My favorite grocery store, where it’s a pleasure to shop, said “Enough is enough.” While I’ve never thought of bringing my dog shopping with me, plenty of folks walk right in a their furry canine friend on a leash. The only other companion pet I’ve seen is a lizard on the shoulder of a shopper in a big box home improvement store.
My dog would love to come shopping with me. There are snacks around every turn, from meat to cheese to cookies and dog treats. There are people to meet and children to chase and so many smells to smell.
My dogs have always been a comfort to me, are faithful companions, and never fail to lift my spirits. But I can be away from them for a short shopping trip. When I get home, they’ve guarded the house, are excited to see me, and will sniff my shopping bags in hopes of a treat.
The verbiage on this sign that caught my attention referred to miniature horses who functioned as service animals. I have never seen a miniature horse in a store. I would love to see a miniature horse in a store. I’ve seen a mastiff as big as a horse in Walmart, but never an actual horse.
I’ve learned that miniature horses make good service animals, most often for the blind or visually impaired. They live longer (up to thirty-five years), they don’t shed (sorry, retrievers!), house train easily, and they are not as social as dogs tend to be so they do better in public spaces.
I really want to see a miniature horse in the store, legitimately guiding a person who relies on them for sight or stability. And I want to meet the doctor who will write a note saying you need an “emotional support pet.” Come on, doc. Everyone needs a dog! That’s not rocket science. And don’t you be billing my insurance for that prescription.
It’s a magical moment when a child learns to feed the family dog. No one teaches this skill to the child or the dog. It comes naturally.
A lot of life precedes that moment. The infant is old enough to sit up by his- or her- self in a high chair. A couple of teeth have appeared on top and bottom so that they can negotiate some solid but soft food. The little one has also mastered the art of grasping a Cheerio, a pea, or a chunk of hot dog.
Not every morsel will make it into the mouth. Some fall to the high chair tray. Others tumble into their lap. Still others drop to the floor.
The observant pup springs into action, eating the crumb and licking the floor clean for good measure. As more pieces of food descend like manna, the dog figures out the source. It’s that little person. Why wait for the food to hit the ground? If you sit in just the right spot, you can catch it on the way down.
The observant child marvels at how quickly the escaped food vanishes without ever touching the floor. And if you reach your hand out towards that black nose, the food will disappear even faster. A tail wags, the giggles begin, and both are delighted!
Dogs know this is their way of helping keep the floors clean. Children remember this trick for the future, when mom or dad prepares food they don’t like. A win-win, right?
Kathy, the receptionist at our veterinarian hails from Scotland and was delighted the first time I brought our newly adopted Westie, Winston, in for a checkup. He picked up on her accent and could hardly contain himself. She made a point of coming out to say hello, so glad to greet a “country cousin.”
The visit was cut short as a gentleman brought an older dog through the front door. She whispered, “This one’s not too friendly. Keep hold of your leash.”
The patient didn’t seem aggressive. No wonder: her owner had drugged her up with some Trazadone in preparation for today’s visit. She hardly paid attention to the other dogs and cats in the waiting room. Returning to her desk, Kathy asked, “Did you bring in a sample?”
“No. We’ve been walking around for the last half hour, and nothing.” Of course. She was there because of an hourly need to poop. Now? Nada.
As they sat in a different section of the waiting room, Kathy told us a story about the young man sitting with her, answering most of the incoming phone calls. She shared how he recently put a caller on hold to ask, “What are the ‘trots’?”
Every cat and dog owner in the waiting room laughed out loud.
Embarrassed but a good sport, he asked, “Am I the only one who doesn’t know what the ‘trots’ are?”
I said, “I think it’s a clinical term” and we all laughed a little more.
We’ve got plenty of euphemisms to describe this bodily function. I hear new ones all the time. So I guess we can give him a pass for not knowing what the ‘trots’ are.
I loved watching this dog happily greet every customer who came in the coffee shop. With a grin on his face and his tail a blur, he was glad you came in today, no matter who you were!
I did a quick search to find out why dogs smile. It turns out that a smile means they are indeed happy. Some say it’s a learned behavior. People smile when they see a dog smile. Dogs like to make please their owners. So dogs smile to make people happy. That in turn makes them happy, too.
