He Has a Few Bones to Pick With Dog
See, I didn’t want this dog in the first place, but I was outvoted by an 11-year-old kid and his mother. Then I didn’t want a lap dog. If I had to deal with a dog in the family, I wanted a virile dog, one I could roughhouse with and that would stare down the other neighborhood dogs.
So I got blind-sided by the Christmas spirit into this toy Dachshund, for God’s sake--scarcely bigger than a well-fed wharf rat. And a female, yet.
Then I said, if you’re going to impose this dog on me that I don’t want--of a size and gender of which I don’t approve--you had better be prepared to take care of her because I wash my hands of the whole thing. So, of course, they go off to work and to school every morning and I’m left with my typewriter and this oversize wharf rat with long ears and soulful eyes.
And on top of everything else, they named her Coco.
On weekend afternoons, the men in my neighborhood hang out in their front yards shooting the breeze and playing with their dogs. There’s a Great Dane and a springer spaniel and a golden retriever and a bouvier and two English sheep dogs.
And, there’s Coco.
She yaps and races around these big bruisers and they look at her condescendingly and every once in a while they make a pass at her and she retreats under the car. If the Great Dane puppy next door ever stepped on Coco, it would probably be curtains.
Then the women come by and make this big fuss over Coco and pick her up and fondle her, and I try to pretend this isn’t happening. The neighborhood men aren’t openly contemptuous, but they clearly think I’ve been used in this matter since no self-respecting man would be caught dead with a dog like this. So they smile and try to find things to say that aren’t too deprecating, all the while patting the muscular haunches of their good ol’ dogs.
I’ve steadfastly refused to walk Coco. My wife has taken her to obedience school, and she walks along pretty well as long as you strangle her with the leash and give her pieces of hot dog every few steps. But I have nightmares about walking Coco and meeting some other guy with his pit bull or his Dalmatian and trying to make conversation. He’d say something inane about Coco, or--more likely--just pretend she wasn’t there, and I’d try to break off the talk and get out of there as quickly as possible. That’s a scenario I plan to avoid at all costs.
She does have some redeeming features. She’s pretty funny, for one thing. She runs sort of sidesaddle, with her rear at a 45-degree angle to her head. And she sleeps on top of a carrying cage--instead of in it, just like Snoopy and his doghouse.
Sometimes I wonder how bright she is, though. We got her a doghouse with a slanted roof, and instead of going inside, she tries to jump up on the roof and keeps sliding back down. I never before realized the significance of Snoopy sleeping on the peak of his doghouse roof until Coco tried unsuccessfully to do it, too.
She’s gotten to be reasonably self-sufficient outside where she now lives during the daytime hours. She’s discovered a bark--rather like an adolescent boy with his voice changing--and she makes her regular daily rounds, barking at the rabbit in his cage and the dogs on either side who are so big they can put their forepaws on the top of a 5-foot fence and peek over, which sends Coco into paroxysms of outrage (Coco knows the security of a 5-foot fence when she sees one).
She also has discovered the immutable rule of dogdom: that in your own yard, you can chase almost anything of four legs, whatever its size. Dogs understand this, but cats don’t. We have half a dozen rogue cats around this neighborhood--tough as mountain lions--who invade Coco’s privacy and then plant their feet and look at her with cool contempt while she does her landlord number. They ignore her, finally stalking away when they’ve exposed her as all bombast.
Coco has also pushed me into fishwifery on several occasions, for which I will probably never forgive her. When I talk to my wife on the phone during the working day, I try to tell her what Coco has been up to--after all, it’s her kind of dog--and she says, “That’s really neat, but I’ve got to go now.” Then when she comes home in the evening after a long day at the office and stops to check her mail or change her clothes, I find myself shrieking at her--as I did at the 11-year-old kid earlier: “I just want you to know what I had to put up with today with this dog. I’ve had her all day and now she wants a little attention from you so do you think you might be able to manage that?”
I’m told she’s not going to get any bigger, so this is the image I’m stuck with. She’s got some spunk, though. She learned how to jump over a fence about three times her height that I put up to contain her, and when I made it higher, she chewed through it. I doubt if that will make very many points with the neighborhood men, however.
What they don’t know--and I’ll probably never tell them--is that when you crash with the paper in the evening, this dog is small enough to jump up in your lap and sack out, and that warm body feels moderately good, especially when she opens those soulful eyes periodically to make sure you’re still there.
She snores, too, but what the hell--nobody’s perfect.
