During a trip to Target…
My son points at the very masculine-looking, female cashier, and loudly says, “Mommy, she’s kind of a girl.”
Awkward laugh, “Yes, she’s a girl.”
He looks back and WAITS TO MAKE EYE CONTACT, then says, “Yeah. Kind of.”
Forget your troubles; come read about mine
Archive for July, 2007
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The other night, my husband and I were watching Man vs. Wild, on The Discovery Channel. Bear Grylls (pronounced Grills), a former serviceman of the British Special Forces is the host of this adventure series. It’s one of those shows where they drop him off in the middle of nowhere, someplace like Iceland, and he shows you how to survive until the last few seconds of the show, when he finds civilization again. I just don’t know what I’d do without these Icelandic survival skills, so I MUST tune in. You never know when you’re going to need the ability to catch a chicken with your shoe string. Or, know how long to boil a sheep’s leg in hot springs before it’s okay to eat.
On the show we were watching, he had parachuted into the French Alps. After climbing UP the mountain to get a better view of his surroundings (this would be my first survival mistake, because I’m pretty sure I’d go down), and finding nothing but snow EVERYWHERE, he started to suffer from altitude sickness. He mentioned that his breathing was labored and he had a pounding headache, then he said something like, “I’d murder for a cup of tea.” Really? Because, I’m thinking there are about 1,000 other things I’d want at that point. Like, oh…say a map. Or, an oxygen tank and a mountain guide. Or, maybe for that helicopter from which I had parachuted to come back and get me. I couldn’t help thinking that Britain would be so proud.
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Our dog is getting old. She’s not at the point where she’s peeing-all-over-the-rug-old, but she’s recently developed a touch of arthritis and you can see it coming in the not so distant future. It’s hard to see a dog with the boundless energy she once had, start to slow down. She used to come flying down the stairs to bark at the UPS man, but now she simply stands up on our bed and barks from there.
When she was only a couple of months old, we found out I was pregnant with our first child. Being new at the whole parenting thing, we decided it was best to have an obedience trainer work one-on-one with us and our dog, in our home. This wasn’t cheap. Nor, was it effective. After just a few classes, we were basically told there was nothing more that could be done. We tried our best, but she’s never learned to heel, or come on command, or lay down, or even sit right. She does what I refer to as a swimsuit calendar pose. Not so much sitting, as much as trying to look seductive for a treat.
For about eight years, she acted like she was still a puppy. When visitors arrived, she would jump all over them and run around the room. That’s one of the things I won’t miss. No one ever being able to wear black to our house. What’s the point, when you leave looking like you’ve been attacked by some Himalayan Yeti? “You want to come over? Okay, but wear white, and whatever you do, DO NOT wear hose.”
So, the fur won’t be missed, along with the nose juice she so lovingly splatters all over our bay windows every day. I also won’t miss putting the trash can on top of the refrigerator when we leave the house, or the thumping sound that always precedes her vomiting at 4:00 AM. And, I would do just about anything to erase the memory of returning home, on my birthday no less, the night after our neighbor had given her a ham shank over the fence, without our permission. I could just about smell the piles of bone-ridden excrement from my driveway. Lovely.
But, I will miss her sweet, gentle nature, and how she’s never even growled at one of our kids when they were using her as a portion of an obstacle course. I will miss petting her soft ears as a form of therapy, and I will miss her acting like a vacuum cleaner and picking up all the spilled food. But, most of all, I will miss feeling safe and sound, and knowing that I’m HOME, just because she’s here.
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