Chapter One

My wife Betty and I used to laugh at those old folks who own a house dog and speak to it as if it were human. They even refer to themselves as Mama and Daddy when talking to the dog, and take it everywhere they go and spoil it rotten and... well, you get the picture. You've seen them, too, haven't you? Betty and I both agreed there must be something really peculiar about that type of person and that you'd never catch us making such idiots of ourselves.

Yeah, right. This just goes to show that you should never laugh at other people's quirks, because guess what? In the prime of our Golden Years we unaccountably lost our sanity one day and saddled ourselves with a house dog. A reddish-brown, shorthaired dachshund, to be specific, weight sixteen pounds, going on forty when lap-sitting, which is his preferred position.

It isn't the fact that we got a dog which is so puzzling; it is that we allowed it to become a house dog. Shucks, we've had other doggies and they stayed outside most of the time on our hundred-acre farm where we grow Christmas trees and pretend we're making a living at it. How did this one turn out to be a house dog who gets treated like a people--and acts like one most of the time? Maybe it's because for the first time in our lives we actually paid money for a pet, the princely sum of a hundred dollars.

I've forgotten why we decided on a dachshund to replace the Chihuahua we had before, who guarded us, the house and the farm with all the fierceness and determination of a hundred-pound German Shepherd until the day he died.

I guess it really doesn't matter now anyway. What I do remember is that appealing little whine coming from the cardboard box we were bringing him home in.

The sounds were so appealing that I just had to take the sleek, wiggly little sausage doggie out of the box and cradle him on my lap, thereby setting a precedent which is carried on to this day. In fact, on this very cold morning as I'm beginning this tale, we're all out in the office, converted from a two-car garage, with a cheery fire going in the Franklin stove. The new kitten, named Velcro (for obvious reasons) is playing with a lizard that made its way inside with some of Betty's house plants, brought in for the winter. I am at the computer, writing (and also pretending to be making money). Betty is sitting in her easy chair reading. And the doggie is asleep in her lap. He loves laps almost as much as he loves doggie biscuits.

Naming a dog Biscuit wasn't one of our brighter ideas, even though it seemed appropriate at the time. As I recall, we had gotten a couple of different kinds of puppy food the day we brought Biscuit home. While Betty began fixing breakfast, I put some dry food out in a bowl for our new doggie. He sniffed at it, looked up and whined.

Obviously, I was missing a signal somewhere. Over the next half-hour, I tried him with canned dog food, cat food, a piece of left over steak and some bread. He whined and sniffed, and sniffed and whined, but wouldn't touch a bite.

As Betty was cooking and I was trying to think of something else to offer our new doggie, we discussed names for him. Somehow, every one we came up with sounded trite, unsuitable for his countenance or silly. Then we thought of names one of us liked, but the other didn't.

The naming session went on until breakfast was ready. Betty put the eggs, bacon and biscuits on the table and we sat down. Immediately, our new little house guest scattled over between us and sat up on his hiney with his little front paws in a perfect begging position--and I promise you that we neither taught nor encouraged him to sit up like that.

It must have come with his genes because that part of his life not spent draped across Betty's lap, he spends sitting up on his hind end, looking around like a people. Well, shucks, if I was only three inches high and fourteen inches long and had four legs when I was a little fellow, I probably would have done the same. Besides, he is perfectly balanced like that and it leaves his forepaw free to wave at us like a band conductor when we don't understand immediately what he wants.

Anyway, there he was, sitting up between our chairs and whining. I broke off a piece of buttered biscuit and held it for him. I'm lucky he didn't grab a couple of fingers in the process, the way he snatched that piece of biscuit. I tried some more. He gobbled those bits of biscuit as fast as I could break them off and reach down to feed them to him. In fact, he ate all my biscuits and I didn't even get a bite that morning.

"Why don't we name him Biscuit?" I asked Betty, wiping my mangled fingers on a napkin. "He sure does like them. And fingers, too."

"Well, okay," Betty agreed.

I think she still wanted to name him something like Prince or Rex, but she finally gave in when it was obvious how silly anyone would look calling a Dumbo-eared, short-legged, long-bodied, snuffly-nosed little Dachshund by a name like that. So Biscuit he became. And thus we became the ones sounding silly.

It's a good thing we don't have close neighbors. I know I'm a little eccentric, but there's no sense having the world think I've gone completely around the bend, which is what would happen if anyone lived within screaming distance of us. Screaming distance? Yup.

Here's the scenario. Take one person (me) who has a puppy still being trained in the intricacies of inside living. That means lots of yelling, shouts of "no!" as he tugs the tablecloth and dishes onto the floor, pees on the carpet, chews on the kittens' tails, and/or tries to electrocute himself with the irresistible lure of cords from the TV, computer, lamps, etc. When we yell, he cringes, knowing he's been bad. Or, on the other hand, when he, for instance, refrains from slobbering all over your face when he's in your lap, you say, "good doggie" or, when he's particularly well-behaved, you say "good doggie, Biscuit."

Copyright © 2004 by Darrell Bain