Scott Pratt's Blog, page 6

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“Gone to the Dogs”

Kids leave. They go off to college and stuff. They get married and buy houses and move to other cities.

Dog’s don’t do that. Dogs stay. Even if they find a girlfriend or a boyfriend down the street, they come back home every day. Home is home to dogs. They’re loyal, you know what I mean? Unlike kids.

So I was talking to my son on the phone the other day. He’s off at college trying to become a big shot (so is my daughter) and he said, “I’m telling you, Dad, what you and Mom do every day is weird. I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying it’s weird.”

“It isn’t weird. It’s just sort of a routine,” I said.  

“Nah, it isn’t a routine. It’s a ritual. It’s evolved far beyond the realm of normal routine and moved into pseudo-insanity.”

“No, it hasn’t.” I was beginning to feel a bit defensive. I  mean, he doesn’t live here anymore. He doesn’t need to be judging what his mother and I do.

“Let me make a suggestion,” he said. “You’re a writer, so write it down. Write down what you call a ‘routine.’ When you’re finished, if you can honestly tell me — and I mean honestly — that what you do isn’t weird, I’ll spring for lunch next time I see you. But if after you write it down you think it’s weird, you owe me a steak dinner.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll write it down.”

“Don’t try to explain it. Don’t slant it or anything. Just write down what you and Mom do.”

“Fine,” I said again, and I hung up. After I hung up I said to myself, “Sheesh, his chances of telling me what to write are about as good as his chances of telling me what to do. Freakin’ kid. Who the heck does he think he is?”

So the next morning, Kristy (my wife) and I woke up at the same time we always wake up. We’ve been doing it for four years, ever since the kids went off to college. Kristy owns and operates a dance school and doesn’t start work until the afternoon. I write novels and the occasional blog and I start work after lunch. So when we wake up, Kristy turns on her bedside lamp. She turns on the television to the Weather Channel so we know what to wear. I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth while she gets dressed. I go back to the bedroom and get dressed while she brushes her teeth. While we’re doing these things, our dogs move about restlessly. As soon as Kristy comes out of the bathroom, the dogs bolt for the front door, yapping and barking and raising all kinds of hell. They’re excited, and because they’re excited, so are we. It’s similar to when the kids were around. When they were excited about something, we were, too.

We have four dogs, by the way, all males. We have a huge German shepherd named Rio. He was our first dog and remains my favorite. I know you’re not supposed to have favorites (but after that little conversation with my son, I’d started thinking that maybe my daughter had become my favorite child) but Rio is my favorite of the four dogs. I’ve written about him in four of my novels. The other three dogs are a little offended about that, I think, but they don’t say much. I love the other three dogs, too. We have a Yorkie named Pedro, a Bichon friese named Nacho, and a teacup poodle named Chico. But Rio is my man.

What we do is, after we’re ready to go, we load these dogs up in our truck and drive ten minutes toward my mother-in-law’s house. About two blocks from her house we go over a speed bump. All four of our dogs start whining as soon as we cross the speed bump. I pull into my mother-in-law’s driveway. Kristy gets out of the truck, walks up on the porch, and opens the front door. Two black, standard poodles named Andy and Opie streak through the door and head straight for the truck. They jump in, exchange greetings and insults with the other dogs, and take their places. Andy gets into the back with Rio. Opie and our three little guys stay in front with the rest of us.

We leave my mother-in-law’s house and drive to a two-hundred acre park on the outskirts of town. As we approach the park, the dogs go nuts. They bark, whine, howl, and moan. Six dogs within the confines of the cab; it’s like standing in front of a bank of speakers at a head banger concert. I park the truck in the parking lot and we open the doors. The dogs explode into the parking lot and raise Cain with each other for a couple of minutes. I pull my walking stick out of the back. If it’s raining or snowing, we grab umbrellas. 

We don’t use leashes because they’re so restrictive. The dogs don’t like them and neither do we. I realize we’re violating the law. We commit six violations roughly three hundred and forty days each year. Since we’ve been doing it for four years, I guess we’ve committed over eight thousand misdemeanors. Sorry. As soon as we enter the park, the dogs break off to sniff stuff and pee on stuff. We walk for an hour, the same route every day. We’ve had many adventures. There are geese in the park occasionally that the dogs love to chase. They love it. The park borders a lake and the dogs like to wade into it and I like to skip rocks. We run across the occasional squirrel and the occasional groundhog and, of course, the occasional human who is following the rules and has her dog on a leash and gets really, really pissed at us and threatens to call the police because our dogs have surrounded her dog and are sniffing every cavity on the dog’s body.

Kristy and I walk for an hour; the dogs run for an hour. They stay close to us, but they explore, just like the kids did when they were young and energetic and we’d take them out on a hike. The dogs sniff and they snort and they pee and then they pee again — except Opie, the female standard poodle. She only pees once and she tries to hide when she does it. She’s such a lady. But between the five males, I’d estimate each one of them lifts a leg and pees at least twenty times a day. No tree trunk, no post, no bush, no lump in the ground is safe. They also poop, but they don’t like to poop in front of each other. They’re private poopers, kind of like humans, and if you get too close to them or look at them while they’re doing their business, their ears droop and their eyes take on this “How could you?” look, and you can tell they’re embarrassed. They each have their own style, too. The Yorkie spins hard in a circle to his left when he poops. The teacup poodle does a sumo wrestler stomp. The German shepherd’s tail looks like the handle on an old-fashioned water pump when he’s doing his business, and the standards each run at least fifty yards away before they’ll rid themselves of the previous night’s dinner waste.

When we’ve finished walking, they all get back in the truck… well, we all get back in the truck. They immediately go to sleep, just like the kids did when they were young and we’d take them to a park and let them wear themselves out. And we feel like we’ve been good parents. We drop the poodles off at the mother-in -law’s and then we go about our day.

What’s weird about that?  

Nothing.

I say he owes me lunch.