My dog, Lola, is a beautiful chocolate Labrador Retriever, who chews everything in sight, including, at times, my kids. When she joined our family last February, we had grand plans for her. She was to be a house dog. However, her relentless desire to chew on the furniture and pee indoors incessantly, despite a good half hearted attempt on our part to house train her, eventually culminated in her permanent removal from the inside. She became an outcast, and over time, the children forgot about her – the same children who assured me they would take good care of her. Lola gradually became lonely as the children did their own things.
As any good father would, I tried to spend as much time Lola as possible. I would come home and play fetch with her, made sure she had plenty to eat and drink and gave her lots of thorough rub downs. But I am but one man, and Lola’s loneliness grew deeper by the hour. Deeply disturbed, I tried to figure out a way to find Lola a more acceptable home, but the kids would cry every time I broached the subject. And crying kids cast spells over their mothers, so Lola remained.
Winter turned to Spring, Spring to Summer, and eventually Summer gave way to Fall. As the leaves began to turn, we Dismukes quickly realized we had reached a bit of an equilibrium in our canine/human relationships. You see, Lola had now forgotten about us. (Except for me, of course, seeing as how I was the only one to show her any affection at all, limited though it may have been due to my first priority of starting a school.) And thanks to a lack of parental involvement, at least on my wife’s part, Lola began searching for her identity in promiscuous relationships with other dogs.
Looking back, we should have been aware of Lola’s sexual escapades. All the warning signs were there – her rebellious attitude, the fact that she was sleeping in later and later in the mornings, strange dogs hanging around the house, and her slightly swollen, discolored vagina. However, as I mentioned earlier, most of the family had forgotten her, and the only one with enough compassion to deal with Lola’s adultery was too busy starting a school that would benefit hundreds of uneducated children for years to come.
The arrival of December did nothing to make us (er… them… not me) notice Lola any more than we had in prior months, especially as the kids anticipated Santa’s annual visit. However, the week before Christmas, something awful happened. Lola’s teets dropped dangerously low, and we were forced to deal with a new kind of problem we had never experienced before. A multitude of questions flooded our minds. How had this happened to our dog? Who was the father? Had it been consensual? Is Lola ready to be a mother? Will she just chew up the puppies like she’s chewed up everything else in our yard? Can a pro-life family get a doggie abortion? But eventually, the questions faded as we began to prepare for several new additions to the family.
Just last week, Lola’s puppies arrived. 6 little babies… all black. Three of them had tails. The other 3 only had partial tails. Nubs… if you will. Ironically enough, Lola has been a very good mother, taking great care of these little pups… even the ones with nubs.
How long do you think it was before our kids and my wife started asking me to keep one of the pups? That’s right… the very same ones who had banished poor Lola into the realm of the forgotten seem to want another dog to join the family and, eventually, the realm of banishment where Lola resides.
My father has a part time yard man who works for him. 
I use the term yard man loosely. See, when he was hired, I think the idea was that he would do yard work exclusively. However, over time, this yard man, who’s now in his 40s, spends much of his time reading the paper, riding around town on my dad’s mule (not a real mule… see the picture), and generally slacking off. He’s probably not the most intellectually astute person I’ve ever met, although somehow he’s managed to outsmart my Dad, who graduated with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech. In an effort to protect the identity of said yard man, I will refer to him simply as “Lewis”.
When Lewis found out we had puppies, he did what any good yard man would do. He waited until he was on the clock, then drove the mule over to my house to see the dogs. He’d already agreed to adopt one of them, and he wanted to go stake his claim. Upon discovering the nub-tailed puppies, he reached the conclusion that the father had to have been a Rottweiler. In his elation at the magnitude of this new revelation, he rushed over to the bank to share with me the good news.
I told Lewis that Rottweilers are born with tails and that they usually clipped them off just for looks, to which he simply replied, “yep”. A long silence. “So,” I added, “you can’t really tell who the father is simply because 3 of them don’t have tails.” More silence. Then he confidently, but slowly said, “Rottweilers got li’l nubs for tails… ‘dem dawgs got nubs too… ‘dat means a Rottweiler was the Daddy.” Sensing some resistance to logic and reason, I went on, “you know… if you cut your hand off and had kids, your kids would still have hands.” He pondered this for a moment, and then said with finality, “I know that ‘dem dawgs is part Rottweiler.” Conversation over. When I shared this story with my Dad, he revealed that Lewis once had a child who was born without thumbs, which got me to thinking…
Maybe they are part Rottweiler.
4 comments:
Good heavens! Your trials and tribulations make Dickens' Bleak House seem more like Mr. Roger's neighborhood! Perhaps you could send several of the puppies to your dad's office to terrorize the wickedly ugly kitten that has taken over...or you could keep them and train to them to follow in their biological father's paw prints...you might need protection once the school gets off and running!
Buwahahahaha!!! Just what I needed today, some good ol Ben logic. The explaining of bobbed tails and having your hands cut off, is like a deleted scene from Joe Dirt or Slingblade, good stuff !!! Congrats on your puppies, dont be too hard on the wife and kids.Puppies suck us all in, no one remembers how its going to turn out in the end. I think its a chemichal in the puppy breath that melts away all reason. Good Luck !
Wow! I am so proud to call you Cousin!
I wish you would blog more.
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