His tag identifies him as a “medical alert dog.” He’s a working dog. I’m don’t know what he was on the alert for, but I’ll bet he went everywhere his owner went. And his smile proclaimed that he loved his work and enjoyed meeting anyone and everyone he encountered.
I’d like to be like that. I’d like to be all smiles when I encounter another person. I do know that if I smile at someone, they are likely to smile back. And if someone smiles at me, it’s hard not to smile in return.
I think we would all benefit from some therapeutic smiling!
“Any chance someone will be home earlier than our appointment?”
“Sure. Come any time.”
The insurance inspector was way ahead of schedule to take photos of our home. A new policy required a quick check of the roof, water valves, breaker box, and hot water heater. I was just hanging out waiting for her, so my schedule was flexible.
“Great. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
When she arrived, I asked, “How do you feel about dogs?” I didn’t want Samson to ruin her day if she wasn’t a large dog lover.
“They are the highlight of my day!”
Now that’s my kind of person. If I see a neighbor walking a dog by our house, I go out to greet them. When I’m walking dogs in our neighborhood, I stop to talk to the faithful canines guarding their front yard or barking at me through a window or fence. They are the highlights of my days, too.
My dog Samson met the inspector at the front door, leaving the usual light-brown hairy reminder of the encounter on her black pants. “My baby will know I met some new friends today.”
Samson can tell whether or not to greet someone or hold them at bay by my reaction as I open the door. Somehow he knows whether or not to trust a person or keep an eye on them. Someone once said, “If my dog doesn’t trust you, I probably won’t either!” I like having a second opinion around.
(Over 850 blog posts and no stories about dogs? This post is way overdue.)
Gabriel is my first dog after I graduated from college, started working at Bell Labs and moved out of an apartment into a house I shared with my friend Jim. He had a beautiful Irish Setter named Shannon. If I got a dog, they could keep each other company. I worked days and Jim worked nights, so the dogs would have plenty of human company, too.
So what kind of a dog did I want to get? I wanted something energetic and active, big enough to run with. This was 1980. Want to do research? You go to the library. It didn’t take me long to decide on a Labrador Retriever. I had seen black ones before, but now I knew they also came in yellow. That’s what I wanted.
OK, so where do you go to get a yellow Lab? This is 1980. You look in the newspaper, under pets. Sure enough, there was an ad for yellow Lab puppies at a home somewhere in the pine barrens of southern New Jersey. I made a call, got directions, and headed out to pick a pup from the litter. I had a map, too. This is 1980. That’s how you navigate.
When I arrived, some kind folks took me down to their basement where about a dozen six week old yellow Lab puppies were running around a large enclosed area. I sat down in the middle of them and let them run around me, on top of me, in and out of my lap. Some chewed on my fingers, some watched carefully from a distance and some wrestled with each other. I learned from my research to watch the little for a while, to tell who was most aggressive and who was most shy. I picked one out that wasn’t the craziest, but seemed to have a good amount of energy. The owners marked a number on the tummy of the one I picked, and I would be able to take him home in a few weeks when he was weaned.
First night home.
I named him Gabriel and I am pretty sure he cried all the way home. I’m pretty sure he cried all night, too, as pups do in their new home. But he quickly adapted to his new place. In those first few months, of course, he chewed out the backs of most of the shoes we owned, chewed up a few candles he got his teeth into and went through a bunch of rawhide.
Gabriel lived up to his retriever breed, naturally fetching anything and everything we would throw around the yard or out into the water of a nearby lake. On one occasion, he came back with a swan by the neck rather than the stick I had thrown! Had I been a hunter, I am sure he would have enjoyed retrieving ducks.
A couple of years later, I moved to Austin, TX for a new job offer. Gabe comfortably rode in the back of my Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel hatchback as we headed out for a new adventure. I rented a pretty nice house in Austin, just a few miles south of the capitol building, and just a short run from what was then called Town Lake (Now Lady Bird Lake). My work hours were such that I had to leave Gabe home alone for a long time each day, so I made sure we went for a run when I got home. Once we got across some busy streets and onto some lake side trails, I could let Gabe off his leash and he would run along side of me, or our ahead of me, or in and out of the water next to me. Four, six, even eight miles later, I would be tired but he would be ready for more.
