Sometimes things just don’t work out like you would like. For example, most of all our old friends who are grandparents have great-grandchildren. We have six grandkids, four of whom are definitely old enough to give us a great grandchild. Do you think they have? Nah, not a one. However, things may be looking up, we have a granddaughter who has come up with a great grand-pup for us. He is a Cavapoo and right now weighs about two pounds. He is cute as a button and they have named him Sprout. We are scheduled to meet him formally over Thanksgiving and are looking forward to it. We have three labradoodle granddogs whose names are Ziggy, Mabel and Cooper. They are now Uncles and Aunts to Sprout, but no formal introductions have been made yet.
Dogs are terrific pets to have around. Our last one was a Golden Retriever named Sheba. Actually, her father was a sneaky Shepherd, but she took completely after her mother. She looked and acted like a Golden Retriever.
She was an extremely cute puppy, but she was also full of it! She would eat anything she could get her sharp teeth on. Once when the Blonde in the house was mending a blouse, she looked down and Sheba was chewing the heck out of the sleeve – which ended the mending process. She ate not just indoors, but outside as well. We planted a plant outside a garage door and she ate it as well. We planted a new one and bought a product that stated that it kept animals away from plants. We put it on the plant, and later came out into the garage and found her playing with the empty bag. It obviously didn’t keep her away from the plant.
There is a comic strip called “Pickles.” A recent story line has the dog which is a small hound type looking in a mirror and wishing that he were a golden retriever. He thought that everybody loves golden retrievers. Sheba loved everybody too and assumed that when visitors came that they were there to see her. Prior to Sheba we had Venus who was also a mixed breed but smaller than Sheba. We ended up with her because one day I took our son to the doctor’s. It so happened that the doctor’s dog had puppies. The puppies were conveniently put in a box in the waiting room. They were cute and Bruce and I ended up taking one home. The Blonde was rather shocked when we arrived home. I think that was the last time I took any of the kids to the doctor by myself!
Venus’s hang-up was the mailman. We lived in Huntington, W.V. and she hated the mailman. This was in the days when the mailman would come up on your porch and put the mail through a slot into the foyer. Whenever Venus heard him coming, she would grab the mail as it came into the house, growl and shake it. We had to rescue the mail quite often before it was destroyed. Then one day, the door opened just as he came up on the porch and Venus shot out like a cannonball. The poor mailman was shaken, but the funny thing was that Venus ignored him and zoomed out into the yard. I guess that she just didn’t like the mail, but the mailman was OK!
Dogs are great, but great grandkids would be even better!
Villager Barry Evans is a columnist for Villages-News.com
