Luke Rettig

Lehigh Valley Magazine
Published July/August, 2006

At five in the morning John Grogan is alone, in the dark, writing. For nine months he writes a chapter a week and thinks back to when he was young and in love: when he and his wife, both from Michigan, had moved to Florida as newspaper reporters, and how they listened to Bob Marley while sipping cafés cubanos in Little Havana.

This was 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Gulf War started, and the Minnesota Twins, after an eleventh inning home run by Kirby Puckett in Game 6, went on to win the World Series in Game 7. John is 34. Life is good. Jenny is 29. She wants a baby.

They settle on a dog. They find a puppy, a Labrador Retriever, who is “young and wired, with the attention span of algae and the volatility of nitroglycerine.” The first thing they do is fight over the name. John wants Hunter. Jenny wants Chelsea. She also wants to drown out John, so she cranks the stereo. They shout when they hear their song.

They name him Marley. He is the world’s worst dog and for thirteen years John and Jenny, and later, their three children, love him despite the screen doors he runs through and the couches he tears open, even the jewelry he swallows. So when Marley dies in late 2003, John, by then a columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer, writes a few words for his departed friend.

The column, entitled “Saying Farewell to a Faithful Pal,” appears on January 6, 2004, and begins: “In the gray of dawn, I found the shovel in the garage and walked down the hill to where the lawn meets the woods. There, beneath a wild cherry tree, I began to dig.”

Six hundred words later, most of Philadelphia was in tears. “When I arrived at work the next morning,” Grogan writes, “the red message light on my telephone was blinking. I received a recorded warning I had never heard before. ‘Your mailbox is full,’ the voice said. I logged on to my computer and opened my email. Same story. The opening screen was filled with new messages, and so was the next screen, and the one after that, and after that, too.”

From the beginning Grogan had thought there was a book in his big, dumb dog, and judging by the response of the column he was now sure of it. This wasn’t a story about a dog that wouldn’t listen. This was about one man and his family, plus an enormously destructive, warmhearted but disobedient pain in the ass named Marley, and how that dog became a larger than life part of it. Today there are 1.7 million copies of Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, and when they sell out, which they will, between 30 and 50 million dollars will have rained down on Grogan’s publisher, William Morrow, and on his agent, Laurie Abkemeir. And that’s not counting Hollywood money. (Fox 2000 bought the film rights.) As for the man in the middle, who with a keyboard spun a fortune, what will he do now?

Well he’s not moving, he knows that much, and he’s not quitting his job either. Like it says on the back cover of his book, Grogan lives on a wooded hillside in Pennsylvania with his wife, Jenny, and their three children, in Limeport, a small suburb of Emmaus which is itself a small and distant suburb of Philadelphia.

In the last six months, one by one and then in herds, journalists from across the world have parked their cars in Grogan’s driveway and entered his living room to sit on a chair and ask in any number of accents, “How did you do it? How did your book, which is about your dog, become such an enormous hit?” Grogan will be sitting at the edge of a long brown couch, wearing the clothes he’s comfortable in, jeans probably, and brown leather shoes; with a shirt, an outdoors type—durable and rugged, the kind a lumberjack might wear. And in response to the question he’ll give a little laugh and say “Gosh, I don’t know. It’s really amazing, isn’t?”

Then he’ll say, “if there’s a basic lesson, it’s that people respond to stories that are told from the heart. Stories that the writer has a passion for, and you can’t fake that passion. You either feel it or you don’t. And I’ve seen this over and over again. When I write something that emotionally affects me, my readers respond in an emotional way. And if I don’t believe in a piece, it doesn’t connect in the same way.” That’s half the answer, because Marley and Me, to begin with, isn’t about a dog. It’s about a family living in America. In Chapter One Grogan’s a young newsman on the make, a few years removed from eating pizza and drinking beer every night after work. By Chapter 15 he’s got two kids and a wife with post-partum depression. Exhausted and sleep deprived, he suspects his house is too small and his neighborhood too dangerous.

Two murders on their block confirms it, and because their house really is too small, the Grogans leave West Palm Beach for Boca Raton. Meanwhile their boys are growing up fast. Unexpectedly, Jenny gets pregnant a third time. They have a daughter. Two months later John turns 40. That night he’s sitting on his patio, in a funk, petting Marley, worrying about important things while everyone else is asleep. He writes: “I was aware that maybe Marley held the secret for a good life. Never slow down, never look back, live each day with adolescent verve and spunk and curiosity and playfulness. If you think you’re still a young pup, then maybe you are.”

Marley was 56 that night, approaching retirement and still rooting through the garbage, still extending himself to the dinner table and beyond, gobbling the things he shouldn’t have. John was over the hill too, but not the sports car type. Instead he left his newspaper job, which he loved, for something he thought he’d love more.

Gardening was his passion, in particular, organic gardening. “Our yard,” he writes, “was a little organic oasis in a suburban sea of chemical weed-and-feed applications and pesticides. Passersby often stopped to admire our thriving front garden, which I tended with increasing passion, and they almost always asked the same question: ‘What do you put on it?’” The answer was nothing. This was 1999, when Lance Armstrong was in Paris, winning his first Tour De France, and John Grogan was in Boca Raton, reading Organic Gardening magazine. One afternoon, stuck in his office waiting for his editor, he clicked on the magazine’s website, then clicked on “Career Opportunities.” Two and a half months later the Grogans were on a plane.

Which brings us to Emmaus, Pennsylvania, where on the first day of April, 2006, in a house on a wooded hillside, John Grogan is sitting at the edge of a long brown couch, answering questions—as he’s done a hundred times before—about his book and his life.

LVM: Are you going to buy a Ferrari?
GROGAN: No. Not at all.

