Why We Love This Dog

My dog is curled up in my lap (yes, she is a lap dog), and she’s hot. Not “attractive” hot, though I think most dogs would say she is quite cute with her black curly hair and black eyes. The eyes are her best feature when you can see them, which is only when she looks at you askance so that the little sliver moons of white show.

No, this dog is really hot. She’s like a heating pad, which works okay in the winter because it gets cold sitting in front of the computer, but in the summer we’re both shifting positions, trying to get some cool air in, but she won’t get out of my lap even if we’re both miserable, and if I put her down because I can’t take it anymore, she looks at me with those sliver moon eyes and whines all pitiful-like until I pick her back up.

Speaking of whining, this dog is always seeing something out the back door and wanting to check it out. I open the sliding door to let her out, and she just stands there with her nose stretched out, smelling the cold air rushing in. I’ll start to close the door, and she leans way forward and takes a step. I stop the door and she sniffs some more, and I lose all patience and try to shut the door quickly, but then she tries to bolt through it before it closes. So I open the door enough for her to get through, and she finally goes out on the patio and barks a few times. If I stand there, she ignores me and just looks around for an eternity. If I walk off, she turns toward the door and wants to be let back in right away. I read somewhere that a doorway is something that a dog is always on the wrong side of.

Dogs are pretty entertaining, though, aren’t they? I mean, this one will play with you by pretending to bite your hand or pull on your sleeve and growl. You push her away and she comes back, pretending to bite again. It’s all in good fun until suddenly, for absolutely no reason, she gets mad. She lunges at you and bites pretty hard, which usually doesn’t hurt because she’s only a 9 pound Yorkie Poo, but sometimes her little pointy tooth will make contact with a bone and it hurts like the dickens. She growls like you’ve become a burglar and she’s morphed into a Doberman, and she’s got a particular growl that if you hear that, and you get your hand or face or any other part close to her, she’d bite hard enough to make a lasting tooth impression in your flesh.

My son loves to get her to the biting stage because he thinks her growling is funny. I say to him, “You’re gonna get bit,” and he grins and looks at me and, every single time, puts his hand a little closer to the dog’s mouth and she shoots out like a lighting bolt and clamps onto his hand, and he yanks it away howling, “SHE BIT ME!” like it just came out of nowhere. He gets all upset because those bites really do hurt, and acts like the dog is disloyal and unfaithful, and shows me the tooth mark before he goes away pouting, clutching his bitten hand and mumbling, “Bad dog.”

I can’t tell you how many times this has been repeated at my house. Over and over and over again. My son will go off to his room or somewhere and then come back out a little later, still pouting, and won’t make eye contact with the dog, who’s just sitting there on my lap minding her own business, the altercation already forgotten and her little stub tail thumping soundlessly against my leg.

The dog is the central figure in this house. Everyone wants to know what the dog is doing at all times. When the kids come home, I ask them how school was, and then I tell them about the adventures of the dog that day. “She treed a squirrel,” or “she rolled in something so foul it made my eyes water,” or “she saw some crows and barked her fool head off for half an hour.” I honestly don’t know what we all talked about before the dog. She’s everyone’s best friend, but she likes my lap the best.