Warning: Cursing Is Involved

When I woke up this morning and was getting my coffee, I heard the most mournful sound I think I've ever heard. I went to the back door to see what I was hearing. It was a woman in a red dress, walking down the misty road calling out, "Buddy! Buddy!" But she was doing it so that the Bud syllable was a G on the piano, the dy syllable a G flat. I went and found the notes. It was so minor in key, so mournful in tune. She was walking swiftly, crying out for her lost dog, I suppose. The same word, the same notes, over and over again.

While I was at Gatorbone, I was in constant awe at how well-behaved and lovely Lis and Lon's dogs Buck and Daisy are. Buck and Daisy are both black labs and they are huge and gentle and loving and they can be in the same room as a wedding cake for twenty-four hours and not even think about eating it.

My dogs can't be trusted to be in the same room alone with the salads on the table for two minutes. Setting the table in my house takes two people- one to set it and bring out the food, the other to keep the dogs from eating the food while the table is being set.

I was praising Buck and Daisy to Lon and Lis and then I said, "No. I do not even want to discuss how great your dogs are. I can't handle it." And I can't. And my dogs act the way they do because I have not trained them to be different. They are spoiled and rotten and I've already cleaned up one poop and three pees today. I think Buck and Daisy would explode before they peed or pooped in the house.

See that tiny dog up there doing a perfect yoga pose? He weighs about what? Six pounds? And yet, he can get under our bed at night and scratch and the entire bed moves as if he was the size of a Great Dane. How can this be? And he jumps off the bed and then he whines to be lifted back up onto it and then he jumps off and scratches some more. I think I got about four hours of sleep last night and he was 90% of the problem. This happens nightly and WHY do we let him sleep with us? Because I have no baby to sleep with, I suppose, and when he gets chilly and snorgles under the covers and cuddles up to the backs of my knees I love it.

When Mr. Moon is out of town, the other dogs know it and they also know that I will let them sleep with me. Pearl doesn't care so much to sleep with me unless it's raining, although Kathleen said that Pearl slept with her for part of the night when she was staying here. But dogs love Kathleen. No. They worship her. My dogs wouldn't bat an eye if she replaced us in their home. When I got back from being gone for three days they were slightly excited. Like maybe someone had returned a piece of furniture they like to sit on. They get a lot more excited when Kathleen comes over and when Mr. Moon gets home. All I am to them is the woman who feeds them, takes them to the groomer, cleans up their pee and poop.

I call them all sorts of names. Motherfucker is part of most of these names. Cocksucking motherfucker is a favorite endearment of mine which I use frequently to refer to them. This could explain their ambivalence towards me. Perhaps. Do you think?

I am constantly trying to figure out how to get rid of one or all of them. Except for Pearl. Time is taking care of that on its own and she is old and sweet. But the rest of them. Damn those little cocksucking motherfuckers and their peeing and pooping and bed shaking and food-snatching souls.

And yet, if one got out and disappeared, I know I would be walking down the road, calling for him. "Zekie," I would call. G, G flat. I would be panicked, I would be freaked, I would be so scared. I know because this has happened. The last time it happened, I found him next door, snuffling around in the church yard parking lot. "Oh Zeke!" I said and I scooped him up in my arms and I wasn't thinking about how he pees on every vertical thing in this house and I wasn't thinking about how he tortures me at night. I was only thinking about how he feels, snuggled up to me under the covers when it's chilly. I was only thinking that he was my baby and he had been lost and now he was found.

Fucking cocksucking motherfucking dogs. They take our hearts and then gnaw on them as chew toys and then pee on our shoes and they don't even lay eggs.

God, I hope that woman found her dog. Her lost-song broke my heart as she walked in her red dress, fearing to find her pet dead on the side of the road, praying to see him alive, her Buddy, her friend, her cocksucking motherfucking dog.