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.