She Will Break Your Heart.

Today is our dog Lula's 12th birthday. When I adopted her she was 4 or 5 months old. No one knew for sure when she had been born. And because I was terminally single I decided that her real birthday was probably somewhere in the ballpark of a Couples Only holiday that did nothing but throw my terminal-singlehood in my face. So it became Lula's birthday. This also had a nice side benefit of making her birthday easy to remember every year. For that reason alone we decided our other dog Sammy's birthday would be July 4th.

So Walker loves Lula. He loves Sammy but he just loves Lula differently. She's a beautiful dog. I had been looking for a dog for awhile, I was single, living in L.A., and my apartment had almost been broken into in the middle of the night when I was there alone. The only thing that woke me up was the dog in the yard between my apartment and the house behind me, growling right at the gate underneath my window. I looked at a lot of dogs but when I saw Lula I just fell in love with her.

She's red-ish brown, a Rhodesian Ridgeback mix without The Ridge. She looks exactly like Santa's Little Helper from The Simpsons. She's sleek. She's the supermodel of the dog world—able to eat whatever she wants and never gain an ounce. Sammy, on the other hand, is so prone to unexpected weight gain that we call her Tubby. She's clumsy and stands too close and once she ate a pile of towels and it cost us lots and lots of money to get them out of her. They're just very different dogs.

Their reactions to brand new baby Walker were very telling. When we walked in the door, just the day after Father's Day, Sammy was right on the scene. Sniffing, investigating, and needing to be very close to the new human being we were carrying in what must've appeared to them to be an upholstered bucket. At the same time Lula grabbed her bone and ran around in circles, hoping to focus all the attention back on her.

Lula's been increasingly marginalized since I adopted her. First it was just her and I. She slept anywhere she wanted to sleep, even under the covers. We survived an earthquake together. I fed her all of my leftovers and she rode in the car with me wherever I went. Then we moved to Portland and Jon entered the picture. I knew he was the one for me when, on our first date, he got down on the ground and wrestled with her. A few years later came Sammy, a dog friend to keep her company. It's debatable how much Sammy's addition improved her life versus how much it shrank her piece of the attention pie. Now there's Walker.

When Lula click-clacks into the room, Walker's face just lights up. He beams at her. If she's close enough, he reaches his hand out to pet her fuzzy muzzle. He laughs at her, he smiles at her, he wants to touch her, see her, know where she is going and when she'll be coming back.

The other day I tried to point out to him that Sammy was really the dog who is loyal to him. "Sammy," I said, "is the one who guards you when you're sleeping. She's the one who comes to investigate when you're crying. She's loved you since Day 1." I went on, "Lula loves you too, but Sammy is the one who really cares about you. Look, I know you love Lula..." And then I said something to him that I didn't think I'd be saying quite so soon:

"... Walker, she's really beautiful. But she will break your heart."