Meet the New Master

Hey, folks. This is a post I wrote back in February, but have been too busy to upload. As you read, pretend it's February, there's a foot of snow on the ground, and it hasn't been six months since my last post.

I better not ever hear anyone question my love for my wife. I’m proving it in spades right now.

My wife and kids got a dog. 12 days and 10 hours ago we were at the pet store in the mall. Shelby wanted to get one of the dogs out of its cage to pet it with the kids. So they took the animal to one of the little petting pens and a full-blown love fest ensued.

Shelby was in love. The kids were in love. The little beast seemed to be in love, too. At that moment, I represented either the gateway or the barrier to their eternal happiness – it was my choice. To my everlasting shame, I said, “Let it be so.”

I could defend myself, but that would imply that I think I’m innocent. Trust me – for the next 12-15 years I’m not on speaking terms with me.

To appreciate the grand irony here, you might want to take a look at a post I wrote about dog people. I don’t hate dogs. I’ve wanted a German Shepherd since I was a little boy. My parents weren’t inclined to spend money on dogs, but they were kind enough to let me have a few free mutts. Four, to be exact. And not all at once - I had one a year for four consecutive years. I have no proof, but it seems a bit coincidental that my first dog ‘ran away’ within weeks of an Asian family moving in a couple doors down. I don’t want to judge anyone for their preferred cuisine, but it is wrong to steal a poor boy’s dog no matter how hungry you are. A shocking accusation, you say? I lost four dogs in four consecutive Novembers. I don’t think those folks were having turkey for Thanksgiving.

Anyway, the point is it’s not that I hate dogs. I don’t even hate this dog. I just hate having this dog. I once heard a guy say that a dog that can’t hunt duck isn’t worth feeding. I can sympathize with that sentiment – I think the only dog worth having is one that can kill people. Like a German Shepherd.

That’s not exactly what we picked up at the pet store on that horrible, horrible day almost two weeks ago.




Don’t let appearances deceive you. This animal is cunning and cold. It took about 10 minutes at home with the little devil to realize that having a new puppy is approximately 1.5 times more taxing than having a brand new baby human.

We’re busy people. The last thing we needed was another full time job. I spent the rest of that day vacillating between acute buyer’s remorse and abject despair. Our lives now consist of watching this animal around the clock so that when it relieves itself we can give it a tiny piece of cheese. The beast figured out the system and decided to pee in increments. It releases a few drops and then clamors for cheese. After receiving the reward, it goes and drips a couple more. More cheese.

Oh, and I forgot the pep rally. The potty training book says that every time the dog does this we’re supposed to act like it discovered a cure for pancreatic cancer. I mentioned this in the dog people post, but there is something so backward about this. My wife and kids and I are made in the image of God. And yet, this dog leads us around by the nose, making us, by its very existence, act like imbeciles – we cheer whenever this rat urinates or defecates.

In hindsight the copious cheese treats were not a good idea. What happens to you when you eat too much cheese? Right. We had some people over for dinner the evening after we bought the thing. Looking back now, I realize that the fact that the dog hadn’t moved its bowels since we brought it home wasn’t a good thing. At the time, I thought that was the silver lining of this whole nightmare. I thought we must have gotten the pick of the litter. I know now that all that cheese was acting like a cork. The poop dammed up by the cork liquefied over the course of the day and the dam broke as we were finishing dinner - the dog diarrhea-ed all over its cage. There is too much to tell. Let me just say that the rest of the story involves a doggie hemorrhoid the size of a golf ball, fresh liquid dog squeeze on the hands of one of our guests, and my wife feeling the same bitter regret I had felt over the previous 24 hours.

As a result, we amended the cheese program and now the animal only gets cheese for solid waste. I ask you, who has the power in this relationship? Pooping for cheese – that’s all this dog has to worry about. Nobody gives me cheese…

Sleeping arrangements have been over the top, as well. With a bowel the size of an electron, when this dog needs to go, it needs to go now. The experts tell us that if you let the beast relieve itself in its cage, it will become a “dirty dog” and will never learn to go where it’s supposed to. I think this is patently ridiculous. All dogs are dirty dogs. That’s why dogs should live outside. God gave them fur for a reason. My wife responds that our dog would freeze to death inside five minutes. I have no objection to that.

