dogs – DTyesthatDT

January 19, 2022January 19, 2022

Wiener Dog versus The Grim Reaper

Like most other children, I desperately wanted a dog when I was kid. I begged. I made promises. I vowed to take care of it, etc. I don’t think my older brother ever asked for a dog and my parents never owned dogs that I know of. This would be Thomas dog #1.

There was a dog that lived in my Dad’s tent while he was fighting off the Soviet backed North Korean Communists with the rest of the U.S. Army in Korea in the 50’s. I saw a black and white snapshot of it once when my Dad was looking through his pictures. The dog was more of a puppy and it looked like something in a Hallmark commercial. It was happy and cute and playful looking and I’m sure it was a nice distraction from the death and horror that those guys walked with every day. The dog kind of belonged to my Dad and his buddies because they fed it and looked after it. They named it, I kid you not, Fartface. (I’m going to leave that right there for you to ponder and be as confused about it as I’ve been for the last 30+ years since I heard about it.) My Dad didn’t know what happened to Fartface when he left Korea. All that he brought home was a disability or two and some pretty wicked nightmares that allowed him to relive the war for the rest of his life.

My pleading payed off eventually and I got a dog for my birthday when I was about seven. After looking at four or five other dogs that day, I found one that my parents and I could agree on. The tag on the kennel door at the Humane Society shelter said his name was Bozo and his breed was identified as a “Doxie mix”. He was a little chunkier and a little taller than a purebred dachshund due to whatever other breed(s) he was mixed with. He had a 99% wiener dog head, ears, color, and face and I think, based on his life, he was probably mixed with an Army Ranger or Chuck Norris because he was pretty hard to kill despite numerous attempts.

My Mom decided that she should probably hold onto him on the car ride home instead of letting him run wild in the back seat with me. Without car seats or seat belts in the back, we definitely did run wild in those days. A few miles down the road he put his nose under the flap of her coat and seemed to settle down. My Mom was commenting on how he was relaxing and she kept petting him and telling him that he was going to be okay as we talked about what we should change his name to. Bozo was a famous clown from that era and he was that peculiar combination of annoying and creepy that only clowns can pull off. The dog needed a better name. Shortly, it was decided that Prince was a far better name than Bozo. Once this decision was reached, Prince promptly puked inside my Mom’s new coat. I watched him do it and watched her recoil in disgust as I hung onto the front bench seat to keep an eye on the dog. I believe he was very lucky that she loved her son more than she hated the new dog at that moment. She hadn’t really wanted a dog in the house to begin with and here was the first disgusting evidence that this whole thing was a bad idea. My Mom always kept a clean house despite the other three of us doing our best to mess it up and now this dog had joined our ranks against her.

That evening, my parents went out somewhere and left me and my brother at home with the dog. I was excited to play with him despite the fact that he had bitten my lip that afternoon when I was trying to play with him on the floor. When my folks left, the dog barked at the slamming door. Then he turned around and started barking wildly and growling at me and my brother. I was seven, my brother was 15 or 16, and we had zero experience with dogs. The poor dog was probably terrified in his new surroundings and just wanted to be left alone. When we approached him, he would charge us and bark and growl. This was new. Prince eventually herded us both into the living room and onto the couch where he held us prisoner for three or four hours until my parents got home. If we made any attempt to move, he went crazy and we got even more scared.

My Mom and Dad got home hours later and they were wondering what was going on as they climbed the steps from the entryway to the living room and saw us cowering on the couch. The dog barked at them too, but my Dad just laughed and picked the dog up while he asked my brother and I what was going on. We told them our tale of imprisonment and they thought that it was pretty funny that we were held captive by a wiener dog with an attitude.

The following year, we moved from a suburb of Minneapolis to a rural area about five miles out of North Branch. Prince had many adventures chasing squirrels and meeting other dogs, cats, and strange neighbors. Since he was of German ancestry, the neighborhood men decided that he must like beer and they gave him his own bowl now and again at one of the many bonfires that my parents hosted. It turned out that Prince couldn’t hold his liquor, shocking I know, and the men enjoyed watching him stumble around as they themselves were also stumbling around. My Dad often recounted the story of one such evening where he claimed Prince ran into both door posts as he attempted to enter the house to retire for the evening.

