My neighbor, Wendy Wackyname, is the owner of a really big dog. I asked her how she managed a dog that was bigger than a moose and weighed more than an elephant.
“You have to be able to solve problems you never thought you could have,” she said.
“Problems like what?” I stupidly asked.
“Well, a dog that big not only chases cars, but he often catches the littler ones like yours. It became a real problem when he finished chewing on them and wanted to bury them in the back yard. When we lived in Oklahoma, our back yard just wasn’t big enough, and the local police kept wondering about what might be buried there. I guess they had a lot of missing persons cases.”
“Oh, that does sound bad.”
“Yeah, but moving here solved that problem. We now live next to this nice big park with lots of room for a dog to bury stuff.”
“So he isn’t cured of chasing cars?” I asked nervously.
“No. But that isn’t the worst problem. Feeding him is really expensive. We have to buy a truckload of dog food every week. That problem has gotten worse since we left Oklahoma. There used to be a cattle ranch nearby. At least until the last of their stock mysteriously disappeared.”
I decided I should probably change the subject a bit.
“How do you walk a dog that big?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t. I climb up on his neck and hang on to the collar as hard as I can, and we go for a run. We ended up in Waxahachie, Texas, last week.”
“Does your mother ever let the dog in the house?”
“Oh, no. Foozy is an outside dog. If he wags his tail indoors, he breaks all the furniture in the room. Besides, the doors in this new house aren’t big enough for him to fit through.”
“Wendy, did you ever read those kids’ books about Clifford the Big Red Dog?”
“Oh, sure. But life with Foozy is nothing like that. Giant dogs are a much harder pet to take care of than people think.”
I remembered then how my little dog somehow managed to make five poops a day. Did Foozy do that, too? And how did poor little Wendy go about bagging it and depositing it in the trash? I finally decided I didn’t want to know.
.
Catch a Falling Star 
Nutzy Nuts
Things are not what they seem. Life throws curve balls across the plate ninety percent of the time. Fastballs are rare. And fastballs you can hit are even rarer. But if Life is pitching, who is the batter? Does it change the metaphor and who you are rooting for if the batter is Death?
If you think this means that I am planning on dying because of the bird flu pandemic, well, you would be right. Of course, I am always planning for death with every dark thing that bounces down the hopscotch squares of the immediate future. That’s what it means to be a pessimist. No matter what bad thing we are talking about, it will not take ME by surprise. And if I think everything is going to kill me, sooner or later I have to be right… though, hopefully, much later.
I keep seeing things that aren’t there. Childlike faces keep looking at me from the top of the stairs, but when I focus my attention there, they disappear. And I know there are no children in the house anymore since my youngest is now legally an adult. And the chimpanzee that peeked at me from behind the couch in the family room was definitely not there. I swear, it looked exactly like Roddy McDowell from the Planet of the Apes movies, whom I know for a fact to be deceased. So, obviously, it has to be Roddy McDowell’s monkey-ghost. I believe I may have mentioned before that there is a ghost dog in our house. I often catch glimpses of its tail rounding the corner ahead of me when my own dog is definitely behind me. And I am sure I shared the facts before that Parkinson’s sufferers often see partial visions of people and faces (and apparently dogs) that aren’t really there, and that my father suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. So, obviously it is my father and not me that is seeing these things… He’s just using my eyeballs to do it with.
But… and this is absolutely true even if it starts with a butt… the best way to deal with scary possibilities is to laugh at them. Jokes, satire, mockery, and ludicrous hilarity expressed in big words are the proper things to use against the fearful things you cannot change. So, this essay is nothing but a can of mixed nutz. Nutzy nuts. And fortunately, peanut allergies are one incurable and possibly fatal disease I don’t have. One of the few.
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Tagged as dogs, family, grief, life, love, mental health, writing