Me Talk Pretty One Day

When Sedaris is a child, his family owns a dog that gives birth to a litter of puppies. When it seems as if one of these puppies has died, Sedaris’s mother puts the small animal in the oven and turns it to a low heat, telling her children to stop accusing her of cooking an animal, since she’s just trying to warm it up. Shortly thereafter, she takes the puppy out of the oven, and to the amazement of everyone, it is alive and well, the heat having restored its health. Sedaris’s parents then give away all of the puppies.

When the family dog dies several years later, Lou brings home a German shepherd that they decide to call Mädchen. When Mädchen dies, Lou brings home another German shepherd and names it Mädchen II. Whenever Mädchen II does something wrong, Sedaris’s father scolds her by saying that Mädchen I would never have done such a thing. Meanwhile, Sedaris’s mother focuses on her elderly cat, whom she eventually decides she must put down. In the aftermath of this, Sedaris and his sisters make prank calls to their mother, pretending to be from cat magazines and asking if they can put the family cat on the cover. Soon enough, Mädchen II dies, too, but nobody feels particularly sad about it—nobody, that is, except for Lou, who suddenly devotes his life to caring for her in the last days of her life, holding her paw as she’s put to sleep.

After Sedaris and his siblings move away from home, their parents get a Great Dane named Melina, to whom they devote their entire lives. Sedaris finds it disconcerting that his parents seem to care more about Melina than him, but he doesn’t say anything, except for when his mother gets Melina to attack him as a joke, the large dog jumping on him as his mother cracks up. When Lou walks Melina, he’s proud of her huge size and never tires of the predictable jokes other people make when they see her, laughing when they say things like, “Hey, you got a saddle for that thing?”

During the time that his parents own Melina, Sedaris lives in Chicago with a female cat named Neil that he adopted from his sister Gretchen. When Neil falls ill, a vet suggests that she be put on dialysis. This is an expensive treatment, though, so Sedaris seeks a second opinion. Another vet suggests that Neil be put to sleep. As the vet says this, Sedaris loses himself to the memory of an old Japanese movie that used to play sometimes on television. In one part of this movie, an overweight boy is forced to shimmy up a flagpole at school. Having only made it several inches up the pole, the boy tells his friend that he can’t do it. Eventually, he falls off the poll, and his friend runs away. Calling Sedaris back to the conversation, the vet says, “So the euthanasia,” and Sedaris agrees to put Neil to sleep.

At the vet’s, Sedaris can’t bear to watch Neil die, so he goes to the parking lot while his boyfriend makes the final arrangements. Waiting for his boyfriend, Sedaris weeps by the car, unable to hide because he doesn’t have the keys. When his mother dies not long after this event, his father is left on his own with Melina. The dog is a great comfort to Lou, who refuses to leave to visit his adult children because he would never think of putting Melina in a kennel. Then, when it becomes clear that Melina should be put to sleep, Lou can’t bring himself to do it, even if “the youth in Asia beg[] him to end her life.” Still, he eventually agrees to put her down, but he immediately goes out and gets a new Great Dane named Sophie.

Almost immediately, Lou Sedaris realizes he has made a mistake. When he walks Sophie, he no longer finds pleasure in hearing people comment on her size, nor does he feel energetic enough to keep up with the dog. Instead of laughing at the jokes people say when they see her, he just acknowledges them and continues on, trailing behind his massive dog.