After nearly being killed by my Mom’s disgusted looks after he hurled into her coat, Prince had many other brushes with death while we lived in North Branch. He liked to bark at the neighbor’s goats, for example. One day the neighbor, Melvin Hanson who was a semi-retired farmer with a thick Swedish accent, got tired of Prince harassing his goats and decided to shoot him with a 12 gauge shotgun. Prince evidently sensed Melvin’s evil intentions because he ended up with a lot of lead pellets in his rear end as he tried to make his escape. We arrived home to find him laying in the yard in tough shape. My Mom rushed the dog into town to the vet while my Dad controlled himself enough to talk to the neighbor without punching or throttling him. When asked why the hell he would shoot a ten pound wiener dog with a shotgun, Melvin insisted that the dog was going to kill one of his goats and that we needed to keep our “killer dog” away from them or this would happen again. My Dad made it quite clear to Melvin that he would share the dog’s fate if he ever did anything like that again. The dog lived and so did Melvin.

Fences were eventually mended and we ended up getting along just fine with Melvin and his bride Lila. Years later, Melvin actually beat me in a foot race. I was about 12 and he was 80. He came out one hot summer day to watch me and my friends play football in the field in between our houses. This was the same field where the wiener dog failed to outrun the shotgun pellets. Melvin was giving me a hard time about not being fast enough on one of the plays and I made a wise remark back to him about being old and slow. He didn’t take that well and started unloading his pockets onto the ground. Old guys have a lot of stuff in their pockets. Watches, wallets, pens, glasses, keys, knives, loose change, notebooks, coin purses, etc. I thought he was going to come and strangle me or put his fist in my big mouth, but he challenged me to a race. I couldn’t believe it, but I agreed and we marked the distance we’d run with some hats and the football. One of my friends said “Go!” and I tore off the line and headed toward the other end of the field to an easy victory, I thought. At one point, I looked over my shoulder and saw Melvin pumping his arms in his bib overalls and work boots and then he was past me and over the finish line. I got dusted by an 80 year old retired farmer. My friends were just about dead they were laughing so hard at seeing the way Melvin ran and also the fact that he demolished me in a foot race. Melvin, in between red faced wheezes and trying to catch his breath, talked some pretty good smack as he upbraided me for making fun of an old man. I’m glad my Dad didn’t kill him. He was a good guy. And fast. But, back to the hero of our story, the bullet-proof wiener dog…

Prince liked to chase squirrels and he also liked to chase cars on the dirt road in front of our house. On two occasions while doing this, he was hit by the car and thrown into the ditch. One was a sedan and the second was a pickup truck. The first time, he yelped all the way back to the house and was not quite himself for a few days, but he survived. The second time, he was knocked out as he flew into the ditch and we were sure that he was dead. My Dad saw it and ran down the yard to grab him, but Prince regained consciousness before my Dad got there and ambled his way back to the house. Again, he survived.

One summer, Prince surprised a dumb squirrel who got himself turned around and wasn’t quite fast enough to get away from the streaking wiener. After getting his face severely clawed and losing some blood, the dog survived and the squirrel lived to pillage our bird feeder another day.

The sound of the snow plow grinding down the frozen dirt road in front of our house in the winter enraged the dog also. He hated that sound. Wherever he was, he would run at top speed to confront the growling truck. Twice that we witnessed, he charged the plow head on and was swept into the ditch with the wave of snow like a twig in a tornado. I always wondered if the driver saw him and just laughed. The dog had guts. One of those times, my friends and I were playing and sledding in the ditch because we had a snow day off from school. We yelled at Prince to stop as he ran at full speed and barking toward the plow. We watched in horror as he was flung end over end into the snow pile in the ditch. Some of the guys lifted up their hands at the plow driver like they were saying “What the heck?!” Most of us ran to the spot where we thought the dog was buried. We dug frantically trying to find and, we thought, save him. He popped up about 15 feet from where we were digging, shook himself off, and trotted back to the house as though his work here was finished. The homestead had been successfully defended. He had survived.

