Giant George (20 page)

Or, more accurately,
Christie
had been pretty much on her own, while I—and just thinking about it made me wince—had been busy having a whole heap of fun with all the excitement of setting up Team Giant George.

“Fast asleep,” I said, approaching. She turned around and smiled
wanly. There were dark smudges beneath her eyes. “Well, at least for the moment,” I added.

She replaced the sheet of paper she’d been holding and glanced at the clock. “Fingers crossed we’ll have a half hour to fix ourselves some dinner.”

“I’ll do it. You go and, I don’t know, have a soak in the tub?”

She snorted, and I was pretty sure George snorted too. Turncoat, I thought, or just pretty
savvy.

“Honey,” Christie answered, “it’s not a soak in the tub that I need; it’s for us to focus a bit more—and I mean all of us, as a
family
—on the things that are important in our lives at this point. It just feels like you’re never here, or if you are here, you’re working. Or if you’re not working, you’re on the phone to Paul or Dana, planning the next detail of your Giant George Total World
Domination Campaign. Like I said—” She gestured to George, who cocked his head at her. “Does
he
care about it? No. Does any of it really matter?
No
.”

She pulled out a stool from beneath the counter and climbed onto it, then pulled the pile of Guinness stuff across to her and stabbed it. It wasn’t a hard stab, but, still, it made
its mark. “I mean, look. You get this in, and the odds are he’s
going to get it. You’ve done enough research to be pretty clear on that, yes?” I nodded. “And so he gets it,” she continued, “in how long?”

I shrugged. “A few weeks, a couple of months? I’m not exactly sure yet.”

“Right. So he gets it, whenever he gets it—say, sometime after the holidays—and then he’s officially the World’s Tallest Dog. And everything will still be
there,
Dave—all the interest,
all the journalists, all the media opportunities. Hell, who knows? He could even get an invite to the White House to do a photo shoot, maybe, with the president’s new dog!”

“Hey! Great idea! I should
so
get on to that one!” I offered, attempting to match her sarcasm with a bit of levity of my own.

It didn’t go down well. Christie didn’t seem at
all
amused. “That’s not funny, Dave, okay? Just
not funny. Look,” she said, “I just think that right now we need to take a step back, and—no.” She paused. “That’s wrong.
You
need to take a step back, honey,
please
. And then we, as a family, can get on with the business of planning our baby’s first Christmas, okay?” She looked searchingly at me, and then, eventually, she smiled. And, thankfully, it was at least one degree warmer. “You know,”
she said, “we won’t get this time back again, Dave.”

She was absolutely right about everything, obviously; one of the lessons I’d long since taken on board with regard to my wife was that in almost everything like this she was instinctively wise. “You’re right,” I agreed, nodding toward George. “He
doesn’t care. And, like you say, he doesn’t even have the record yet, does he? I guess we’ve all
gotten ourselves a bit overexcited, haven’t we?”

“And I’m sure I would too, in your shoes,” she said, softening. “Pretty unremitting, this 24-7 baby care, huh?”

“I’ll speak to Paul and Dana,” I went on, “ask them to carry things for me for a while. They’re loving it, and they pretty much run the website and social media stuff between them anyway. They can let everyone know that George is taking
a short break. I’ll just FedEx the forms in and leave it at that. Like you say, let him actually
get
the record first.”

Christie pushed the paperwork across the counter toward me, and I picked it up and squared it off neatly. If I’d had a tail, it would have been planted very firmly between my legs.

“Would a ‘sorry’ be an acceptable thing to offer you at this point?” I asked her sheepishly.

She grinned. “Yup, it would. And dinner would be even better.”

She forgave me, of course, because she could see I was sorry, but Christie had delivered a pretty clear wake-up call. Some things were so much more important than getting entries in the Guinness World Records: our growing little family, our baby, our pet, our ordinary lives.

Except something happened
then that fired us up again—and this time it very much included Christie. It was early November now, and though I was aware of not letting it take over life at home, in my head I was in “all systems go” mode.

“Okay,” I said to Paul and Dana, at the next happy hour meeting, “we’ve got to think about speed here. Did you see how many dogs are being entered for Guinness right now?”

Dana nodded.
“I did. I checked online yesterday. There must be half a dozen other animals lined up to try for it. If we want a shot before they go and award a new title, we are really going to have to get our skates on.”

Which we did—while George and Paul’s kids played tag in the yard, we spent most of that happy hour getting every
thing sorted, and once it was done we popped open a bottle of champagne. Sure,
we knew George was tallest, but we also knew officialdom—if we hadn’t gotten our forms in as quickly as we did, who knew how long it would be before they decided to award the record to another dog?

But two days later, right after I’d FedEx’d the forms, a new Guinness title
was
awarded. It seemed our friendly rivalry with Boomer was already consigned to history. The title of World’s Tallest Dog
now apparently belonged to another Great Dane.

Not that we needed to worry—it didn’t exactly change things. We’d all of us checked the stats for the other dogs who’d been entered and, by our estimates, George was taller than all of them.

But even if that hadn’t been so—if we’d somehow done the measurement wrong—we were primarily in it for the fun. This was a case of may the best man, or dog,
win. What other approach was there to take about such things?

So we thought we’d make contact with the owner. We’d had great fun chatting to Boomer’s owner, hadn’t we? It would be great to connect and share stories about our giant pets the way owners of same-breed dogs tend to like to do. Whatever happened with the title, it was now out of our hands.

But we never did get in touch. I got a call
on my cell phone, from Dana, the next day.

“You should get on George’s website and check out the guest book,” she told me. “There’s something really unpleasant going on.”