LVM: Are you a workaholic?
GROGAN: I’m not a workaholic at all, but I do like to be productive. The only time I get depressed is if I feel like I’m not being productive. I enjoy lounging around the house, but if I did it all weekend I’d be in a slump. But if I garden, write a Blog, fix my kid’s bike; it makes me happy to be productive.

LVM: You’ve lived in Michigan, Florida, and now Pennsylvania. Where’s home?
GROGAN: Home is the Lehigh Valley. We have no plans to leave. It’s home for our children. My youngest is nine, so in another nine years she’ll be leaving for college. We’ll stay in this house, stay in the neighborhood. The irony is, with a best selling book, it does open options. I could write books full time. I could live anywhere I want. I really can’t think of anywhere I’d want to live other than here.

LVM: Were you ever in a band?
GROGAN: I was in a newsroom band in Florida. We were called the Drop Heds, which is the Sub Hed underneath the main headline. We played at clubs, we had paying gigs. It was incredible fun. I’m not athletic so it was the closest thing to being on a basketball team.

LVM: Did Marley change your philosophy towards life?
GROGAN: Yeah. I don’t want to overstate it. Pets are pets, they’re animals. But yeah, he had these qualities that I began to note, subconsciously; they’re not bad for humans to have. The whole relationship thing: unconditional love and devotion, not holding grudges and accepting those with flaws; all those things that dogs do. They’re not class conscious, they’re color blind to race. You’ll see a Great Dane and a Chihuahua playing together and they don’t recognize they’re barely of the same species. Marley lived life on his own terms. He lived it with great joy and he did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it. I’d always been a company man, always trying to please my boss and do things that other people wanted of me. It dawned on me. I feel like a hamster on a running track. Look at this dumb dog, he does whatever he wants to do and he’s having this good time in life.

LVM: Who’s going to play you in the movie?
GROGAN: I have no idea. No idea at all. To match Grogan, the actor should be six feet tall and broad in a square way across the chest and shoulders. His face should be untamed, slightly bearded, almost feral looking but tempered by a voice—something mild, perhaps, and filtered through the nose—with a Michigan accent and a preference for saying gosh.

He was born on March 20, 1957, in Detroit, six days after Jimmy Hoffa, then Vice President of the Teamsters, was arrested in Washington, D.C. The Grogans were a Catholic family. John’s father worked for General Motors. His mom kept the house. As a kid there were many things John wasn’t good at, but he could write.

In 1979 Skylab crashed into Australia and Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq. That same year John went to the Herald-Palladium in the Michigan harbor town of St. Joseph, where as a police reporter he rode at night with cops, taking pictures of murder victims and walking through charred houses. His existence was lonely bordering on monastic.

“And into the newsroom walks this lovely 23 year old woman right out of journalism school,” says Grogan. “She was the first woman ever hired on the news side. I fell for her pretty quickly and she for me. So here we are in this little town. It was the first newspaper job for both of us and we’re crazy about each other, and we were young. So we would work and go out and have pizza and beer and take walks in the woods and walks on the beach.” On those white sandy Lake Michigan beaches, Grogan found his soul mate, lover and wife, in that order. They were colleagues, lovers, then a married couple, then a married couple with a dog, then a mother and father with children: a family. They lived in Florida and ate mangoes from their backyard. They moved to Pennsylvania so John could be editor-in-chief of Organic Gardening. Then a part of their family died.

They saw it coming but they denied it. Marley was going weak in the knees. His teeth had worn down to nubs. He was deaf and couldn’t make it up the stairs. “Part of us wanted to believe Marley could chug on forever,” Grogan writes. That “despite all his frailties, he was still the same happy-go-lucky dog.” The first bloat came on a Tuesday morning. Grogan was in Philadelphia near Independence Hall when his cell phone rang. It was the vet. “We have an emergency with Marley,” she tells him. His stomach had bloated with food, air and water, and eventually flipped over on itself, trapping the contents inside. Only by sticking a tube down Marley’s throat was she able to un-flip it. “But once their stomachs twist like that,” she says, “they almost always twist again.”

John and Jenny decide that if it twists again, they will spare Marley an invasive surgery and put him to sleep. For a moment they accept his death. But he makes it through the night and the vet sounds optimistic the next morning. John brings Marley home and the two sleep downstairs, John in his sleeping bag, Marley beside him, breathing his stinky breath on John’s face, moaning in pleasure as John scratches his ears. “The scare of that summer should have snapped Jenny and me out of our denial about Marley’s advancing age,” Grogan writes, “but we quickly returned to the comfortable assumption that the crisis was a one time fluke, and his eternal march into the sunset could resume once again.” But then came September, when Marley fell down the stairs. Grogan looked his old friend in the eyes and said “You’re going to tell me when it’s time, right? You’ll let me know, won’t you?”

On December 29th, 2004, Marley’s stomach twisted again. Grogan writes of driving to the vet with Marley in the backseat, his head resting across the center lump, using one hand to steer, the other to pet his old dog, saying over and over again, Oh, Marley. John thought he was ready. Yet when it was time to sign the papers his voice was cracking. I’m ready, he said. Another word and he would have lost it. Marley was on the table unconscious, his belly distended but alive. Two syringes went into his body. Two plungers were depressed. In the car on the way home, Marley was again in the backseat, this time in a black bag, and Grogan—who doesn’t cry at movies or funerals—was crying.

With a shovel from the garage he buried Marley in the backyard where the woods met the grass. Though unmarked, the gravesite will be remembered. John loved that dog, they all did. But without Marley it’s easier to keep the house clean. Without Marley the garden can survive and the children can eat without guarding their plate. Without Marley, the Grogans were not quite whole.

Epilogue: Life goes on. The Grogan’s have a new dog. Her name is Gracie, and though her behavior precludes a best-selling sequel, the family once again feels whole.