My Dad wandered out to the kitchen each morning in his robe and started the coffee. One winter morning, he wandered with his bare foot into a pile of warm dog poop as well. (For years, he told people the detailed story and described how it felt to have warm dog poop squish up between his toes as he stepped down into it on the cold linoleum.) We didn’t need our alarm clocks that morning as we were awakened from blissful sleep by a raging torrent of foul curses and imprecations toward the dog. I got to the kitchen entrance as my Dad was finishing wiping the waste off his foot with a paper towel and grumbling. I was afraid to speak because I didn’t want to be murdered, but I was also afraid for my dog so I had come to this vantage point to see what was going to happen. Done wiping, my Dad walked over and grabbed the dog like a purse by the skin of his back and walked toward the door as the dog howled. I started crying and begging him to not hurt Prince. I don’t think he heard me in that state of mind. He flung the door open, kicked the storm door open, and walked out onto the frozen porch as he raised the dog into punting position. As he pulled his foot back for the dropkick, he slipped with the other foot, fell, and landed flat on his back on the frigid concrete steps. His grip on the dog was released and Prince landed on my Dad’s stomach. He quickly scampered out into the yard and completed his morning duty as my Dad groaned and managed to stand and hobble back into the house. Thankfully, the wiener dog was not punted that day and he survived yet again.

I came home from high school one day with my friend Karl and my parents met me at the door and said they needed to talk to me. They told me that they had learned from the vet that day that the reason Prince hadn’t been eating or acting like himself lately was that he had stomach cancer and needed to be put “to sleep” as some people say. I didn’t react as they expected because my friend was there and it wouldn’t have been cool to get upset over a dog, right? They asked me if it was okay to put him down so that he didn’t have to suffer anymore and I said that was fine. That evening and the next morning we said our goodbyes to Prince and when I came home from school the next day he was gone.

I’ve always thought that it was pretty unfair that having survived so many things in his life, Prince was taken out by cancer. My Dad, having survived many more horrendous things than Prince, was taken out by a fall in his garage. A friend of his died after stumbling while putting on his pants one morning. Life and death are strange and they seldom make sense, but I hope that you take the time to enjoy all of the squirrel chases and snow plow encounters in your life before cancer, heart disease, war, drugs, a car accident, or old age take you away from the ones that you love. Remember to not let the squirrel scratches and temporary snow burials distract you. Keep a smile on your face, be nice to people, and try to enjoy every minute of it like you’re a drunk wiener dog hitting both door posts on your way to bed.

May 16, 2021January 22, 2022

Everyone seems normal until….

This writing is for the amazing Erin Q. Last week, she said “Why haven’t you written any blog posts lately? Get on that. Your fans need more.” I didn’t even realize that I had fans. (What a bunch of weirdos!) Thanks, Erin!

You’re normal, right? Do all of the weirdos in the world think they’re normal or do they know they’re a little twisted? I’m sure, like everything else, there is a spectrum of weirdness and I also think that the most interesting people are weirdos. But, there are definitely times when you suddenly realize that you’ve crossed over your normal boundary into whatever you consider to be weird or just plain stupid. Those times seem to happen in sets of two for me. Am I a slow learner or hopelessly optimistic thinking that the outcome will be different the second time? Probably both.

In the early eighties, my parents bought a massive new RCA console television (WITH REMOTE!) and I somehow managed to talk them into letting me have our old TV in my room. I used this large box with a fake woodgrain finish and giant telescoping rabbit ear antennas to watch countless sporting events, Wide World of Sports, The Superfriends, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and a number of other programs on the five channels that we received. I remember jumping up to quickly close my door when Madonna premiered “Like a Virgin” on some Music Awards broadcast. I thought that my parents would be pretty upset to hear her openly saying the word ‘virgin’ on television while rolling around on the stage in her white wedding dress. Scandalous! I definitely would have been scolded for watching such a thing. I think I was 12.

