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Other Voices
Even as a puppy - the most destructive phase of a dog's life - she only chewed on her chew toys and left my tennis shoes, chair legs and the TV remote alone. I've always been able to brag about this to my mother, especially because of the stunt her dog, Belle, pulled when she was a puppy. Late one afternoon, a few months after my brother and I gave Belle to my mother for Christmas, I got a phone call "I'm going to kill this dog," my mother announced. "What did she do?" I asked, figuring Belle, not quite housebroken, had left an unwanted puddle somewhere in the house. It was worse. In my mother's kitchen, behind the back door, the wallpaper goes all the way down to the baseboard. One little corner of that wallpaper had come loose. Belle found that little corner. When my mother came home, she found shreds of wallpaper all over the kitchen floor. "Well, you've been talking about re-doing your kitchen," was the best response I could muster. I bring this up to tell you this: I was sitting on the living room floor this week wrapping Christmas presents. One of them was a box of gourmet dog treats. I had planned to give the treats to Belle with a card that said, "From Glory." I do this every year. Like the other presents, this gift went under the tree, where it was to stay until Christmas morning. In the nine years she's been with me, Glory has never bothered any of the presents. Until this week. When I came home from work Thursday, Glory didn't meet me at the door. I immediately should have known something was wrong. Usually when I get home, Glory spends 10 minutes alternately jumping on me and running laps around the living room like her tail's on fire. On Thursday, nothing. When I turned on the light, I saw why. The once neatly wrapped box of gourmet dog treats was now unneatly unwrapped. A hole had been gnawed in the top of the box. And about two-thirds of the treats were gone. I wanted to give Glory the benefit of the doubt. I had seen the story in the paper about the Sheriff's Department stepping up its burglary task force because of an increase in break-ins during the holidays. Maybe, I thought, there's a rogue band of burglars breaking into homes and stealing Christmas dog treats. Maybe I should call the sheriff. But I knew better. It had to be Glory. My suspicions were confirmed a few hours later. Let me just say that if your dog eats two-thirds of a box of gourmet dog treats at one time - and I'll state this as delicately as possible - your dog very soon is going to have this incredible urge to go outside and tend to some basic biological necessities. For Glory, that incredible urge struck at 1:15 a.m. And again at 4:30 a.m. I suppose at this point I should be thankful that Glory woke me up rather than tending to her necessities all over my carpet. But it's hard to think rationally at 1:15 in the blessed a.m. This particular need of Glory's meant she'd be leaving little calling cards all over the yard, the kind of calling card that can ruin your shoes, if you get my drift. I'm a responsible dog owner. I clean up after Glory. But it's the middle of the night. I couldn't very well go sneaking around the yard in the middle of the night with a flashlight without spooking the neighbors and getting an invitation to spend a night in the Hall County Jail. So at seven the next morning - before there's been time for anyone's shoes to be ruined - I went out in the rain with my plastic bags looking for signs that my dog has been there. My co-workers found it amusing that I had to get up twice in the night to let the treat thief out. "It's like you have an infant," said one, who's a new mother. "Did she eat her dinner after that?" another asked. Well, I didn't give her any dinner. She'd just eaten two-thirds of a box of gourmet dog treats, for crying out loud.
Incidentally, I went back to the store Friday and bought another box of gourmet dog treats for Belle and wrapped it for Christmas morning.
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