A Drive to the Airport

I took my coworker and her husband to the airport this morning. I hadn’t met her husband yet, and I wanted to make a good impression. My little dog was coming with me in the car, and she often smells like a goat. The beast rolls in everything. She cannot go outside without flopping on her back and wiggling from side to side, all four legs in the air, grinding herself into some foul smelling dead something. I’ve seen her roll on a squished earthworm – any creature that has departed this world she will hunt down and have her back smeared into it in nanoseconds. She has to do it quick because I’ll see her through the window and yell at her to stop. She pretends she can’t hear me long enough to get coated in a stench, then jumps up and looks at me like, “You talkin’ to me?”

So this morning I gave her a couple of squirts of some cheap flowery smelling stuff my daughter had bought. My husband is allergic to scents so I don’t have my own perfumes.

When I squirted that dog with a fine mist of smell, she was so insulted. She took off running like I’d poured hot water on her and tried to rub it off on the walls. She nosed down into the carpet and walked along like she was trying to shovel something, pressing one side of her face and shoulder then the other into the rug in a pitiful attempt to try and scrape the scent off.

I’m not sure why a dog can’t stand to smell good. Not this one, anyway. If I let her outside after a bath, she streaks to the grass and starts rolling just to get the smell of dirt on her. She comes back in with half the back yard clinging to her long wet hair. You can’t comb it off, it’s woven in and half the time it’s sticky – why I don’t know. But as she walks through the house it drops all over the floor like autumn leaves in a windstorm. It looks like someone’s scattered brown and green confetti over every floor in the house.

There are laws of physics that state: a 10 pound, 12 inch high dog with long black hair can collect 30 times the squared surface area of its body in yard debris consisting of tiny sticks, brown grass from last week’s mowing, and those little maple helicopters. Double the formula if the place where the dog rolls is under a sappy fir tree like the ones covering our back yard.

So this morning this dog that normally smells like a goat because it’s not practical to give her a bath every five minutes - this dog smelled like a cheap tramp. When we got in the car, the whole place filled with the sweet smell of a bouquet of sickly sweet flowers. I discovered I didn’t have any gum and I hadn’t brushed my teeth for fear of being late. Then I put on some “unscented” lotion that added an acrid element to the mix.

When my passengers got in the car, the husband who I just met immediately rolled down his window, even though it was raining. The dog, loving the fresh air, jumped into the backseat to sit on his lap, coating his jeans in that perfumed goat smell that probably lingered throughout their whole 15 hour flight to Brazil.

I’m not so sure I made a good impression.