For Christmas one year, I got a huge bag of red and green M&Ms. As I sat in my room watching the Viking’s game one Sunday afternoon, I was slowly wiping out that bag. I would eat one at a time. Three at a time. A small handful. Etc. At some point, I started putting a single M&M on the tip of my index finger and sucking them into my mouth. I would start the vacuum effect and then bring my mouth over to the M&M or I would bring the M&M over to my mouth until it encountered the suction and got sucked in. It was pretty amusing. Or, I should clarify, it was quite amusing until I sucked one of the candies into my mouth and onward into my throat where it lodged in my windpipe and cutoff my ability to breathe. You wouldn’t think that an M&M could choke a human to death as effectively as a deranged killer, but let me assure you that they’ve got a dark side. (Side note: I’m sure this homicidal M&M was one of the red ones because the green ones seem too innocent and positive to hurt anyone. It would be like Meg Ryan garroting Billy Crystal in “When Harry Met Sally”. That may happen in the modern remake co-rewritten my Nicolas Sparks and Stephen King, but it would have been unthinkable in the original just like a world where green M&M’s are something other than innocent and pure.)

Eventually, my gagging, panicking, and writhing along with my good luck caused the candy to turn slightly and I was able to move it upward to a place where I could painfully swallow it. My red face normalized, I wiped my runny nose and eyes, and the air tasted pretty good. After a minute or so, I went back to watching the game and a short time later I went back to eating the M&M’s. One at a time, three at a time, a small handful, etc. At some point, I decided to try the suction thing again and, within minutes, I was choking on another, undoubtedly red, M&M. Really stupid. Twice.

As I thought back on this incident where I choked in my bedroom while the Vikings no doubt choked on the football field right in front of me, I thought briefly about the M&M slogan “Melts in you mouth, not in your hands.” That’s a filthy and dangerous lie.

My Dad’s army buddy Jim lived in a crime ridden neighborhood in the inner city of Indianapolis. As I was growing up, Jim and his two boys visited us each summer or we visited them. My Dad credited Jim with saving his life during the Korean War. In reality, Jim “saved his life” by giving him a Snickers bar and a can of Coke on the troop ship that they both took from San Francisco to Japan. My Dad had been seasick along with most of the rest of the soldiers on the ship for over two weeks and hadn’t eaten much until that candy bar and pop hit the spot. His life was saved and a lifelong friendship was born.

There were guns hidden and lying out in the open all over Jim’s house. He was a bit of a paranoid in addition to living in a tough neighborhood. There was a leather sling mounted under the kitchen table with a sawed off shotgun in it that I noticed as we were eating breakfast one morning. There were several rifles lying on the floor under the bed in the guest bedroom where I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor. Jim also had a Beretta pistol that he used to shoot two guys who were stealing his car stereo in his garage one night. He had microphones setup in the garage and a speaker in the house as a homespun security system, so he heard the robbers breaking in. One robber was taken to the hospital in an ambulance with several bullet wounds after being shot in the garage and the other was taken away in the back of a police cruiser because he only got winged as he was fleeing down the alley according to my Dad. Jim was not charged with anything and his car stereo was saved. Let’s just say it was an interesting neighborhood in an interesting state at an interesting period during the early 1980’s.

Jim also had two dogs. One was a small Shih Tzu, I believe, whose name I can’t remember because the dog was old and tired and never wanted to play with me. The other was a large Doberman whose name was Rodney. Jim introduced me to the little dog then he pointed at the Doberman and said “That’s Rodney. Stay away from him. He’ll kill you.” Rodney wasn’t a pet, he was a home security device and he was treated as such by Jim, but I thought he was the coolest dog I’d ever seen.

