The Boys

Sky and Buddy

I occasionally do some dog-sitting for a friend of mine. He’s got two dogs - Buddy, a Silky Terrier and Sky, a Sheltie.

Buddy’s the smaller and older of the two. He’s also the cuter and the more ferocious. I do mean ferocious. Sky’s friskier but less secure in the world.

The dogs live for two things – food (other than the prepared dried food) and the outdoors. For the dogs, the outdoors is about three acres with an electric fence perimeter, a great area to run and frolic.

Buddy has an inside personality and an outside personality. Inside, he’s a lap dog and generally responds to commands. Outside, he turns surly and commands don’t mean much to him. If you’re trying to get him to come in, for instance, he stares at you with a look that says, “you’re kidding, right. You actually think I’m going to listen to you. Let’s have an understanding; I will come in when I damned well feel like coming in. You butt out. Case closed.”

While Buddy can be very independent, Sky needs to be close to you. He doesn’t like to have you out of his sight. So, when I go to the kitchen, he goes to the kitchen, when I go outside, he goes outside, when I go to the bathroom, he goes to the bathroom, that is he follows me into the bathroom where he appears to be fascinated with what I do there, maybe wondering why I get to go inside while he has to hold it until he’s outside.

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Buddy and Sky live in the present. Even if they’ve been outside for hours, they’ll come inside, eat something, and they’ll want to go outside again.

They give me the anxious stare combined with some whimpering when they want to go out. I know they don’t have to go out, and I want to watch the news.

So we’re sitting in the great room, I’m watching the news. The dogs are restless at my feet, and they pass some of that noxious dog gas which is strong enough to stop an ox in its tracks. As my eyes water and I gasp for air, the dogs look up at me as if to say, “now will let us out, Bozo!”

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Someone I know kisses her dog on the lips. I like dogs a lot, but that’s going a little too far for me. I’ve seen where the mouths of dogs go – in grub holes, in piles of shit, on other dog’s genitals. And that God-awful breath! No matter how many Dentabones you give them, it still smells like a mixture of garbage and turd out of a pizza oven.