Wellington

A statement from the author.

My name is King Wellington Lindsay. I am a West Highland White Terrier, eighteen pounds, twenty in an indulgent season, and for eleven years I have governed a family of five from an apartment in the West Village of New York - a reign my subjects have persistently misfiled as owning a dog.

I have let this stand. I had a kingdom to run.

I ran it well. I held the door. I inspected the groceries. I raised three children, none of whom were consulted about my methods and all of whom turned out beautifully. I maintained files on every dog in the neighborhood, sorted souls with total confidence from a great height, and was, on the record, wrong about nearly all of the ones who mattered.

This book is those files, opened.

In it you will find: the dog-walker who runs everything south of Fourteenth Street and commutes to his kingdom like a don. A five-pound neighbor across the street who cannot lie. A ghost in the corner of the living room I have elected not to fear. The complete inventory of smells on a New York morning, ranked. And a bulldog, at the end of a small park one block from my door, who said hello to me every morning for six years - and what I did with that hello, and what it cost me to learn, too late, what it meant.

You will also find the thing I have never told anyone. One warm morning last July, I watched something happen on that corner. My family does not know. The general does not know. The woman I love most - the one who is, in my professional opinion, half dog - does not know.

You are about to.

I am told that people who live with my kind will recognize themselves in this book: the spelled-out W-A-L-K we cracked years ago, the theatrical sigh, the toy we deny sleeping with. Fine. Recognize away. But understand what you are actually holding, because I wrote it down for a reason: you have lived your whole life assuming you were watching the dog.

The dog was watching you. The dog wrote everything down.

The dog forgives you in advance for crying about it.

- W.