Dog Tales: The Great Escape
This is the Second Installment of the Adventures of Whitney — White Wonder Dog!
In my first post to Medium, a few days ago, I presented my curriculum vitae (c.v.) in narrative form to introduce myself to you. If you will recall, I am writing these posts from the Great Beyond, as I left planet earth more than a few decades ago. Here’s a quick summary of my skill set when I lived here on earth: strong hind legs; very smart; mischievous; charming (I probably failed to mention that skill in manipulating humans). Since I went to another plane of existence, I have developed additional skills including:
- writing (as you observed from that first post ). I have occasional lapses in the use of grammar like starting off sentences with “me and my humans.” You might spot some other grammatical issues on occasion, but please refrain from correcting me if it isn’t too bad. My feelings still get hurt, believe it or not! Oh, almost forgot that I prefer to use the present tense, rather than the past tense. I also have a tendency to go off on tangents which I sometimes call bunny trails.
- social media fluency. I have a FB account. No Twitter; no Instagram (yet). And just forget about Reddit — I understand there are a lot of nasty people there that y’all call Trolls.
- usage of French vocabulary. But I cannot write full sentences — just wait
- channeling my spirit into other creatures. Those stories will be really engaging. Be prepared to be AMAZED.
In our first home in Fort Worth, the place they took me to from the Humane Society, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks — really. It was a poor neighborhood with lots of people just getting by — white folks and brown skinned people. I think you call them Mexicans. I simply refuse to use derogatory phrasing that is sometimes used in Texas, and other parts of the south, when speaking of poor whites and Mexicans…it’s just mean-spirited! Like that “president” of yours that I mentioned on my C.V. He would use that terminology, though.
All of these neighbors were nice people — the two-legged ones and some of the four-legged ones. I know this because I got to meet a lot of them, unbeknownst to my humans. I got to pall around with Matthew and Mark: two German Shepherds whose caretakers were “Jesus Freaks” as they used to say, back in the day.
I also palled around with two, feisty dachshunds. They were very good hunters — they were responsible for killing the chickens in one of our neighbors’ coops. Everyone blamed Matthew and Mark on the killings. Nope, it was those hound dogs — I saw them one day, running down the street with a dead chicken between them. I. KID. YOU. NOT. It was a really funny sight to behold. I barked at them saying “I want some.” But, they weren’t into sharing, either. I would have liked to taste raw chicken meat. All I got was a snarl that basically informed me to “get my own chicken.”
So, I unfriended the dachshunds, since they didn’t play well with me anymore! Well, I didn’t unfriend them, like on FB. We didn’t have the internet back then. My humans used something called “mainframe computers” at school. Their school mainframe actually had a name: Zelda Xerox. Yup, Xerox the photocopy giant. They were into computers too back then…the stupid executives sold their technology to IBM! Oops, bunny trail.
You know that expression, while the cat’s away, the mice do play? Well, I’m like the mouse in that expression. Think of my humans as the cat. Got it?
My powerful, hind legs served me well, escaping from the backyard every day when my humans left for school. I think I forgot to tell you that my humans were poor graduate students; they spent a lot of time at school. They had offices and laboratories there — yippee! The cad worked with rats…how appropriate, since he became one. That’s a story for another day!
Ms. Lapin (the female human) came back in the late afternoon to prepare dinner, eat, play with me and then returned to school. Her schedule was a lot more regular than the other human who I just referred to as the cad.
I had a huuuge internal clock, so it seems (I’ll add that skill as another bullet point on my real c.v. when I get around to it). I always sensed when she would be arriving back home. I guess it would sound better if I said I had my own timepiece like the Mad Hatter, but I didn’t. I was always back in the yard when she arrived back home, week after glorious week.
I was like the Pied Piper in that neighborhood. I would round-up all of my 4-legged friends and we would go wandering around begging for food or just chasing each other down the streets. It was great fun. Sometimes we would follow kids getting off the school bus. One day we followed a group of kids after school who were marching like soldiers. Each of those kids had a kazoo and they were playing, in unison, When The Saints Come Marching In. Little did I know that the tune would become my theme song a few years later.
You need to know something about that back yard: it was fenced-in, sans gate. It was about 42 inches high, too high for me to scale. Ms. Lapin was trying to figure out how I got so dirty every day. She was clueless that I had escaped every single day and returned before her arrival back home. She thought that I must have been digging holes for fun — she knew that I got bored easily — I made a lot of mischief inside of the house on rainy days. She found no holes… there were no bunny trails either (well, you the reader probably thought I was going off on a tangent again — fooled you). I fooled her too, day after glorious day.
My humans had absolutely no idea just how smart I was. Frank, the black, Toto wanna-be, hadn’t yet learned to talk! She would have told on me, ’cause she was stuck in the yard with those short and weak legs of hers. She does talk now, of course, up here in our new home.
FYI: Frank hung around on earth a lot longer than I did. I guess she had better genes than me. Really, it doesn’t matter how long you occupy the earth, but what you do with your life while you’re here. I might pen a chapter on my metaphysics…I’ll have to give that more thought.
Anyway, Ms. Lapin remained clueless about how I was getting myself all dirty, every day. IF I had been a human, I probably would have made some snarky remarks to her once my secret was laid bare. Hmm…a dog that outwitted a graduate student working toward a doctorate. Pretty funny, don’t you think?
My secret was uncovered one lovely afternoon in the summer of ’74. She came home early. Drat. She opened the kitchen door to let me inside of the house. But of course, I wasn’t in the back yard. I was cavorting with my friends in the neighborhood. She looked around thinking that I hid somewhere, I guess. NOPE. She started calling my name.
I had very keen hearing and I recognized her voice. Boy, am I in trouble, I’m thinking. So, I start galloping like Secretariat down the street (fyi: he was a triple-crown winner just the year before that). She was back in the kitchen by then, probably scratching her head, looking out of the window. She must have observed my trick.
Here’s what I did.
I was outside of the fenced yard. I leaped up onto it, a few inches from the top. NO, I did not climb over it. Do you think I turned into a squirrel? Nope, still a dog, but heavier than a squirrel by about 15 pounds. My weight caused the fencing to bend in towards the yard (it was cheap, chicken wire fencing…remember, it was a poor neighborhood). I leaped into the yard. She saw the whole thing. I guess she inferred that my escape out of the yard was through the same methodology. She didn’t ask Frank to confirm it. No need.
Guess what? I wasn’t allowed out of the yard “unsupervised” I think was the terminology Ms. Lapin used. Now, if I had been a rabbit, I would have dug a trail under that cheesy fencing. Never got a chance to try that possibility. So, I guess I wasn’t quite as smart as I thought I was. Over blown ego — it will get you every time. Remember that, reader!
Anyway, my outdoor adventures were over. I had many more inside the house in the days to come. Even had a few in Dullsville, AR — the place from which I passed into The Great Beyond!
© Linda Lapin (aka Linda A. Robinson) 2018
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for another one of my (yummy) adventures in a few days: The Birthday Cake. I need my beauty sleep! Adio!
In case you missed my first installment of this series, you can read it now! Here we go:
