DOG
Howdy neighbors, I’m Tex…and I live in a little teardrop trailer called the Club Foote, parked at the very way-back end of the Lucky Dozen Campground. I’m a semi-permanent resident, and Renee, the sweet lady what owns the place, lets me work off the rent at my own pace.
Other than Dog, I live alone. Dog is my...well...maybe I should say Dog is "a"...dog. He just showed up one day...110 pounds of black lab.
I knew from the beginning Dog was enough dog that someone would eventually come looking for him, so he and I spent two days just kinda staring at each other suspiciously. I didn't speak and he didn't wag, and for the most part, we just sorta put up with each other.
On the third day, when I caught him drinking out of a muddy rain puddle, we had our first conversation. I explained that if he was gonna hang out around the trailer, he couldn't be drinking out of a mud hole...leastways not in broad daylight. So, I set him a big bowl up under the trailer tongue…out of the way, where it wouldn’t get turned over. Then I commenced to teach him what few manners a cowboy could recall from his younger days.
That evening, I gave him a big chunk of ham, complete with bone, and he promptly thanked me by bruising my leg with his tail. It's like a hickory axe handle, weighs seventeen and a half pounds, and he wags it like he means it.
At the end of the third week, I accidentally let him inside the Foote, and he promptly laid claim to the entire right-hand side of the cabin. There goes the neighborhood. I mean…there's not much an old cowboy can do when he's tryin’ to rest sore cowboy parts on the queen mattress, and a hundred plus pounds of black mischief decides he just can't stand being left alone outside.
That's when me and Dog had our sixty-seventh conversation, wherein I explained that teardrop trailers are for cowboys, and occasionally, for cowboys and ladies, and dogs are neither expected nor invited. He didn't say much, just sat there and blinked his non-understanding, especially when I got to the part about his lack of doggie lavation.
Since no one ever came looking for him, I've concluded that Dog apparently has no felony rap sheet to speak of, so I've learned to overlook his daily class C misdemeanors. The chewed-up seven prong plug can be replaced if I ever decide to move, I really don't need that little knob on the tongue jack, and the tires probably need watering on a regular basis anyway…so they don’t dry rot.
As they say, dogs will be dogs...but during our evening conversation yesterday, he told me he was tired of Brookes and Dunn and Alison Krauss...and asked if I had any Snoop Dog CDs. I'm wonderin' if maybe he's been getting' a little too much fiber...
Tex