Learning to Live with Fritz: Disgruntled Angel in a Hairy Disguise

By E. Rawlins

An opera singer meets her greatest teacher in a Manhattan pet store.

In Learning to Live with Fritz, author E. Rawlins tells the story of her chaotic relationship with Frizbee, an eight pound nut case who is in reality an ill-tempered angel in a hairy disguise. In her humorous and self critical memoir fifteen years of non-stop travel take the dizzy diva and her high maintenance mascot to Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, Vienna, Salzburg, Milan, London and back to the Big Apple. Along the way they captivate a handsome young baritone on his personal journey to international operatic celebrity. As the drama unfolds, the idea of love at first sight reveals itself to be anything but a romantic illusion. Fritz upstages and controls his mistress through his rigidly enforced rules and regulations, his antics, his irascible charm and oftentimes through his bizarre otherworldly connections. This is a memoir of a narcissistic would-be diva and a dog who is dead serious about teaching her to give up her illusions, to live authentically and above all, to learn the meaning of unconditional love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475932355

E. Rawlins

E. Rawlins is a retired international opera singer. She is a metaphysical teacher, seminar leader, drama coach, poet, first time author and dog lover. She resides in Switzerland.

Book preview

LEARNING TO LIVE WITH

FRITZ

skizzenvonharrietANGEL.jpg

DISGRUNTLED ANGEL

IN A HAIRY DISGUISE

E. RAWLINS

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Learning to Live with Fritz

Disgruntled Angel in a Hairy Disguise

Copyright © 2010, 2012 by E. Rawlins.

Author Credits: Author of Rather Light Candles

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-3236-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3234-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3235-5 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 09/06/2012

Illustrations by Harriet Maack-Schümann

Contents

Introduction

Part I       Learning to Live with Fritz

1       The Making of One Dizzy Diva

2       Meeting the Big Guy

3       Frizbee’s Predecessors

4       The Beginning

5       Name the Puppy, Train the Puppy

6       Professional Puppy Training

7       Meeting Dr. Del

8       The Fourth Rule

9       Analyzing the Boss-Dog Personality—Early Contributing Factors

10       Boss Dog I—Precious, Precocious, Precarious

11       Boss Dog II—Fishpond Psychic

12       A Devilishly Clever Disguise

13       Approaching Pedestrians

14       Frizbee Meets His Master

15       Our Adventuresome Lifestyle

16       One Crazy Little Dog

17       Frizbee’s Virtues

18       Emotional Entanglements

19       Frizbee Stories

20       Final Countdown

21       Exeunt Omnes

Frizbee’s Photo Gallery

Part II       Learning to Live without Him

22       Abhorring the Vacuum

23       Signs and Signals: Metaphysics or Wishful Thinking

Epilogue       Cathedral Rock Visitation

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to one crazy little dog, Fritz, a despotic and outrageously unreasonable creature who taught me more about unselfishness and unconditional love than any pundit, priest, or guru ever could throughout his life … and even after.

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I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

—John Steinbeck

Travels with Charley

The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.

—James Thurber

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!

—Franz Kafka

Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn’t act sorry.

—James Thurber

The Dog Who Bit People

Introduction

At the time I met the crazy little dog pictured on the cover of this book, I was an international operatic soprano who had given up her European domicile and (unwittingly) her career to marry a delightful man and live in sun-drenched California. This was a life I thought I deserved. My dream of domestic bliss without the stress of constantly singing opera boomeranged. Six years into my fresh start, I had already become doubtful. To make matters worse, my career mascot, a loyal and wise old Cairn terrier, suddenly died, leaving me bereft and lonely. I suffered four more years bitterly regretting my decision to leave Europe and allow the fickle finger of fate to decide my operatic destiny. Ten years of off-and-on singing and living the role of a trophy wife convinced me that I had to at least make an attempt to save what might be left of my singing career. I had been stopped in my tracks by a charming offer I couldn’t refuse. I finally noticed that I had become a wannabe diva—a sad, narcissistic wreck. It was at this dramatic time of my life that I met the grumbling protagonist of this volume, Frizbee—otherwise known as the Fritz.

