8月9日
1 part strength, 2 parts crazy
It was the end of October 1994. A day that will live in infamy. The day my life changed forever. We had a beautiful, black pure bred labrador. Several weeks before, I had seen a strange dog jumping back over the fence to the dog run. I called our vet and he said our dog was probably in heat and probably pregnant now. He had come over to examine her and said he thought there might be one puppy in there. So on this afternoon in late October, I get out my car and hear this strange sound. It sounded primative almost like a baby crying, but it wasn't. I walked toward the dog kennel and on the ground about 3 feet outside the kennel was a puppy, cold and mewing. I peeked inside the dog house and there were 7 more and I still heard yet another one mewing like the one outside the kennel. I finally found that one underneath the dog house. I ran inside and called our vet and yelled into the phone "THERE ARE NINE PUPPIES!" He chuckled and said "I love being wrong. I'll be over after dinner to check on them. I can't wait to see them!" I yelled "WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH NINE PUPPIES?" Our vet told me that the two puppies that had fallen out the doghouse probably wouldn't make it. Turned out he was wrong about that too. Did I mention he loves being wrong?
I can't even begin to describe how much work it was to care for nine puppies. The bigger they got, the more work they were as a small handful of them started orchestrating escapes and we would wake up to find 3-5 puppies running around the living room, pooping randomly and chewing things up. There were two that always managed to escape and we suspected they were letting out the other puppies sometimes. One was a light colored yellow male I had named Simba and the other was a black female named Siah, which means black in Farsi. My friend from Iran had already decided she was taking Siah so we let her name her. There were five yellow labs and four black ones in all. Three of the yellows were a dark golden color and two were light- almost white. I had always wanted a white lab so I decided we would keep Simba. I knew better than to keep the bully of the litter. Everyone knows what a problem the alpha male can be. right? I assumed that the alpha male was a fat black male I had named Brutus. My vet concluded several years later that the dogs may have been conceived at different times and that Brutus was actually bigger because he was conceived earlier not because he was the bully. I have to tell you that as it turns out, Simba was the alpha male. That dog has been the bane of my existence since the day he was born. I don't know why I didn't see it then, he and Siah were always the ones that escaped, but I was mesmerized by how pretty he was.
I'm sure this will come as no surprise to you, Simba has a screw or two, or three or four, loose. I'm telling you, I should have seen it coming but I didn't. I was ambushed by his craziness. Our vet describes him as a bull in a china shop. I describe him as an escaped mental patient with a firearm. He's just freakin' nuts. And stupid. Did I mention that? No? Once you spot the vacant look in his eyes, you know. The light is on, no one is home. We should have had an inkling when we were trying to train him and he just seemed to have difficulty learning. Can dogs have ADHD? If they can, he's got it. When we tried to teach him to sit, he'd sit for less than a second then stand right back up. He never lays down like normal dogs do. He wanders around looking for something to get into. One time he chewed up five of my shoes. Now the disturbing part was that the shoes he chose were all black and he only ate one from each pair. How does that happen? He used to like to eat Steve's underwear too. I just can't even go into that without feeling like I want to throw up in my mouth. There's nothing like seeing the waistband of your husband's underwear hanging from a dog's butt. For the first two years of his life Simba thought his name was NO! NO! BAD DOG! To this day we still refer to him as nonobaddog.
Escaping is still his best skill. The first time we put him in a confined space he managed to escape in minutes, howling and yipping the whole time. We have spent the last decade rebuilding and reinforcing, trying to keep him wherever it is we tried to put him. Just last night he escaped twice. He got a hefty dose of benedryl this morning to calm him down but I saw him staggering out the doghouse not too long ago and I hear him starting to whine and yip again. There's something else you should know. He takes Prozac. Yep, that's right. The dog is so clearly certifiable, he takes Prozac.
So that you can understand just how we got to the place where our dog takes medication, let me tell you what we've been through. We've even bought and read that book "How to live with a neurotic dog" in which I laughed until I cried. Then I just cried. The first time we decided to take a little vacation and leave for the weekend we had a friend come and take care of the dogs. We thought it would be best if Crazy, I mean Simba, were in familiar surroundings. This idea ended up costing us two thousand dollars. Our friend put him in his airline kennel (where he was confined every night due to his destructiveness), shut the door to the bedroom and left for the night. She returned 7 hours later to find our bedroom destroyed. He had not chewed his way out the kennel during the evening, he had burst through the side, blowing it out like a bomb went off in there. He had left our carpet in shredded ribbons in the middle of the floor. He had dug a hole through the wall and chewed off the windowsill. He had relieved himself in a circle around our bed then climbed on top to leave a steaming pile of, I mean a gift. He had gone into the bathroom and eaten medicine out of the medicine cabinet. He flung my jewelry box across the room and my jewelry was interlaced with his gifts. Are you understanding yet the depth to which he is crazy? Eleven years of this!
That brings me to the title. Last night my son asked my husband how come Simba had escaped but not our female. Steve's answer was "Because he's one part strength and two parts crazy."
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