Claus

I wrote this recently for a fellow author's blog. Thought I'd share it here.
Most children have happy memories of pets. Me? Not so much. When I was very young, I can remember having a couple of hamster, one of which embedded its sharp little chompers into my thumb and the other which committed suicide in our toilet. My mother swore no more pets, but then she consented to goldfish, and I’m not sure they really count. I mean, you can’t interact with them. You can’t pet them; they can’t nuzzle next to you in your bed. But it was the one animal my mother allowed in the house, and they all mysteriously ended up dying in a tragic tank cleaning incident though my mother will swear she didn’t do anything to them.
So, growing up, I wasn’t exactly batting a thousand in the animal department. When I married, my husband had an ill-tempered Rottweiler, which I absolutely loved because we had an understanding. He kept away strangers, and I fed him. It was a working relationship until he died about eight years into our marriage. After that, we tried again with a couple of other Rottweilers and one crazy lab that my husband had to track down on a regular basis, but one disaster after another made it seem we’d never have a dog.
When I had my children, I thought about getting them a dog. Okay, maybe I was trying to compensate for my “petastrophes”. I blame it on those dog food commercials, the ones with the dogs running along the beach in slow motion. I could picture my little cuties playing in the yard with a golden-haired dog running behind them. But my husband was very specific about the kind of dog he’d be willing to let into our family. He wanted a “manly” dog, so when my sister’s German Shepherd had puppies, we thought we’d give it a try. That’s when Claus came into our lives.
I didn’t do my research. I was completely unprepared for how smart and active this dog would be. From the moment we brought him home, Claus has been a furry tornado with a tail about two feet long that is downright lethal. My poor entertainment center no longer sports a picture frame that hasn’t suffered from the whiplash of that weapon. At eighty-five pounds, he still thinks he’s puppy. His favorite thing to do is to put his enormous paw on my forearm when I pet him, but that’s not quite enough. He’s recently started putting both paws on me—the problem with that, he’s incredibly clumsy. When he stands on his back paws, he falls over and invariably scrapes his claws down my arms and/or legs and often knocks me down then takes advantage of my prone state to pounce all over me. And the hair! I could knit a sweater by this point! Forget about leaving stuffed animals in the floor. Claus is quick to snatch them up and chew them into submission. I’ve rescued countless pink bears with slightly gnawed ears and spit-covered Pillow Pets.
I was really regretting this whole pet thing until the first time a stranger came to our house late one night. My husband is a coach, so he was at a game, and I was home alone with the kids. A distraught woman I didn’t know pounded on my front door, and my awkward puppy showed his true worth. Though the woman proved to be strange but harmless, I was never so glad to have a dog in the house! I was shocked by his fierce protection, and my daughter commented later that she hadn’t been scared because Claus would protect us. So while my kids may not have that slow-motion- commercial dog, they have a guardian, a stumbling, slobbering guardian.