This is the story of a little dog who changed my life through his demanding, sometimes bellicose, ever-watchful evaluations of my behavior. It seemed to me that not one thought, word, or deed escaped his critical eye, acute hearing, or uncanny ability to read my mind. At the time I conceived the idea for a book about this oddball creature and how he affected my life, the little guy was still alive and playing his strict and grumbling guru role to the hilt while I, completely unaware of the spiritual truths he was trying to teach me, endured his antics, which were exasperating, comical, acutely embarrassing, and/or physically painful. Although master teachers rarely bite their students, this one did.

The idea for this book about my irascible and intellectually challenging Maltese terrier Frizbee came to me after I walked away from a serious auto accident that should have killed me. My dog and I successfully survived the smashup utterly unscathed. I looked upon our survival as a sign. That neither of us received a scratch or bruise from the horrendous crash on the German autobahn was nothing short of a miracle. It was then and there I knew that Frizbee had been forced upon me as a sort of a talisman, a protector, a spiritual guide, or at the very least a bad-tempered angel in a hairy disguise. As a result, I began to record a few peculiarities of one extraordinarily difficult little dog.

Describing to an unseen audience the supreme patience, understanding, and obedience required to get along peacefully with my demanding, fluffy dictator turned out to be quite a lot of fun. I developed this entertaining story into an outline for a book; the title Learning to Live with Fritz seemed to be the only logical choice. After completing a few chapters, I was quite optimistic. A good friend arranged a meeting for me with a New York literary agent. I was overly nervous, since as an opera singer, my auditions up to then had all been of the musical variety. I was used to experiencing minor panic attacks before presenting well-practiced arias written by respected composers to a panel of judges, conductors, or opera directors. However, I had never done anything as personally nerve-racking as submitting a first manuscript for critique by a literary professional. I was relieved when the stylishly dressed agent welcomed me into her Madison Avenue office. She was quite enthusiastic as she told me that she had read my first twenty-some pages and had taken a look at my outlined chapters, finally pronouncing the book: Funny! And yes … well written … interesting … if a bit off the wall… Then she tapped her desk with one long acrylic fingernail and finished her appraisal: . . . but, my dear, this is a first-class effort!

She quickly added that no one would want to buy a book about a dog, particularly a bad dog. She told me that everyone thought that his or her particular pet—be it cat, dog, or canary—was worthy of, at the very least, an Encyclopedia Britannica entry. As you see by her comment, this was long before Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and personal blogs were even imagined. Lowering her voice and assuming an expression of ill-disguised skepticism, she went on to say that if I insisted upon writing a dog book, I should make sure that it appealed to the greatest audience possible by leaving out all the—and here she knitted her eyebrows together, pursed her Dior-red-slicked lips, and pronounced haughtily—mystical tra-la-la.

The respected literary talent scout encouraged me by saying that I should try writing something else because my writing style was distinctive and unquestionably entertaining, and there might be a reading audience interested in fact or fiction written by an American soprano enjoying a European career. The people you must know… She mused. Opera gossip might be a more titillating topic … and with your talent for description … well… She gave me a sly wink, assuring me that if I chose to change the focus of my writing and produce a behind-the-scenes-in-international-opera book, she would assist me in securing a publishing contract. Yes, she mused, if I produced a sellable manuscript, it was her astute opinion that I could become fairly successful as an author. Just please, dear, not with this book… She trailed off as I finished her sentence mentally: since this book is about a numinous little dog that not a soul in the world would be interested in buying.

I was completely uninterested in writing a tell-all book about my singer acquaintances in the opera business, revealing some of the personality disorders of many famous stage directors, the odd after-hours habits of many conductors, or the stranger-than-fiction casting-couch stories. That idea was just too hot for me. Not to mention that after writing such an exposé, I would probably have few, if any, friends left. I took her card and private telephone number and left the luxurious suite completely disheartened. I was so discouraged that I gave up on the project entirely.

