside. The living room floor was covered in white feathers and foam. I yelled. Maggie froze. And then she turned to look at me.
The thing I like most about dogs is their absolute belief in their own innocence, even when they've been caught red-handed. No matter what they've been doing, every bad dog bears the same look when scolded.
"What?"
It was the same look she gave me last month after she ran to my office and threw up at my feet. The pile she produced was colorful -- blue and red and green -- and stringy. When I went downstairs, I saw that the Oriental rug was missing a corner.
But, again, Maggie has a ways to go. She has yet to crash through screen doors or gouge drywall, tales chronicled in Grogan's book.
Like Marley, though, she has shown a weakness for women's underwear.
But whether she wants to share her tale of dragging a houseguest's bra through the living room during cocktail hour in her memoir will be totally up to her.
E-mail cwilson@usatoday.com
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