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Dog stories are always good ones do. I have known a few good dogs and a few dumb ones too and over the years I've written about both. Here, then, are a few for your reading pleasure.
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Dooheimer The Leather Dog
When I was a small boy The Adventures of Lassie was a popular television show. Lassie was the perfect specimen of an all-American collie dog. Not only that, but she was superhuman, too. She could sense danger, run for help, had a mastery of understanding the English language. Man, what a dog.
But, at Route 1, Mt. Holly, NC where I was born and raised, we didnt have Lassie and didnt really want her either. You see, we had was Dooheimer the Leather Dog.
Now Dooheimer, whose given name was really Duchess was a full-blooded German Shepherd. Why I chose to call her Dooheimer is anybodys guess and I certainly have not idea as I was one when we got her. But nonetheless Dooheimer was my constant companion while I grew up.
And even though Dooheimer didnt match up in stature to the television wonder dog of her day, that certainly didnt matter to me. You see, Dooheimer loved me and even looked after me. Of course, while Dooheimer wasnt as smart as Lassie, I certainly wasnt as stupid as Lassies friend Timmie.
Remember how Timmie amazed us every week by doing something so incredibly dangerous and life threatening that we hung on the edge of couches wondering if Lassie would get help to him in time? If Timmie hadnt had a superhero for a dog that boy wouldnt have made it to puberty.
however, was the perfect embodiment of the perfect child so my parents didnt have to invest in a miracle dog to perpetually rescue me. Well, except for that one day.
It all happened on a day I really cant recall. I was only a year old. But as the story goes, I was playing beside the pool at our beautiful estate at Rt. 1. The Old Man was watching me that day and had taken his eyes off me for a moment. In that slight moment in time I promptly found my way to the pool and decided to take a dip unaided. Not being able to walk good much less swim, I fell in. Truth be told I probably jumped in.
Now, good old Dooheimer sprung into action. No, she didnt leap in the pool and drag me out that would have been too corny for Dooheimer. She proceeded to find the Old Man, who was hanging up the days wash on the clothesline. She barked at him and led him to the pool where he found me. The Old Man had to jump in and retrieve me. As the story goes, he used rescue training he learned in his days at Duke Power to resuscitate me. I really wished someone had filmed that.
So Dooheimer earned her stripes that day. During the rest of her life she had the run of Rt. 1 when she got older, all her hair fell off for some reason, which made her the ugliest thing you have ever seen. The vet said it was because of a reaction she had to fleas so we had to catch her weekly during the summer and rub sulfur on her. Not that it helped any; she never did grow hair. But nobody ever broke into our house either. What thief in his right mind would come in a yard with a dog that looked like a leather bag with teeth and eyes?
In her declining years, all Dooheimers teeth fell out except for two but that didnt slow her down any. Several days before she died she used both teeth to bite the meter reader. She bit him while the Old Man yelled at her stop, wildly waving and clapping at her. Trouble was, Dooheimer had lost her hearing and eyesight as well by this time and she didnt even know the Old Man was there. She did find that poor meter reader though and gummed the living heck out of him.
All things considered, the family had to give The Old Man his due. Being worried about her declining he health, The Old Man had previously called the vet to see if he could get a set of false teeth, eyeglasses and hearing aids for her. I think the vet thought it was crank call and hung up. But you have to hand it to him, the Old Man did try.
Dooheimer lived for 16 good years thanks in part to all those table scraps we werent supposed to feed her. And when she passed on to that great doghouse in the sky, we buried her with full funeral rites in the back yard. The Radio Flyer wagon served as a funeral cason and I read a well thought out eulogy written just for the occasion. We even found a large rock in the woods to serve as a grave marker and pulled it home behind the Old Mans riding mower. I inscribed it by hand with a hammer and chisel to include her birth date and date of death.
I just wish Dooheimer and I could be there when some poor archaeologist tries to figure that tombstone out.
Pepi
Memories of pleasant times, places and people gone by are worth more than anything of earthly value
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The older I get, the more I am convinced of this. The ability to recall such pleasant memories is one of Gods greatest gifts to us. The ability to drift back happily to some spot or place in time to relive a precious moment or visit the memory of friends and family long gone is priceless.
While the present crowds in and pushes us around and the future bears down on us like a freight train, we can always take quiet refuge in that little section of our minds where the pleasant memories are safely tucked.
These are things no amount of money can buy.
It is in our memories that we can travel back in time to visit with the memories of old dogs we have known. Those friends of man who have loved us, cared for us, and given loyal companionship without ever charging a penny for services rendered. I have had my fair share of dogs and once in a while I find it nice to sit on the back porch and think on some of the beasts of my past who long ago made that journey to the big pet shop in the sky.
One of these memories is of Pepi the Mexican Chihuahua. He wasnt big as a minute, but he was the meanest dog I have ever known.
My association with Pepi began when I was 5 years old. It actually started as a medical treatment my parents were using on me to try and cure severe asthmatic attacks caused by an allergy I had developed.
My mom and dad, being the good parents they are, didnt want to see their sickly son suffer so. They immediately endeavored to get me treated for this affliction. Being good Southern parents, they of course would never call in a medical professional without trying at least one folk remedy on me first.
It is a known fact that true Southerners will never go to a real doctor without first trying to do the doctoring themselves. Some even live to tell about.
