1. When the dog’s water bowl is empty, and she goes to drink from it, and her tongue scrapes against the grainy bottom of the bowl and your insides turn cold in a moment that can only be punished with self-flagellation but WHAT SORT of self-flagellation will be best?
2. When you forget the dog is outside eating a chicken wing, and you leave the dog outside, and ten minutes later you go to the screen door and there she is, huffing and panting because she’s been OUTSIDE for ten minutes, and that chicken bone made her SUPER THIRSTY, and she goes over to her water bowl and this time YOU ENSURE that her water bowl is absolutely brimming with clear, fresh water, you push her head aside and try to beat her to it, and fill it up with your own Mount Franklin bottle just to be sure, because giving away spring water helps to assuage guilt or something like that.
3. When the dog is half blind and fully deaf and can’t tell the difference between roads and grass, and so on her morning walk, she starts bumbling unknowingly towards the road, and she’s about one paw-length away from making herself vulnerable to the whooshing-by of cars, cars whose owners are in a big rush to get to Byron Bay CBD and buy some embroidered handbags, or overpriced sarongs, or 200 bucks worth of marijuana. Or, even if there are no cars around, there’s still the real and ever-present concern of the elderly dog being unable to tell the difference between height levels of pathways and that of road, and the dog toppling ungainly from higher pathway to lower, AND GRITTIER, road, and hitting her soft sweet grey head on the hot tar of the road.
4. When you go out for two hours JUST TO BUY YOUR MUM’S BIRTHDAY PRESENT, WHAT, I’M NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE HOUSE ANYMORE???, and you come home and the dog is heaving with excitement to see you’re back, she’s so excited she starts dog-coughing, wheezing like her larynx is crammed with furry caterpillars, and you wish your presence was less exciting but DAGNABBIT what can you do.
5. When you try to make the dog wee before you go out, and she won’t, so you go “FINE THEN, DON’T” and then you come back 2 hours later from buying your Mum’s birthday present and let the dog out with a chicken wing to eat, and the dog needs to wee SO BAD she doesn’t even look at the chicken wing, she dumps it on the grass and then goes to the other side of the garden, away from her food, because she is CLASSY LIKE THAT, and does the longest wee in the world, and for every second that she stays in that crouching-sitting-meditating longest-wee-in-the-Northern-Rivers position, you feel little acupuncture needles of guilt in your lungs.
OH MAN now I feel better.
Allie said,
October 6, 2011 @ 11:52 pm
So I don’t think dogs are meant to eat chicken wings? Aren’t they like the only bones dogs can’t eat? Because they splinter into little bones and the little splinters lacerate the doggie’s insides and they travel in it’s blood stream to it’s little doggie heart where they slowly make little tiny pin pricks in the surface, not big enough to feel but just enough to cause continuous discomfort and the little doggie ends up drowning from the inside out IN IT’S OWN BLOOD. I think so.