Sometimes at work people bring their little dogs into the store, and the other day I accidentally greeted the puppy wagging his tail in the cart instead of the customer who was actually pushing the cart. I think I recovered somewhat gracefully, though, because I refrained from asking the dog what I could help him find today and turned my attention instead back to the human being with the wallet.
I have a dog too. His name is Fezzik (after the giant in the book turned movie The Princess Bride). He’s supercool.
We think he’s a springer spaniel-chocolate lab mix. We’re not sure though because we got him from a shelter, so we don’t really know his history. I’m bummed that we didn’t get to know him when he was a puppy because he was probably the most adorable thing in the world, as puppies are wont to be. Also, we suspect that he wasn’t treated very well as a puppy, since he’s sometimes jumpy and is afraid of a lot of not-so-threatening things. So it would have been nice to have had him way back when so he wouldn’t have had to go through whatever it is he went through. But I digress.
Fezzik isn’t very well trained. He knows how to sit, so long as you’re holding food and have made it clear that you’re willing to share said food with him if he just puts his butt on the ground for half a second.
He doesn’t know how to fetch. He gets properly excited, chases after whatever it is you’ve thrown, looks at it lying in the grass, looks back up at you, and then wanders off to smell very important things.
He knows how to jump up on the sofa, but he’s not really supposed to do that, so I probably shouldn’t count that as evidence of his being well-trained.
Long story short, he’s awesome.
I wanted a dog forever before finally getting Fezzik, though. I begged for years.
Every Christmas and every birthday, the first item on my wish list was “DOG.” The other items were usually things like “Food bowl FOR DOG” and “Dog collar FOR DOG.”
I even remember giving my mom a wish list of “DOG” for one of my sisters’ birthdays.
The problem was mainly that we don’t have an enclosed back yard. The yard ends in a little hill that goes up to meet the edge of our neighbors’ back yard (whose view is awkwardly straight into our windows HAY THERE NEIGHBORS!). The walls separating our yard from our next-door neighbors don’t go all the way up the hill either. They sort of go straight into the hill, leaving a good amount of unwalled hill behind my house. So a dog would have a really easy time running off up the hill, and from there he would have access to pretty much every yard on our side of the block. So my mom didn’t want to get a dog before we had a place to put him.
In the meantime, we had lots of other pets. We had a feeder goldfish that we won at a carnival who lived for a good six or seven years, which was a good six or seven years longer than we really expected him to.
We also had a million rabbits. We started out with two female rabbits, Smoky and Snow (not super surprisingly, Smoky was grey and Snow was white).
Then we noticed that Smoky was pulling out all of her fur and building a kind of nest in their cage.
Then we noticed that there were little baby rabbits in her nest in her cage.
Then we noticed that Snow was not a lady rabbit.
So our two rabbits quickly became six, and we decided to go and get a second cage.
One day I went outside in the morning before school to feed all those bunnies. As I was closing the door of the rabbit hutch, I heard a rustling in the bushes on the hill behind me.
I turned.
All was still.
I started to go back inside, but I heard the rustling again.
I spun back around and saw that the bushes were very clearly moving.
So, naturally, I dropped the rabbit food in my hands and ran shrieking back into my house. I slammed the sliding glass door shut and locked it, yelling at my mom to come quick, there was a monster in the yard.
My mom hurried over and we peered out at the movement on the hill.
And out jumped a rabbit.
A big rabbit, but still just a rabbit.
He hopped happily up to our door, where he sat, gazing at us through the glass, waiting patiently for us to let him in.
Which we did. We named him The Big Rabbit and put him in with all our other bunnies. We posted Found Rabbit signs, but nobody claimed him, so our number of rabbits was now up to seven.
We also had a parakeet named Sweety, who was the coolest bird ever. He’d fly around our house and land on our heads. Our bannisters were always covered in bird poo, which was gross, but whatever. He was a good bird. He lived to be pretty old, and after he died we got two new parakeets named Kara and Pete. They were both mean and liked to bite fingers.
I had a hamster named Casper and a rat named Isabella and two tadpoles who didn’t have names, but did start growing legs and then one day mysteriously vanished from their bowl. I’m afraid to know where they hopped off to.
We had lots of good pets, but I didn’t finally get my dog until my sophomore year of high school, when we solved our backyard problem by fencing off a corner of the yard so that at least while we were away from home Fezzik would have a place to run around without escaping up the hill and trampling the neighbors’ gardenias.
I have no idea if any of my neighbors grow gardenias.
Aaaaaaaaaanyway, the point is that my dog is supercool and I miss him because I couldn’t take him with me when I moved, so he’s all the way at home.
