A layabout mutt turned therapy dog leads her owner to a new understanding of the good life. At loose ends with her daughter leaving home and her husband on the road, Sue Halpern decided to give herself and Pransky, her under-occupied Labradoodle, a new leash—er, lease—on life by getting the two of them certified as a therapy dog team. Smart, spirited, and instinctively compassionate, Pransky turned out to be not only a terrific therapist but an unerring moral compass. In the unlikely sounding arena of a public nursing home, she led her teammate into a series of encounters with the residents that revealed depths of warmth, humor, and insight Halpern hadn’t expected. And little by little, their adventures expanded and illuminated Halpern’s sense of what virtue is and does—how acts of kindness transform the giver as well as the given-to. Funny, moving, and profound, A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home is the story of how one faithful, charitable, loving, and sometimes prudent mutt—showing great hope, fortitude, and restraint along the way (the occasional begged or stolen treat notwithstanding)—taught a well-meaning woman the true nature and pleasures of the good life. *Starred Review* Halpern realized that Pransky, part yellow Lab and part poodle, was so smart and energetic that she was bored in spite of the pleasures of her leash-free Vermont life. As her daughter left for college, Halpern herself feels the need for a new adventure. So she plunges into the rigorous training required for Pransky to become a certified therapy dog. When they begin visiting a nursing home each week, Pransky proves to be a dog of phenomenal empathy, affection, and patience. An immersion writer—Halpern participated in neurological studies for her last book, Can’t Remember What I Forgot (2008)—she is skilled in the art of combining vivid in-the-moment storytelling with thoughtful analysis. She warmly and incisively portrays the people they meet and contemplates the vagaries of memory, the inevitability of loss, and persevering joy. A deeply ethical thinker with a bright sense of humor, Halpern uses the seven virtues as organizing principles, subtly shaping her engrossing account to reveal fresh and provocative aspects of restraint, prudence, faith, fortitude, hope, love, and charity as she addresses the complexities of infirmity, dementia, and death; animal intelligence; and how doing good benefits all involved. The result is a profoundly affecting and edifying chronicle brimming with practical wisdom and things “that were so unexpected they seemed miraculous.” --Donna Seaman Sue Halpern is the author of five previous books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books , The New York Times Magazine , Time , The New Yorker , Parade , Rolling Stone , and Glamour , among others. She has been a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow and is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. She lives with her husband, the writer Bill McKibben, and Pransky in Ripton, Vermont. Introduction Pransky, my soon-to-be ten-year-old dog, is lying on the living room couch, her body filling it end to end, for though she is not a big dog, she is double- jointed, which means that her hips lay out flat. If I weren’t typing this I’d be stretched out next to her because I’m tired, too, as I often am on Tuesday afternoons. Every other day of the week, Pransky is a carefree country dog who operates by instinct, roaming the meadow around our house. But Tuesday mornings we spend time at the county nursing home, going door-to-door dispensing canine companionship and good cheer. Working at the nursing home requires us to pay attention—Pransky to me, to her surroundings, and to the people she is meeting, and me to her, to our surroundings, and to the people we are meeting. After three years you’d think we would have gotten tougher or more robust, but that’s never happened and probably never will. When I first considered training Pransky to be a therapy dog she was in her late adolescence. Dog years being what they are, she is now about the same age as most of the people in the nursing home. Even so, the words “work” and “walk” still get her to her feet in a unit of time that is less than a second. Is she better at her job, more empathetic, now that she, too, is of a certain age? I doubt it. I doubt it because I don’t think she could be more empathetic. As foreign as the nursing home environment was to both of us when we first started visiting County, it was a little less so to me, since my first job was at a medical school in a teaching hospital where I sometimes went on rounds. I was in my late twenties, with a newly minted doctorate, hired to teach ethics to second-year students. This should tell you all you need to know about how seriously that place took the ethical part of medical education: at that age I had about as much experience with the complicated ethical dilemmas of sick people and their families as the second-years in my class h