Anyway, Shelby has been sleeping in the living room so that she can hear the dog yelp in the night when it needs to go twoosies. She bolts off the couch and sprints to the back door, trying to catch the animal in time. The dog needs to go at least twice a night. So, we’ve been sleeping alone. I swear, I can hear that little rat cackling in the middle of the night.

The lack of sleep the first week was intensifying Shelby’s buyer’s remorse. I gently approached the subject of treating another family to a bargain-priced bundle of joy. She replied that she didn’t want to sell the dog for less than we paid for it. I said, “No one on earth is going to pay what we paid for that dog. The way I see it we have two options: 1) we can take a financial hit, keep the dog, and let this animal ruin our lives, or 2) we can take a financial hit and enjoy freedom beyond our wildest imaginations. The choice seems pretty clear to me.”

Some of her doggie owner friends encouraged her to stick it out. Thanks, ladies.

Fast forward to right now. She flew out to California to spend the weekend with her two best friends. I’m thrilled that she gets to do this from time to time. It’s usually not a big deal – I’ve finely tuned my survival skills so that a weekend alone with the kids is smooth sailing. It’s mostly fast-food, re-runs, and two naps a day for me and the baby.

This time it’s different. I’m here in Ohio under a winter storm warning with four needy little kids and a tiny dog who thinks I’m its mommy. One of the tiny details about this weekend that didn’t really hit me until my wife was at 30,000 ft was that it was going to fall to me to take Little Evil to the vet for inoculations. As I loaded a small pink dog carrier into my truck and headed out into blizzard conditions, I thought to myself, “I’m risking my life so that this mutt won’t get doggie AIDS or whatever it is that the doggie doctors and doggie drug companies have conspired to convince the general public will befall any and every doggie not given a series of several hundred injections of overpriced doggie snakeoil.” I realized, though, that a deadly doggie disease might be just what the doctor ordered. A natural death would give me my life back. All I had to do was skip the vet appointment and just drive around for a half hour before going home to relieve my in-laws, who were watching the kids for me. But I can’t lie to my wife. Blast it.

I got to the vet’s office and was disappointed to find that they hadn’t closed early to beat the bad weather. When I went in, the desk lady said, ‘What’s the name?’

“My name or the dog’s name?”

“The dog’s name.”

For the life of me I couldn’t remember. I stood there for a couple of awkward seconds before offering, “My last name is Birdwell – I don’t remember the dog’s name.”

The lady looked at her list of appointments and then said, “Is it Razzle?”

“That’s it.”

She instructed me to get the dog out of the cage. As I peered through the gate, I noticed a long, black object on the inside. “Of course.” The dog had squeezed one in the cage. How can such a tiny animal produce such large chunks of stool? I swear, it was the size of a hand grenade. After giving the dog to the shot person, I shared my grenade predicament with the desk lady. She offered me a blue paper towel. I said, “Okay, I’m gonna need like five of those.”

I finished dealing with that just in time to take the dog back from the shot person. The next blow was an expected one, but when it happened it was worse than I thought it would be.
The shot person referred to me as daddy. As in the dog’s daddy. I want to puke just typing this. In past posts, I’ve catalogued some of the reasons I have trouble thinking of myself as a grown man. Being a chihuahua’s daddy doesn’t help.

I told my friend Rick that the dog may not survive the weekend. One could accidentally leave the back door open all night right next to the dog’s cage. One could accidentally drop a handful of Hershey’s Kisses in the dog bowl. One could absent-mindedly leave the dog alone in the same room with my 3-year-old son. If you think of any others, please, please email.

God prepared me for this, though. Last week in chapel at school one of my professors preached from Job about God’s providence in affliction. So I know that God long ago set me apart for this pain. I just never thought it would take the form of a chihuahua.