Don’t talk to me about dogs. I’ll break out in a cold sweat.
Don’t misunderstand me. I love dogs; I really do. In fact, for most of our married lives, we’ve had dogs which I spoiled rotten. Simply rotten. My
son Johnny always said he wanted to be
reincarnated as one of my dogs. I treat
them that well.
We’ve owned golden retrievers, Boston terriers and a Pekingese. But the dog of all dogs was a little white fur ball named Missy, our cockapoo.
If you look up the word “adorable”, you’ll find Missy’s picture in
black and white. If you look up “incorrigible,” you’ll find her picture in
blazing color. But these words only partially define her.
Missy held me hostage. She took complete charge of my life from the day she arrived from Boston. I was her willing slave and she knew it.
Before she was born, I honestly believe she chatted excitedly with the rest of the litter in her mother’s womb about how she would drive me out of
what’s left of my mind. And she came precariously close to it several times.
Missy had two passions in life. One was to pull the end of a roll of bathroom tissue down the hall, into the living room, through nearly every
bedroom, ending back in the bathroom. And all this without a single break in the
tissue. An incredible feat. Unfortunately, I was the only one who thought so.
Her other passion was John’s underwear. She loved to chew them to pieces, placing the ragged fragments in front of John’s closet where he tripped over
them and flew into a rage. She loved to be the focus of a rage. It made her
feel important and needed. Or something.
But one day Missy came perilously close to losing her beloved place in my heart. She came even closer to permanent eviction from our home.
I was taking a leisurely bath one afternoon when I heard John close the kitchen screen door and drive off in his car. Realizing that the screen door
offered very little by way of protection and privacy, I draped a towel around
me and headed for the kitchen to close the solid wood door and lock it before
resuming my bath.
Just as I reached across the open screen door to pull the kitchen door shut, Missy grabbed one end of the bath towel and ran with it, leaving me stark
you-know-what in front of the open door. To my horror, the UPS man stood on
the outside step looking up at me.
He was frozen to the spot and I was frozen in time. When I emerged from my self-induced coma, I leaped back out of sight and stammered the most stupid
thing I could think of.
“Do I owe you anything?” I stuttered in embarrassment and humiliation as he dropped a package on the top step by the door.
Running toward his truck he called back over his shoulder, “Lady, you don’t owe me a thing.”
I never saw him again. Either he was transferred to another route, he died of cardiac arrest, or he suffered a total emotional collapse.
Don’t even ask what I did to Missy. You just plain don’t wanna know.