As my parents visited with Jim in the living room, I got bored and started wandering around the house. I ended up sitting at the shotgun laden kitchen table playing a hand-held Mattel Electronics Football II game that I had brought with me. Rodney walked into the kitchen and I could hear his nails clicking on the linoleum. When he saw me, his stub of a cutoff tail wagged and he turned and ran out of the room only to return a few moments later with a big rubber banana dog toy that squeaked. He bit up and down on it and it squeaked over and over again. Then he came over and dropped it on the floor in front of me. Rodney the killer dog wanted to play. My parents weren’t around and he didn’t look like he wanted to hurt me. I reached out for the toy and as I grabbed it so did Rodney. He was exuberant and I hadn’t realized that he liked to play tug of war more than fetch. Unfortunately, I had my index finger extended as I grabbed the banana and Rodney grabbed that along with the banana. Ouch. But, he didn’t notice the look of pain on my face and he started to play tug of war anyway. Tug of war with a large Doberman is hard enough without your finger being the object being contested. On top of that, I was doing my best to keep quiet so that my folks didn’t catch me playing with the forbidden dog. It was a difficult game. As he growled and snarled and shook his head and pulled and as I bit back the pain and tried pulling my finger out, I realized that I couldn’t win that way. So, I pushed instead of pulling and when Rodney opened his mouth a bit to take a better bite of the banana I was able to jerk my finger out of his mouth. I retreated to the chair at the table. I had tears in my eyes from the pain but also from the intense effort to stay quiet. I wiped those away and stopped the bleeding cut on my finger with a napkin from the table. Rodney was oblivious to my personal drama and kept wagging his stub and dropping the banana in front of me. When I just looked at him, he would pick it up and drop it again. Occasionally, he whined too. Now, you would think that having your finger bitten, cut, and bruised by a large Doberman who was playing tug of war with it would teach you to leave the dog alone. It didn’t. He was so cute and so insistent and I was so bored that I eventually decided to make a grab for the banana again. Of course I would be more careful and only grab the very end to avoid the teeth. It would be different the second time, right? No. It wouldn’t. And, as Rodney bit down on the same finger a second time I fully realized how stupid my plan had been. Instinctively, I tried to pull my finger out again and the game was back on. I had to use the pushing trick several times to get my finger free the second time because Rodney was smart and had learned from the first round. Each time I unsuccessfully pulled the finger out, he bit back down on it again. In the end, I retreated to the chair at the table again and grabbed a napkin to help stop the bleeding AGAIN. Really stupid. Twice. Decades later, you can actually still see the scar.

As I wrote about previously in The Poop Mound blog entry, I worked at Wild Mountain Ski Area when I was in High School. There were many long nights of sheer boredom sitting in lift shacks on the side of the “mountain” watching skiers get on or off the lift and stopping the lift now and then as one of them fell. One particularly boring night, I was operating the main chairlift right in front of the chalet with another guy named Wade. He and I took turns sitting in the shack or helping folks get on the lift by holding the chair briefly for them as they sat down. We switched about every half hour to keep from freezing to death. As I was sitting in the shack I started looking at the large, industrial looking control panel for the lift and I noticed that there was a big red light bezel with the word ON underneath it. The light was not working even though the lift was obviously powered up, so I unscrewed the glass bezel after tapping it a few times and I found that the bulb was broken. I tried to tap it and I tried to unscrew it and it just spun because the glass part was broken off from the metal base of the bulb. I pulled the bulb glass out of the hole and looked inside. The metal part was still in the socket, so I reached into the hole with my thumb and index finger in an attempt to unscrew the metal base from the socket. I kept my fingers as close to the outside of the hole as I could so that I wouldn’t get shocked. As the electricity hit me, I jerked back in my chair and made a noise like I would imagine an extremely constipated 100 year old man makes trying to push out a particularly difficult and painful stool. I ripped my fingers out of the hole and held them with the other hand as I processed what had just happened. Wade ran over to the window of the shack and looked in at me, looked down at the open socket in the control panel, and then looked back at me holding my tingling fingers. He said “Did you stick you fingers in there?! What the hell are you doing?!!” I explained that I was trying to get the broken bulb out of the socket and he told me to just put it back together and leave it alone which I did.

Soon it was my turn to go outside and assist skiers. 30 minutes later, I was back in the shack staring at that socket again. I knew that if I just kept my fingers closer to the sides of the hole, I wouldn’t get shocked. Years later I realized that the socket and the bulb base were both metal and the base was electrified so there was no way to touch the base without being shocked, but that realization was far too late to save me from my second attempt. When the electricity hit me, I made my approximation of the noise an extremely constipated 100 year old man makes while trying to push out a particularly difficult and painful stool for the second time in the same day. Again, Wade ran over to the window and looked in at me and the control panel. This time, he summarized the situation perfectly by simply saying “You’re stupid!” So, here again, I was really stupid. Twice.

I had an alarmingly similar encounter with electricity while trying to fix an Alpine home air purifier about 15 years later, but all that needs to be said about that incident is that I was quite stupid. Twice. And, as a side note, it’s good to unplug electrical items BEFORE sticking your hand into them twice or even just once.

