Steven Winn, columnist and critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and past contributor to Writing It Real, tells a good story about a series of articles he wrote that were extremely popular. He was eating lunch with one of his newspaper’s editors and telling her about Como, the one-year-old rescue dog his family had adopted, especially about the way the dog seemed to hate him and loved his wife and daughter. Steven’s sense of humor had the editor laughing. Suddenly, she took out her cell phone to tell their boss about the story. Right there, she got Steven an assignment to write his story about Como’s entrance into his family. Steven wrote the story in three parts that ran consecutive weeks in the Home & Garden Section of the paper. The stories were especially well received. Sixteen months to the day after the family got him, Como was hit by a car and Steven wrote about dealing with the accident and the injury and his worry and feelings of responsibility. Again, reader response was big.

As Steven told me the history of his dog stories, I was thinking about Hemmingway’s famous comment that many a fine story has been talked away. But in this case, Steven had talked his way into a story. He didn’t know, he said, that he had a story until the editor listened. But before lunch was over, he stopped telling the story. He had to save the rest of his words for the page.

Here’s part one of the essay Steven wrote about his dog’s accident for the April 6th edition of the San Francisco Chronicle:

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A Second Dogged Pursuit Takes a Tragic Turn
By Steven Winn, Chronicle Staff Writer

At first I didn’t think anything of it when I hung up the phone that morning and couldn’t find him. The house was a combat zone of banging and wrenching and screeching lathe and plaster on the second day of a bathroom remodel. Our dog, Como, would want nothing to do with it. He had probably found a haven somewhere to wait out the crisis.

I checked under the desk and out on his blanket in the alcove by the refrigerator. No luck either under the dining room table, another favorite hideout of our 2-year-old terrier mutt. I was about to head upstairs and look in the back bedroom when I saw it: One of the workers had left the pocket door in the living room open a crack. Out in the hall, the front door was off its hinges for the demolition phase. A still, cold premonition came over me. Sure enough, watching three men tromp up and down the front steps from a secure distance, Como was out on the sidewalk.

I took it easy at the start and tried to assume the best. “Como,” I called in my most cordial tone, “c’mon inside. It’s cold out there. C’mon back inside.” It was, in fact, one of those warm, brilliantly bright winter mornings — a pleasant enough Jan. 11 that I could venture out in bathrobe and bare feet, my attire of the moment, and not feel underdressed.

 My opening line seemed to register on the dog as a kind of double betrayal. Not only had I allowed this squadron of noisy men into the house, with their work boots and tools and boom box tuned to combative talk radio, but now I was lying to him about the weather as well. Como took off at a slow, regretful trot toward 10th Avenue. I followed at a respectful distance, as if he were leading me on an invisible long leash. But after waiting for a moment at the corner, as our daughter, Phoebe, has trained him to do, he lowered his head and darted into the street. The invisible leash snapped. The chase was on.

There was an absurdly familiar, slow-motion quality to this dog-and-man pursuit. Sixteen months to the day after we brought him home, Como was leading me off on the very same route of our first chase scene. That one, as loyal Home&Garden readers might recall, took place within days of our adopting this constitutionally skittish, escape-artist dog. One warm September morning, when he and I were home alone, Como scooted out the front door and led me on a frantic path through our Sunset District neighborhood. Only after I lay flat on my back in the middle of 11th Avenue, the very image of unmenacing passivity — and only then with the kind assistance of a passing Good Samaritan and the lure of a PowerBar — did I recapture Como and bring him home.

This time as I loped along, calling out to him, wheedling, pleading, sometimes commanding him to stop, Como stayed a steady distance ahead of me. When I slowed down or sped up or even stopped for a moment, he did the same. It was if he were toying with me like some anthropological specimen, at once curious and patronizing of my strange behavior. I’ve seen dance that’s less cunningly choreographed.

Como monitored my movements, as he’s given to doing when something alerts him on a walk, by looking back over one shoulder as he retreats. Sometimes, to our amusement, he’ll run into a mailbox or a pole. Maybe, I thought, that will happen now and he’ll knock himself silly enough for me to catch him. It didn’t, of course. Como trotted on.