Bitten by the writer’s bug and with the agent’s marginal encouragement, I decided to publish a bit of inspirational prose poetry I had written down on scraps of paper. The long flights, the endless waiting with other operatic hopefuls for auditions, sitting on trains or alone with Frizbee as my miscreant muse in a foreign hotel room—all these situations brought out the poet in me and revealed the deeper side of my psyche, the part of me I thought I had to suppress in order to pursue my career in opera. When that small collection was published, I felt that I had made my contribution to the betterment of this wacky world. Frizbee’s story would have to remain untold. His predilections for eccentric behavior and mad temper tantrums and the uniquely individual set of rules he lived by (and tried his best to force upon every human being he encountered) would remain locked away in my memory and the memories of those Fritz so thoroughly intimidated and often inspired.

It was in 2005 when I noticed a dog book on the best-seller lists: James Grogen’s marvelous book Marley and Me, describing his life with big yellow Labrador retriever bad dog Marley and their indescribably bizarre and heartwarming adventures together. After laughing and crying my way through it, I decided that efforts on behalf of my extraordinarily peculiar animal pal Frizbee would not be entirely in vain. The New York literary agent had unfortunately died and missed the immense international success of this bad-dog-with-a-big-heart story. Suddenly, I felt not only free to continue my work on Frizbee’s book but compelled to do so. I owe this burst of energy and renewed inspiration to James Grogen’s tribute to his magnificently misbehaving and unreservedly outrageous dog, Marley.

My perspective has changed significantly since I began this manuscript. When I visited the literary agent, Frizbee’s book was only a few chapters long and was intended to be a comical account of the dog’s long list of foibles, crazy outbursts, and especially his ardently enforced set of rules. Fritz was a mere six years old, already a certified nut case, and in my mind, if not the agent’s, had earned the right to be eternalized in print. Along with the comedic and entertaining aspects of the story, I had anticipated merely insinuating the strangeness of Frizbee’s entrance into my life. I had no thought of including stories of my continuing operatic career, meeting my big baritone, or chronicling our adventuresome life together. As I began again, it was not my intention to give readers the idea that Frizbee was some sort of guru. I wanted to circumvent the metaphysical and write a story about an extraordinarily bossy little dog. Even freshly inspired, as I started work on the book again, I avoided any sentiments or opinions that could classify the book as a personal memoir or mystical tra-la-la.

It was not until the day after the little tyrant forced me to release him from his earthly existence that I realized that this small dog was my greatest teacher. This sad event left me helplessly confused as I faced life without Frizbee’s constant demands and dictatorial edicts. Gradually, my manuscript took a more serious and poetic turn as it became painfully clear to me that living without Fritz was far worse than the fifteen years I put up with his rules and squinty-eyed evaluation of my actions twenty-four hours a day.

After his death, signs and signals came pouring in. These seemingly supernatural events convinced me of the dog’s otherworldly connections, which I had perceived at the outset of our relationship but later adamantly refused to take seriously. It was only after his departure from his physical body, that I felt obligated to eliminate the word coincidence from my vocabulary and underscore the importance of the strange little animal’s spiritual significance in my life. All that the Madison Avenue agent had warned me against, I felt I had to include. If I chose not to relate these occurrences exactly as I experienced them, I would not be telling this tale—mine or the dog’s—as it was meant to be told.

Frizbee was an unusually sharp-tempered, authority-oriented ball of fluff. At the same time, he was as spiritually significant as he was stubborn and cantankerous. The crabby little animal’s main objective seemed to be making me miserable, but his real objective was teaching me an alternative view on how I might live my life.

At the time I met the pup in a Lexington Avenue pet shop, I possessed more than a few of the dubious personality traits attributed to upwardly mobile female opera singers. I could easily have been the butt of a soprano joke or two. If Frizbee was impossibly fierce and demanding, I was just as hopelessly self-involved and passionately territorial. Both of us were unwilling to give up our dominance games, and here we experienced a Mexican standoff, an impasse, an utter deadlock. In the end, Frizbee won the battle and in the process transformed my life from one of dedicated self-service to one of understanding that serving others is not for sissies or the unenlightened. It took a master teacher in the form of one crazy little dog to revolutionize my life.

