I have been preparing my book of RobZerrvations, pulling out the best of 2011 and putting them into book form. One of the stories that made the cut (there are 267 to choose from) was a story of the Big Mook, my beagle Jasper.
In editing the story, I noticed that I had promised to talk about my other dog at some point. Sadly, I haven’t yet, but I am now going to remedy it here.
If you’ve been reading right along with the bouncing ball, you’ve heard of Barney before. He was a Labrador/Beagle mix. That meant more Labrador in size, more Beagle in look. It was an odd combination that created a really sweet dog, one who played a very important part in my young life.
We had lost our family dog a short time before Barney came into my life. I was probably around 12 at the time. My aunt game him to me while I summered in Anacortes. This was back in the day when kids would bring litters of puppies in a box and try to sell them to shoppers.
Barney cost 10ยข. No, that’s not a typo. While I later paid $300 for Jasper, Barney was one thin dime. Well, one slightly fatter fifty cent piece actually, since my Aunt Lu felt compelled to give them more money. I’m really surprised that the kids just didn’t hand her four more puppies as change.
Like the other dogs in my life, Barney was a real personality. He had a mind of own, even though I tried and tried to give him a piece of mind for his many adventures.
I never thought he’d make it out of being a puppy. He stayed with me in the back part of the house, mostly in my room.
One day I came home and couldn’t find him anywhere. I searched high and low. I was in a bit of a panic about it, since I couldn’t fathom where he had gone. I finally found him in the bed. No, not on top of it or even under it. He was in it. Somehow he had managed to tear off the muslin covering on the bottom of the box spring and had crawled up into it. He seemed to like it there. He didn’t even make a peep.
When we left the house for a time, Barney would stay in the hallway outside of my room. He didn’t seem to like this arrangement much. He eventually ate the door to my bedroom, trying hard to make his way back into it. Nothing like coming home and finding a huge hole in the door.
That was nothing compared to his other hallway adventures. There was the time that I came home and smelled something funny. I knew the dog had pooped. But it was nowhere to be found in the house. I popped open the doggy gate and thought I should check the bedroom, though there was no way he could have gotten in there. He and his rug were blocking the door. I moved the dog, pulled back the rug and began to open the door. It was then I found the poop. Barney had taken a dump and covered it with his rug. He was laying on it to hide the evidence. It was a horrific, runny mess. I didn’t have the heart to punish him. It must have been punishment enough to lay on your own crap for a couple of hours.
At 12, I didn’t know how to train a dog to stay and come when called. When Barney had to go outside, you’d take him by the harness and guide him to the pen in the front of the house. Occasionally, Barney didn’t want to go there. He would prefer temporary freedom. Thankfully, we lived on a dead end road so at least if he did get loose, he would be safe. But our street was not his destination. He instead loved to run a couple blocks away, across a very busy street with blind corners.
As I said, he wouldn’t come when called which made it hard to convince him to come home at all. But he had his weakness. Whenever I took Barney for a walk, I would hook his chain to his harness. He wasn’t the off leash type, as I said. When he did run away, he couldn’t be bribed with a box of dog biscuits. Oh sure, you’d shake the box and he’d look at you, but never come. However, you could shake his chain and he’d come bounding excitedly out of wherever he was hiding and come right to you, thinking that he would get to go for a walk. I always thought that was hilarious, since he had been on a walk of his own, unleashed, up until that point.
The adventures go on and on with my best friend. It could fill pages and pages of RobZerrvations. But given the holiday season, I’ll leave you with a Christmas story.
My mom and I had gone off shopping one day. We had forgotten to bring the dog in. This was before we had a pen for him. Before the pen he was tied to a stake in the front yard, which gave him lots of latitude to play and frolic in the grass. It also allowed him to dig up our leaking septic tank, but again, another story.
It turns out that he didn’t want to stay in the yard. He got into the planter instead, which abutted the house along the entire front. There he got tangled in the Christmas lights. He was hanging in them literally, not by the throat, but suspended in the lights, whimpering loudly.
My oldest brother heard the horrific sound from the house. He gallantly leaped into action, running outside to cut the dog out of the lights that wove through all the bushes. We later learned from our neighbor across the street that his heroic response both saved the dog and shocked the neighbors watching the drama unfold. It seems that in his haste, Jon had forgotten to put on his clothes, having just stepped out of the shower. I’m sure the story of the naked man and Christmas dog is still being told all these years later.
I learned many years ago that Barney had finally died. He was a great dog, not only man’s best friend, but a kid’s best friend, one who would have had a much harder childhood without him to be there for me.
In the Emerald City, dogless for the time being,
– Robb