I’m not much of a meat eater other than some chicken and occasional fish, but everyone else in my family is somehow related to the Tyrannosaurus Rex so I end up grilling from time to time. The igniter on my grill wasn’t working on one of these occasions, so I got a book of matches and decided to drop one into the grill to light it. This didn’t work after several attempts, so I thought that maybe I would have better luck if the lid was closed. I tried sticking the match into openings at the bottom of the grill, but that didn’t work either, so I opened the lid about an inch and stuck a lit match in there. That worked. What I hadn’t considered, though, was that this whole time the gas had been building up inside the grill. There was a big WHUFF sound and as the lid blew back away from me, I was surrounded by a thin sheet of flame that shot out of the narrow opening I had made to stick the match in. I jumped back as the lid slammed down again and the flames dissipated. There was a really strange smell and some white stuff on my arms that I soon realized was the smell of burnt hair and the burnt arm hair itself which fell off as I rubbed my arms. My wife came running to the door after hearing the WHUFF and asked if I was okay. I said that I was, but that I had burned off about four inches of arm hair on both arms.

I turned off the gas because I had just been trying to see if the grill would start at all after sitting for a long time. We didn’t want to grill quite yet, but soon enough I was back outside to light it again. I must have just let the gas build up in there too long, right? If I lit it sooner while holding the lid slightly open, I wouldn’t have the same problem. Again, incorrect. And, again, I did something really stupid. Twice. More arm hair lost. More head shaking from my wife. More explaining to the children what had happened. Etc. Interestingly, the arm hair in those two spots grew back a lot thicker. It’s a regular reminder of the rule of two’s in my life.

The most painful incident in this category was when I dislocated my knee playing basketball in Montana. Twice. I was at a camp and I thought that I would show off to my girlfriend and dunk the ball. I twisted somehow as I was jumping and my knee popped out of the joint. It went back into place as I hit the ground with a thud. Everyone was laughing because they thought that I had just slipped on the court until they saw me grabbing the knee and writhing around like a flopping South American footballer. A friend helped me stand up and I asked him to help me get back to my cabin as my knee swelled rapidly. He suggested that I get on his back and he would carry me up the hill to the cabin. I thought this was a terrible idea because I’m 6′-5″ tall and about 200 lbs. and he was much smaller, but he convinced me citing some things he had done in the military which seemed legitimate. About ten yards into the journey, he stumbled and lost his balance and I started to fall off his back, so I stuck out my leg to keep from falling and dislocated the same knee again. This time it stayed out of joint for probably two or three minutes and I almost passed out from the pain. I was seeing stars. A doctor who was also vacationing at the camp saw this debacle and ran over to help. As I rolled over to try to sit on my rear end, the knee went back into place with a thwack and the pain hit me like a falling piano. I said “ARG!” quite loudly and drew a bit of crowd. I was trying to remain conscious and trying not to puke. Thankfully, the doctor was literally a giant and he knelt down and picked me up like a child and carried me back to the bed in my cabin where I spent the rest of my vacation to Hungry Horse, Montana. The train trip home on the Amtrak was not pleasant as the train rocked from side to side and my knees kept bumping into each other until I managed to get a pillow to put in between them. In short, I was stupid twice and suffered for it yet again.

There are number of other incidents, of course. Dangerous situations in 1990’s New York City, juicing too much garlic to ward off a cold, taking too much of a natural health supplement for colon cleansing, falling off roofs while shingling, slipping on the same icy steps or sidewalks repeatedly, crashing my friend’s motorcycle, the list goes on.

As I’ve gotten older, the stupid things seem to be getting less terrible at least. I step in the same puddle of water and get a wet sock twice. I spill the same drink twice. I buy the same record or guitar pedal twice. I call people the wrong name twice. All of these types of things are annoying or embarrassing, but not as painful as burning or dislocating something.

I’m hoping that you’re smarter than me and that you only do something stupid once or not at all. I also hope that as a country we aren’t stupid enough to repeat the mistakes of history. Sadly, many of those have happened way more than twice. I hope that the pandemic is a one shot deal. (Obvious vaccine joke.) And, I hope that these blog posts continue to entertain you and that they continue to trend toward humor rather than rants about all of the craziness we’re all living through at the moment. Have a good year, people, and remember as you’re grilling this summer that propane is combustible.