If some folks were playing frisbee in the park, Gabe would join them even if uninvited. He would leap up and grab it midair, proudly bringing it to me. He could get some pretty good air!
Gabe was a strong swimmer, churning through the after to go after a thrown ball or stick, almost leaving a wake behind him. He would spring from the land and sail out across the water before splashing in and powerfully dog-paddling out and back. He loved to get wet, even in the cold. To this day, I call any cold, rainy day “Labrador weather.”
Before that year was out, though, I had decided on a career change and was headed for the seminary. Unfortunately, dogs were not welcome in the dormitories, so Gabe would go to live with my dad for a couple of years. Dad was a dog lover, had a great fenced-in yard and even built a house for Gabe. Gabe and my dad’s dog Barney had a great time chasing balls and squirrels together.
When I met a classmate’s sister, who would later become my wife, one of the first things she noticed on my bulletin board was a picture of Gabriel. With a good looking dog like that, she knew I must be a pretty good guy! Gabe knew she was a keeper, too. When my wife-to-be came to Philadelphia to meet my parents, he not only welcomed her but climbed up in bed with her, too.
“She’s a keeper, Bill.”
After our wedding, my wife and I headed for Baltimore for my vicarage year. Inner city life would be very different that what either of us had experienced before, so having a big dog along was a good thing. In fact, on one of our first days in our house, Gabe had pinned a repairman up against the wall to protect us. I had never seen him do that before! He didn’t do that often, but it was reassuring to know he could.
We got a companion for Gabriel that year, a chocolate Lab named Rachel. She was much more docile, just as good of a retriever, and had a beautiful shiny brown coat. Our two dogs were quite popular in Baltimore. Every day after school, kids from the neighborhood would be knocking at our door, asking, “Can we play with your dogs?” Dozens of kids would then chase our two Labs around our small yard. Everyone had such a great time.
I would take Gabe for runs with me early in the morning. Good exercise for him, and good protection for me to and from a nearby park with great running paths. During those runs, I discovered that Gabe had a sixth sense when it came to balls. We would be trotting down a path when suddenly, he would break for the woods of weeds on one side of us, and come out with a baseball or tennis ball. Somehow, he just knew it was there, and that it was there for him to take home. At home, he would chew the cover off and unravel all the string inside.
After vicarage, we moved back to the seminary for one last year of study. We had a house to live in and I put up a wire fence around the yard so the dogs could be outside. Winter was extremely cold that year, and the dogs provided much needed warmth in bed at night.
We moved to Connecticut after graduation for my first call in the ministry. The church was small, but they provided a huge house on four acres of property, a paradise for dogs who loved to run and fetch. I had a five gallon bucket of baseballs and softballs. I would hit them out into the yard and woods from our driveway for Gabe and Rachel to retrieve. We always let them run free, which sometimes meant they would be way off in the woods. But when I whistled from the back door, I could see them coming through the tall weeds of a nearby field, usually pretty muddy or dirty.
Our scariest moment came when my son was about two years old and eye level with Gabriel. Gabe felt assertive one day and snapped at him, scaring all of us. It was completely unexpected and reminded us to closely supervise their interactions.
Dad loved dogs!
Once Gabriel got hold of a tennis ball, he sometimes didn’t want to let it go. When he was especially stubborn, I would insert a broom handle behind the ball in his jaws and pick up up with it. He would not let go if he didn’t want too Other times, I would stand about 10 yards in front of Gabe and throw the ball as hard as I could right at his head. He would catch it in his mouth every time.
When we moved to Iowa to serve a new church, Gabe was about eleven years old and had mellowed out. Our much smaller back yard was fine for him. We went for walks rather than runs.
As often happens with Labs in their teens, Gabe spent a lot more time sleeping on the couch and had a lot less pep. Finally, when he just couldn’t keep much food down, our vet felt a mass in his abdomen, and we knew Gabe’s time was up. He was almost fifteen and would always be the dog we would compare all our other pets to. I don’t know that I have ever bawled the way I did the day I came back from the vet without him. My daughter Katie hand drew a little book for me, to commemorate Gabe’s life and cheer me up. It still brings a smile to my face.