The first home doctoring treatment any Southerner is going to try on someone with a breathing problem is the vaporizer. This device shoots out a steaming concoction of anything that stinks, and it is a custom in the South to force people who cant breath to inhale it.
The rule of thumb here in the South is: If it smells bad, tastes bad, or makes you run for the bathroom, then it must have medicinal value.
When the vaporizer didnt work on me, Mom and Dad reached out to friends and relatives for any home cures they had used. One idiot they found said that if a child has allergies, all you need to do is get the child a Chihuahua dog. The Chihuahua will then actually absorb the childs allergies into its own body and the child will become allergy-free. It was pointed out as evidence that this treatment really worked by the fact that Xavier Cugat always carried one around with him and he didnt have allergies.
And so we got Pepi .
He was ungodly mean. He hated people, especially children. If you pointed your finger at him like a gun, he would stick his teeth out and start growling. For that matter, if you pointed anything at him, he would stick his teeth out and growl. On the third growl you got bit.
And Pepi didnt care how big you were, either. My 6-foot-6 cousin Raybone almost lost a leg after he pointed a stick at Pepi . The only thing that saved him was diving over a chainlink fence.
If we could breed a Great Dane to be as mean as Pepi , we could drop three of them on Baghdad and our troops could come home.
Oh, and as for the use of Chihuahuas to treat allergies, I am sure all of you have guessed by now it doesnt work. And Mom and Dad finally did take me to an allergist the next time I had a spell. The doc gave me a thorough scientific medical evaluation and made his diagnosis.
He said I was allergic to dog hair.
Stupid Dogs I Have Known
About every ten years I wind up getting a dog I want to spend most of my time killing. This is a trait I seem to have inherited from my father. I actually believe that if my dad had had Lassie the poor dog would have turned out so stupid it couldnt get itself out of a shower of manure or would have been mean as the devil himself.
I could write about his dogs and call them Stupid Dogs I Have Known and give each a chapter.
I have already written a column on Pepi The Meanest Dog in the World.
Like the Shitzu he had that had to wear a diaper in its declining year. We called it Diaper Dog. He then got another Shitzu when the Diaper Dog passed away, and he named it Fluffy. Fluffy turned out to be bipolar. He had a wild look in his eyes and all of sudden for no apparent good reason, every now an then Fluffy would jump and start bitting himself. And he bit himself hard too. He even slept with dad and would wake at night in the bed and start barking and biting himself and every now then he would nail dad.
Before this one died, he grew a big dislikening to my brother Toms left leg. Poor old Tom would be sitting there watching television minding his own business when that dog would jump on his leg like the Tasmanian devil and start chewing him up and spitting him out.
At the present time, dad only has two dogs. The cant bark, it just weezes at you. It also prefers crawling on its belly like a snake than walking on all four legs. Last year the dumb thing had puppies and the one they kept looks like a small version of one of those cows they show on CNN that have the mad cow disease.
So here I stand, a chip off the old block head. I am just not as consistent at him and I have had some wonderful dogs over the years. Bonnie Belle the English Bull Dog was the best. She has past on too.
Right now we have Millie, a boxer we found under a school bus. We named Millie because we found her on the eve of the millinuem. This was my wifes idea of course. She has been a good dog and is great with children. The only problem we have had with her was when the neighbors Doberman pincher jumped that split rail fence with the biddy wire. The stork visited us a few months later and left 9 pups and I now have the only split rail fence that has barbed wire on it in my whole subdivision.
After the pups were born, Jacob got the job of caring for them after Millie did her time. It was amazing to watch an 8 year old go out on the deck and get mauled by 9 good sized puppies wanting to eat. He did such a good job with them I really couldnt say no when he wanted to keep one. Even Attilia The Hun couldnt have refused his soon such a request.
So he picked out the one he wanted. A cute black and tan dog I told him he should name Lucky because the stupid dog is lucky he got to stay. So he did.
And lucky has grown up to be a big dog now. So big in fact that I stand almost six feet tall and that dog at a year old can stand with its paws on my shoulders and look me straight in the eye.
And like I said, I spend most of my time wanting to kill him. He is lucky I havent.
Hes lucky I didnt kill him when he chewed the deck chairs I havent paid for yet.
Hes lucky I didnt kill him when he chewed up no less than ten of the rails on my deck.
Hes lucky I didnt kill him when he got up under the house, found a bag of nails I used to put the barbed wire up with and spread them all over the yard. Of course one found its way into the wheel of my new riding lawn mower.
Hes even luckier I didnt kill him when I came home one night and heard him hollering at the bottom of the yard. I asked Laurie what was wrong with him and she told me to go out and see what he was doing for myself. He had not only had chewed up my $40.00 Bass Pro Shop Hammock I had hanging back there, but he was actually caught in it and couldnt get out.
But that was nothing compared to what he did to the gas smoker grill. I had just bought it and had cooked one load of barbeque for supper. The next morning I went outside and found the miserable thing had chewed through propane hose. I had to take the fittings to a gas company and have it fixed and you know that was an expensive venture.
I came back and didnt hook it up again the next time I used it. Before I could disconnect it that stupid dog ate through that one too! The good news was the guys at the gas company laughed so hard they didnt even charge me to fix it the second time.
I haven't killed him yet, and I dont guess I will. We were bonding this week watching T.V. when I discovered Lucky Dog likes to watch old westerns.
He's my dog now.
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