Getting a dog

It started simple enough.  I wanted a dog.  My parents got me one.  I promptly went to college and left a half trained demon for them.  They constantly told her that I abandoned her, they fed her at the table, took her for long walks in the woods.  I came home very infrequently and when I did I ignored her.  She continued to love me best anyway.  My brother tortured her by teaching her the word squirt, and then giving it no significance, by making her do tricks for a single grain of rice, by knocking on the wall and saying “Come in,” until she ran to the door in a frenzy, barking.  She gained thirty pounds.  She stopped running and jumping and . . . moving, really at all.  She was dubbed Mongo the special dog, I believed she really didn’t know any better.  I decided it was time for me to move on, to get my own dog, and so I did, a Coon Hound named Raisin Cain, a perfect dog for a farm . . . or so I thought.

And so . . .

MONDAY NIGHT AT THE FARM PRESENTS:

A day in the life of Cain the American Black and Tan Coon Hound

5:00 a.m. I get up, not because I want to, but because I have to go to school, Cain eats his breakfast then gets into my bed and falls asleep.  I couldn’t be more jealous.

6:10 a.m.  I leave.  Unbeknownst to me but knownst to anyone who has a puppy that has never been left alone before, Cain goes completely mentally insane.

6:11 a.m. He runs around the house jumping on every windowsill howling and crying

6:15 a.m. He accidentally knocks over a ten-gallon water jug that dispenses water into his bowl; the kitchen is flooded.

6:17 a.m.  I like to think that the reason he knocked over the trash can and pulled out and shredded all of the paper towels was to somehow mop up the mess in the kitchen, my mother thinks it was because he was pissed off and hungry and the turkey pot pie I could only eat half of, mostly because it was turkey pot pie, not because I wasn’t hungry, smelled really, really good.

6:25 a.m.  He starts to jump on doors to see what might open, maybe to get out, or to find me, or to run away, I don’t know.  He pushes open the bathroom door.  He finds and chews up, spreads out, and unrolls 15 rolls of toilet paper throughout the house in a sort of Halloween/ Devils night, vandalization effort.  Luckily he can’t figure out how to open the fridge to get the eggs.

6:45 a.m. He finds a bag of Halloween candy, and eats the entire bag that it is in, leaving every single piece of candy intact, if not a little slobbery.  What can you say, he doesn’t like Runts and Gobstoppers.

6:55 a.m. checks all of the pockets in the jackets hanging in the front room, by systematically ripping them off of their hooks and dragging them through the flooded kitchen.

7:05 a.m. Stilled pissed off, he decides to really get me back for leaving by marking the couch as his own.  He lifts his leg; a new puddle is born on my moms Sea Grass rug.

7:15 a.m. as a big screw you for leaving a dog bed out on the living room floor, he picks it up, and drags it upside down onto our leather couch, where he falls asleep, too tired to chew on the bone or ball or Frisbee or stuffed gorilla that I left out for him to play with.

12:25 p.m. I come into the house, my feet get wet, the toilet paper is everywhere and my dog is asleep on the couch underneath his dog bed.  Not the best lunch I’ve ever had.

Funny thing happened to me the other weekend.  I left to go to up north to visit my grandmother, and my parents came down to the farm to move furniture and apparently to see how many dirty dishes they can fit into the washer without actually washing them.  I got home rather late, picked my dog up at my uncles and in the darkness, which is beyond explanation at the farm; I pulled out my key to undo the padlock on the door (don’t ask).  Funny thing is, they didn’t use the pad lock we all use for the door; they accidentally used a totally different pad lock, one that not I, nor anyone else, actually has a key for.  So there I am, in the middle of the night, pitch dark, trying to break into my own home with a screwdriver and a paperclip.  Lucky I live in the total boondocks or somebody might have gotten suspicious, actually maybe that’s not so lucky after all.  It turns out it was just a little too easy.

Speaking of people breaking into my house and killing me in my sleep.  I am thinking about writing the cable company to complain.  Every time I turn on the TV it’s another scary movie, and you know I’m going to sit there and watch Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween and Texas Chainsaw massacre and Porky’s Revenge (okay maybe that last one isn’t that scary) and I live alone in the country where children are of the corn.  Children already are of the corn out here; I don’t need Hollywood making it worse.  And I think my house has it out for me, making all kinds of eerie sounds just to hear me jump.  It’s not funny okay house, it’s just not funny.  Great now I’m talking to the house.  I need a friend.

On the bright side, I’m not really going to have many trick or treaters out here, so all the candy is for me, maybe three bags were too much.  (Is treaters a word?)