Dog is gone for the day? Time to make some noise!
One morning last week I rose before dawn, without the bleat of an alarm clock or nudge from my wife.
“You’re up?” she said, surprised to find me showered and dressed at such an hour.
Only two life events can change my position from horizontal to vertical this early in a day. The first is vacation. The second is our dog going to the vet for a routine checkup.
Because my wife works at a veterinary hospital, a wellness visit for our beagle-basset mix means she will spend the day there.
I love my dog, I really do. But a day without tiptoeing around her assorted neuroses is a day full of opportunity.
I can operate loud appliances, simultaneously if I so choose. I can leave the house as many times as I want without triggering a bout of howling driven by separation anxiety. I can burn toast for sport.
If I had the power to control the weather, I would summon a thunderstorm.
The entire family will admit to this same feeling. On the eve of this most recent vet visit, my daughter said, “Well, I’d better get some sleep. I have a lot of baking to do tomorrow.”
I know many dogs have their hangups, especially when it comes to loud noises like thunder, or the sudden, unexpected appearance of murderous predators like curbside yard waste bags. Yet I’m pretty sure our pooch is on the top of the dogpile when it comes to these eccentricities.
Take the oven. In our house, uttering the word “oven” is akin to Harry Potter using the proper name of You-know-who. You get points for bravery, but bad things will happen nonetheless.
This is how oven usage usually goes: The dog snores soundly in her chair. Someone says, I need to use the oven. The dog stops mid-snore, One eye opens. Mild shaking commences.
The oven user then pushes oven buttons. The dog leaps from her chair and runs to the hallway, inexplicably choosing — every single time — to stand directly beneath the smoke alarm.
At this point, there is no calming her down. Should she eventually resign herself to the oven being used and creep back to her chair, that is invariably the moment that the smoke alarm will sound. Once again she will run to the hall and stand directly beneath the screeching Disc of Doom. If she moves on to the living room, you can bet that she’s about to empty her bladder in the hope of preemptively extinguishing the fire that these reckless humans seem obsessed with starting.
It doesn’t even take the oven buttons to set her off anymore. Clink two Pyrex baking dishes together and she will outpace a greyhound. I suspect that at least some of her bouts of quivering are triggered by employees at the Bed Bath & Beyond on Rt. 256 as they restock the store’s display of cookie sheets.
I know it’s ridiculous, but it just seems easier to take on these tasks when the dog is out of the house. Vacuuming occurs in fits and starts, with one family member taking the dog for a walk and another racing from room to room with the vacuum cleaner, playing beat-the-clock.
Want to roll the dice and run the vacuum with the dog in the house? Better get the carpet cleaner ready to use too. You’re going to need it.
And so, with the dog out of the house for a span of several hours, vet visit day is the only time we are free to move about the passenger cabin. Fire up the leaf blower, crank the stereo and grind some coffee beans.
Last week, I nearly shouted to my slumbering children, “This is not a drill, people! This is a real-world scenario! Start your vacuums!”
The countdown had begun. Until 4 p.m. it would be just me, the kids and and our pair of aloof, low-maintenance cats, Lynx and Lola.
“Oh yeah,” my wife said before leaving with the dog. “Lola still has diarrhea.”
tdecker@dispatch.com