Determined not to let history replay itself precisely (I was PowerBar- less and saw no obvious Samaritan candidates), I decided to cross Lawton and herd the dog back toward the house. Like many things that happened that day, it was a decision I later played and replayed in my mind, wondering if I might have altered the outcome by making a different choice.

At 10th Avenue Como turned left and headed down the hill toward Kirkham. His ears lay flat now, and he was picking up speed. What may have started out for him as a kind of tentative evasion had turned into a flat-out, panic- driven dash for freedom. Within the space of a few minutes he had become a street dog again, on the lam. As Como and I shot past a row of identical maroon garage doors, I had this brief vision of us, as if we were being seen from across the street. From there, someone happening by on the way to work would have observed a small white dog pursued by a scowling barefoot man in a dark blue bathrobe, flaps flying open, hair uncombed.

By that point, I felt even more disheveled and unprepared than I looked. How was I ever going to catch this dog? What would I tell Phoebe, a 13-year- old only child who loved her “brother” with an overflowing heart, if Como got away? What would Sally think (and tactfully, painfully never say) about the dog springing loose on my watch? What would we all feel, getting into bed that night in a dogless house? The questions billowed and blotted out whatever last shred of good judgment I had left.

“Help me,” I shouted to a couple of strangers walking up Kirkham. “Corner him.” Folly. Panic. Desperation. Como bolted off the curb so quickly that no one — not I, not the driver and certainly not he — saw it coming before the SUV hit him. He let out one terrific yelp, bucked mightily to get up and dropped flat on his side by the tire. I knew he was dead. Or worse, that he was dying in terrible pain.

When I got to him his side was heaving rapidly, almost fluttering. An eye rolled back to see me. I laid a hand on his shoulder, and he sprang to life, thrashing at me with bared teeth. He bit my hands and shin, tore at my bathrobe, pierced my forearm. That much I understood — those were his animal instincts kicking in. But something else puzzled me. I was in that oddly detached state of mind that accidents briefly confer. Why was there blood on his neck where there hadn’t been any before? Then I realized: It was my blood dropping down on him. That’s when time lurched forward and I started sobbing. I didn’t feel my own injuries yet, but I knew Como was badly hurt and suffering in ways I couldn’t see, couldn’t know. Those few drops of blood on his fur were trivial, a mockery. If only it were that simple, a blot, a spill that could be wiped away.

Much of what happened in the minutes and hours that followed is a blur of fear, guilt, uncertainty, blame, hope, more fear and compassion for another living being who couldn’t possibly know what had happened and what lay ahead. And much registered with the heightened clarity that comes with an adrenaline surge.

One of the people who gingerly approached when I was still in the street with Como held out her cell phone, apologetically, and said that 911 was busy. Someone else asked me if it was my dog, which struck me as simultaneously kind, cruel and irrelevant. I wanted to thank him for his concern and snarl. Then a woman was gently telling me to get in her car. I scooped up the now limply obliging Como in my arms and climbed onto the front seat. Only after I had directed her to our vet’s nearby office and we had started down 11th Avenue did I realize that I was sitting in the SUV that had hit Como. As the driver tearfully apologized for something she couldn’t have prevented, her young child babbled in his car seat behind us. “What’s wrong, Mommy?” he asked. “Where’s the doggy?”

I flew out of the car without thanking her or even looking at her (another source of guilt to mull later) and charged through the vet’s waiting room to the desk. “He was run over by a car,” I said. That, and my madman, bathrobe-and-barefoot appearance, earned immediate attention. Como was whisked away to an emergency room, where he was quickly examined, put on fluids and readied for X-rays. I was politely, then a bit more firmly asked to leave the room so the staff members could get on with their work.

And so they did, as I roamed the hallway and several empty examination rooms, muttering blackly and speckling the floor with blood. The spot where Como had gotten me on the fleshy pad of my thumb wouldn’t stop gushing. Every few minutes I pushed open the door to see if our dog was still breathing, if the X-rays were done, if some miracle recovery had happened and he was up gobbling a treat and wagging his tail. Each time I was sent away and told to be patient.