Just a few months later, Rachel would develop a limp which would be diagnosed a malignant tumor in her leg. Our time with her would be over, too. But we would not be dog-less for long. Michael would be next, and that’s a whole different story!
I settled into my Sunday morning routine quite a few years ago. The first of our two weekly worship services is at 8:15 am. The musicians for that first service arrive to warm up between 7 and 7:20. So if I want the place to myself to run through my sermon, I need to start practice preaching about 6:30. I like to have about an hour to eat some breakfast, shower, get dressed and drive to over to the church. So I’ll get going with all that about 5:30. Plus, after I feed and walk the dog, I like to have some time for my own personal devotions, prayer and journaling, so I set my alarm for 4:30 am. That’s why I always look so awake when y’all arrive for worship. I’ve been up for about four hours.
But that’s not what this post is all about.
My routine was a little different today. You see, my daughter’s dog is spending the weekend with us. So I had two large brown dogs to tend to first thing this morning. No problem. They play, sleep and bark at everyone together. After feeding and walking them, I made my coffee and sat down with my Bible and journal. I figured they would lie down and relax.
Didn’t happen. My wife was still asleep having worked till 11 the night before. We tried to be quiet, but lapping up a quart of water is surprisingly noisy. Toenails ticking on the floor is surprisingly noisy, too, as they sniffed here and there and just couldn’t get settled. They noised our bedroom door over and over again, and I finally figured out what they wanted. They wanted to go back to bed!
I turned off the lights and quietly opened the door. They hurried in, circled around in their beds a few times, and noisily collapsed for a few more hours of shuteye.
It was finally quiet. They probably thought I was nuts to be up so early. I’m sure they’re not the only ones.
I’ve been buying frozen marrow bone slices for my dog at Publix for years. He loves chewing them and I am certain that they are great for keeping his teeth clean. Someone somewhere discovered a market for marrow bones among dog lovers, so the price has steadily increased. The last batch I bought went for $2.19 a pound!
However, marrow bones are not always easy to find at my neighborhood Publix. Over time I have established that the truck delivers them on Thursday nights and they may be available on Saturday morning, but you better get their early. They are popular!
For the past two weeks, I’ve been looking for a new supply of marrow bones. But the meat case where I usually find them has been filled with turkeys for Thanksgiving. And not just turkeys. Turkey necks. Piles and piles of packages of turkey necks. I asked myself, “What in the world do people do with turkey necks?”
Well, it turns out you can do a lot with turkey necks. You can sear them, roast them, eat them and enjoy them. But most importantly, you can give them to your dog!
What? You don’t give turkey bones (or chicken bones) to your dog! Do you want a boatload of trouble? Well, as it turns out, dogs love them and it is fine to give raw ones to your dog. I learned about it here. Cook them, and you might have trouble. Frozen or dried? A treat!
I am not the first to discover this treat. The packs of turkey necks at our Publix are selling for $3.49 a pound! Yep, someone is making a fortune on something many people simply tossed out in the garbage. Never again. My doggo will now also get some turkey necks!
My dog Samson and I had just headed out for a longer walk yesterday afternoon when a neighbor unloading her car said, “Hey, I’ve got something for you!” I don’t know her name, but I am certain we’ve waved at each other before. She handed me a grocery bag and said, “Here are some dog treats. We just had to put our dog down, and you’re the first one I saw, so you can have them.”
The words put our dog down immediately tugged at my heart. In an instant I pictured every single one I ever had to put to sleep. I said, “I know that’s hard. How old was your dog?”
“She was thirteen-an-a-half; just a little Yorkie.” As far as I’m concerned, the words “just” or “little” aren’t appropriate for describing our dogs. Each one claims significant acreage in our hearts, regardless of their actual size or age. That brief moment of sharing spoke volumes. But all I could say was, “Thank you so much!”
Sam and I talked about the encounter as we continued our walk. Well, he just listened, as I reflected how nice it was to take home an extra bag of treats and what a good dog he was.
Waite for it... 