Most of us live our lives fairly peaceably. We have family and friends, and a bunch of work colleagues and acquaintances, and most of us never really have to concern ourselves with people we don’t know.

But put your head above
that parapet—as anyone famous would probably tell you—and suddenly, to some extent, you become public property. People who’ve never met you feel they have the right to pass judgment, or at the very least to comment on what you say and do.

That we’d put ourselves above the parapet wasn’t in question. We’d set up a website, we had Facebook, we had Twitter, we had YouTube, and through them we connected
with a whole bunch of people, ninety-nine percent of whom were exactly like we were: dog lovers, pet owners, interested in connecting and making friends.

If you’re a pet owner yourself, you’ll probably know this intuitively. You become part of a community of other pet owners and like to share all the things you have in common. This community is everywhere: from the friends we still make at our
local dog park, to the information that gets exchanged on all the pet-interest websites, to the forums and online communities that exist so that there are places folks can go to share anecdotes and questions about their particular breeds. Our website, plus Facebook, and Twitter, and the visits, were a part of that same human process of people enjoying connecting with like-minded souls.

But perhaps
we had all been incredibly naive. Because it seemed that, despite our friendly intentions, we’d stumbled across a dark side to our Giant George project, whose existence had never once crossed our minds.

One of the most popular and useful features of George’s website was the guest book where people could write comments and questions to George. It had been popular right off the bat. George (or,
rather, one of us) would post something up there and folks visiting the site would read about it and comment. At any one time, there were plenty of visitors, and all sorts of lively dog-related conversations would go on. It was one of the fun parts of having the website: seeing this fast-growing global community of dog lovers coming together through becoming fans of George.

But there now, for
all to see, were these really spiteful comments, saying not-so-nice things about me, the Giant George Team and, most unkindly, we thought, about George himself. These comments questioned his height and weight and said he couldn’t possibly be that tall or big. In short, they said we, and he, were frauds, and that we were exploiting George for the publicity.

To say we were aghast would be to put
it mildly. Why would anyone in their right mind want to do that? I simply couldn’t believe (and neither could Paul or Dana) that someone would have such a vested interest that they would go to these ridiculous lengths to trash my beloved dog. Going for the Guinness
record was supposed to be fun, wasn’t it? But this whole thing was suddenly making it anything but. What would cause a person to behave
this way? You hear stories about such people, of course, but to witness it firsthand was a reality check. Were there really people who were so bitter and mean-spirited that they would publicly belittle another person—another family—in this way? But it was a public forum—that was the whole point of the guest book—so what could we do?

We kept a close eye on it and tried to find out what was happening;
with comments beginning to appear across all our social media, we started building a picture and getting clues. The final giveaway was a post that we found on a blog—a full two-page rant—almost all of it labeling George a fraud. Now the whole unpleasant business fell into place: the blog belonged to one of the people whose dog was vying for the same Guinness record that we’d submitted George
for.

We decided that perhaps this was just a one-off, that they’d been having a particularly bad day and decided to take it out on their perceived Guinness “rivals.” It wouldn’t have been the first time that sort of thing had happened, and the anonymity of the virtual world makes unpleasantness so easy. Perhaps the best thing would be to give them the benefit of the doubt, trusting that they’d
realize they’d made a bit of a fool of themselves, and perhaps, having done so, they’d go away.

Within days we realized that this person was intent on some sort of mission. More comments began popping up everywhere. There was one on our YouTube video of George playing with
Boomer, and several more in the comments boxes beneath newspaper articles that had been published online as well.

There
was obviously nothing we could do about the latter, but one thing we could do was close the guest book on the Giant George website. It was such a shame, because we’d met all sorts of great people from around the world there, but we were also very conscious that many of George’s most devoted fans were children. The last thing they needed was to log on and witness some adult, but very childish, mudslinging.

On a personal level, we felt under attack too. Particularly Christie, who, just like every other dog “mom,” was enraged that there was someone out there dissing her cherished pet. Suddenly, our “bit of fun”—so recently the cause of some spirited marital debates about priorities—had become something quite different: a priority in itself. Now it felt like George getting hold of that title was no
longer something we did for a laugh, but something we
needed
to do, we all agreed, to silence this person who was so intent on bad-mouthing us.

I was also angry. What right did anyone have to talk to people they didn’t know in such an unpleasant way? Christie and I were now united. We must refocus our efforts to get that Guinness World Record and put an end to all the spiteful allegations.

The next day, therefore, I telephoned the people at Guinness to let them know that we had recently sent in our package, and we’d be grateful if George could be considered for the title. There was nothing else we could do now but wait.

We then tried to put the whole record-breaking business right out of our minds, and mostly we succeeded. Paul and Dana, as promised, took over the website and Facebook,
while Christie and I took some time out to immerse ourselves in family. After all, that was what was most important to both of us, and the
only
thing, really, that was important to George. It didn’t mean a thing to him how big or small he was. He was much more concerned with the really pressing stuff of life, like finding new ways to sneak bits of our dinners off our plates, or discovering how
to wheedle an extra dog treat out of visitors.

He’d also found a new thing to enjoy after Annabel was born. Even if he didn’t care for her, he loved her dolls. Being a girl, she’d already amassed around half a dozen, mostly rag dolls and cloth dolls, which she was still too young to play with, so they sat in a smiling row close to her crib. Right away, George took a shine to one of them in particular,
a green stuffed doll that played a nursery rhyme when it was squeezed. George loved this doll right from the minute he saw it, and any time he got a chance he would take it off somewhere and place it between his two front paws so it played him the tune. It was almost as if it was some kind of security blanket. We’d often find him dozing with it nestled between his paws.