I knew I was acting — and looking — ridiculous. I couldn’t help it. I hated the other pet owners placidly waiting with their perfectly healthy- looking dogs and cats in their laps. I hated the man who came in to buy aloe shampoo for his Pomeranian and idly debated the medium or large size. I despised the little serenity fountain burbling away on the receptionist’s desk. My bathrobe gapped open over my bare chest and legs, and I didn’t care. It even pleased me, in a moment of histrionic self-indulgence, that my thumb kept bleeding through a series of damp paper towel patches. Good, I thought, Como and I can both die today. I’m sure I deserve it.

As I waited and waited — for what felt like weeks and was actually something less than an hour — scenes from our family’s dog-tormented, dog- enriched life of the past 16 months spooled by in my head. I saw those first frantic nights with Como, when he chewed through the hinges on his plastic crate and made his first of many dashes for freedom. I saw our obedience classes, shredded leashes and the home-visit trainer who charged $85 an hour to feed Como mounds of turkey that he promptly threw up.

I saw Como, months later, coiled on the end of Phoebe’s bed, sleepily blinking before she invited him under the covers. I saw Sally snapping on his leash for their early morning rambles around Stow Lake, his tail switching in the front hall. I saw him as I’d seen him the night before the accident, crouched down on his front legs, waggling his hips in the air and inviting me to chase him around the house. It was a new and delicious game of wish fulfillment for a dog who had always openly preferred my daughter and wife to me — being pursued by the other male in the house and never, ever getting caught.

At last the doctor came out and showed me the X-rays. The good news — the remarkable news — was no broken spine and no apparent internal injuries or bleeding. The bad news, as she showed me the ghostly image of tiny splintered bone, was a pelvis fractured in several places. They couldn’t do the surgery there, she said, and recommended a specialist across town. She said Como was “stable” now but thought it best to transport him to the surgeon in a pet ambulance that afternoon.

The question of what saving Como might cost had not yet occurred to me. Now, in a somewhat quieter voice, the doctor told me what the charge for the ambulance ride would be. It wasn’t a funny number, but for the first time that day, I laughed.

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The famous essayist E. B. White, as well as others such as Edward Hoagland, have written about the way successful essays address or feature the author’s less than model behavior. From his bathrobe-garbed walk to his thoughts about the other pet owners at the vet’s to his happiness at the blood dripping from his thumb, Steven has successfully portrayed himself as relinquishing any of his usual façades. As readers, we warm to him in his morning gone wrong, in his time of guilt and sadness, panic and need.

Having experienced this essay, try writing about one of your own times of distress–what story have you told and retold or maybe never told about a time you were worried out of your mind about something you thought you’d caused? Did you think the worst couldn’t have happened and then find that it did or did you think the worst had happened and then find that it didn’t? Did you have socially unacceptable thoughts as Steven did at the vet’s while you were worried? Did you not listen to or imagine disobeying instructions and expectations? Did you have memories from other, happier times that you dwelled on? I’m sure that at least one story will come to mind. See if you can spin the tale in a way that makes the reader chuckle at how human you the author are trapped in your difficulty.

And so you are not left hanging about Como: I visited the Winn’s this past March. Como looked chipper as he marched on his leash with Sally to watch Phoebe’s soccer game.

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If you want to read the rest of Steven Winn’s articles about Como, here are links to the series as it’s presented on SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s web site.

The initial series:

01/31/04          What sort of madness makes otherwise sane people opt to adopt a mutt?
02/07/04          Dogged: Battle of the sexes for fickle canine’s favor
02/14/04          DOGGED! – Como the dog makes it past Decision Day

A follow-up article

9/11/04            Man and beast, a year later – Como has let our writer inch his way out of the doghouse of his affections

After the accident:

04/06/05          A second dogged pursuit takes a tragic turn (the article you just read)
04/09/05          Family on tenterhooks as injured dog recovers

Also, you can read some of the resulting letters to the editor

Last, you can read Steven’s previous articles in Writing It Real by clicking the links on his author page. Many of our readers enjoyed his story about going to the baseball game with his daughter and a friend.