It was during the editing process that I altered all verbs from present to past tense in a conscious effort to accept the reality that Fritz was no longer here with me. I began the final chapters of this book with a great faith that readers attracted to Learning to Live with Fritz would be able to appreciate the not-so-unusual idea that all members of the animal kingdom are here on Earth for a purpose and that particularly our beloved domestic pets choose us in order to accompany us through a specifically defined period of our lives. It is generally accepted that all animals have the ability to communicate with humans without the benefit of speech. A tilt of the head, a sigh, a stretch, a bark, or a bite can replace an entire vocabulary of words. Frizbee, however, was exceptionally talented in sending plain English commands to my clairaudient inner ear. My peculiar friend Fritz taught me valuable lessons not only throughout his brief and turbulent life—but even after.

Frizbee was a remarkably intelligent dog who behaved abominably most of the time. When measured by all human rules of conduct, Fritz was a bad dog, but all things considered, he was a guru dog with a mission. It took many years of putting this puzzle together to come to the above conclusion. In the beginning I tried to explain his behavior by analyzing the dog’s puppyhood traumas and adding in the abnormal operatic and environmental factors that might have negatively influenced his development. I construed a few unsatisfactory answers as to why Frizbee reacted so vigorously to certain stimuli. It took a mental stretch and a long reach into the supernatural for a logical explanation—and then everything became perfectly clear.

Part I

Learning to Live with Fritz

Chapter One

The Making of One Dizzy Diva

Let’s talk about love at first sight. Sometimes it is real, and other times it is an idea that can get you into lot of trouble. I was born impatient. I had swept out of Ohio at age eighteen into the wide world of opera. I was in a hurry to make a name for myself and escape what I thought would be a dull, humdrum life in the Midwest. After winning many vocal competitions, completing studies in two prestigious music schools, and with a Fulbright-Hays Grant in my pocket, all I wanted was Europe. I wanted stardom! I had the looks, the talent, and the will to win a fabulous career for myself. I did win for quite a while. Singing was my life, and I had little room for anything (or anyone) other than musical scores, practice sessions, rehearsals, and performances of the operas I loved. I left a string of broken hearts (oftentimes my own), always feeling the necessity to sacrifice all for my art.

Yes, I was a would-be diva with a very good start on an operatic future, a chance to grab that golden ring, true diva status—if I could only hold to the course I had set out upon. My star potential looked promising; already quite successful and engaged for a leading role at the Salzburg Festival, I had contracts with the San Francisco Opera and two full years of guest engagements in Germany, France, and Belgium. After years of sacrificing my personal life for my art, and at the peak of this upward swing, L’amour sauntered up the aisle and settled in beside me on an airplane ride neither the enchanting businessman nor the enchanted soprano would ever forget. Mr. Right chatted me up for twelve full hours on the long overseas flight from Zurich. He wrote a clever limerick (extolling my virtues) on a soggy cocktail napkin. I gave up. I gave in. I could not resist him.

Believe it or not, the charming and charismatic man persuaded me that I could easily continue my career from California, and by the time we landed at the San Francisco Airport, I thought this sounded like a perfectly reasonable idea. He had not yet proposed marriage, but my fantasies were flying. I could be married and sing too! I could live happily ever after in sunny California. I was sure I was in love. Twelve hours of hard sell from one of the West Coast’s most successful investment advisers had turned my life around. Yes! Life was good. What could go wrong?

What could go wrong? Plenty, as it turned out, but that story is too involved to tell here. Let’s just say that both parties had acutely overestimated their good fortune and leave it at that. This wild infatuation and eventual marriage took me far away, stopped the thrust of my discipline, and sabotaged the hard work it had taken to establish myself in Europe as a respected young soprano. Magic thinking carried me off on wings of delight to my optimistic future. The initial two years were filled with exciting activities. I enjoyed the laid-back California lifestyle while alternately buzzing (sometimes twice a month) back to Europe to sing. My life was looking good, although adjusting to my new and (surprise!) subordinate role as the wife of a busy executive was not easy. Flying solo for so many years and then being suddenly thrust into a Honey, where are my socks? situation, well, no diva gives up her place in the pecking order without a battle.

Combining this wifely job with my contractual obligations turned out to be far more complicated than I had imagined, but still I was able to convince myself that I was living a full life and, most of all, that I was happy. Each singing engagement required a flight to Europe. Jetting back and forth kept my brain