The Dog Days

The Spring is such a wonderful time of year. It brings the people-folk out of their houses. The runners start training in mass for races, bikers create that cloud-like blob along early-morning road sides, and dogs with their owners begin making longer journeys around the neighborhood.

I was on a run yesterday when I passed a number of people walking their beloved furry animals. I couldn’t help but remember just over a year ago when the wifey and I made the collective decision to bring a dog into the family.

And….scene:

It was late fall, the family had just moved from Virginia to Chicago to be with me after waiting months to sell the house. We had already bought a cat and everyone was settling into a good mid-western big city routine.

I’d just finished reading the amazing book The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (yeah it’s an Oprah Book Club book but I didn’t read it because of that…you wanna fight about it?!!!). I suddenly got a hankering to bring a dog into the family thinking in my head, the kids would love growing up with a furry bastard around the house.

It was like being a teenager all over again…I wanted something that I knew was no good. I wanted to bring a dog into a three bedroom, one bathroom house, already equipped with one brand new cat, a backyard no larger than a postage stamp, long winters hovering around 0 degrees, and a wife I knew damn good and well would not walk this beast.

We went to the SPCA as a family. We met dogs. We walked dogs. We played with them on shit-covered sheets of ice. We finally found the “perfect” one! Five minutes later the SPCA worker was quickly removing him from us after he tried to eat my daughter’s face off.

Two days later we brought home a large doggie. We loved that bastard. But holy shit no one in his short life had even begun to train him. And when he stood up on his hind legs, he was the same height as my beloved wife at 5’1”.

This is the same wife who for the first time since she was 14 years old, wasn’t working a job. She was staying home with our children, in a new city, hundreds of miles from any family and friends while her husband was gone from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. during the work-week.

We named him “Odie.” Most of his short life in our home he spent chasing the cat, leaping on counters, tackling our children, trying to eat my wife, and sparking calls from the wife to me at work that sounded a lot like “I can’t handle the two kids, this winter, and this damn dog!!!”

I took him on walks. I read up on training and implemented the tips as best I could. I set up an appointment with a trainer but had to wait a month for a new class to start. But every day I came home it was the same. House trashed, the dog crated, wife frazzled and crying, and kids swinging from the ceiling.

A few days later I came home to the wife in tears again and mumbling, “I just can’t handle it!”

I asked her to put the kids to bed, I grabbed the dog, put him in the car and headed back to the SPCA. It was the worst feeling I’d had in years. I knew I was taking him back to prison after experiencing our wonderful family. A lot of other people would have made a different decision, but I knew we were not the ideal family for this dog that had lived in our house for four days.

Later we explained to the kids that I took Odie to a farm to be with tons of other dogs where they could run around and have so much fun.

We kept track of Odie on the SPCA website and a week later he was adopted and never returned. Looking back at those pictures the wife and I miss him. We wished he had found him at a better time in our lives.

But…we’re confident he’s enjoying his life on that farm with all those dogs…

I Am My Wife's Lil-Bitch

I’m a schmuck and my wife knows it.

Her favorite past-time? Watching me jibber jabber my way into a spike-filled corner only to realize too late that I’m bleeding from 30 different places and crying for mercy.

Now that I’ve tipped you off as to how this is going to end, let me begin my story…

I used to commute on the Metra train into the city for my last jobby job. I enjoyed the mile-long walk except days when my nose hairs froze solid or old-lady Gertrude’s teenage snow shovel-boy decided to take the day off. Other than that, it was my time to listen to damn good tunes, people-watch, and occasionally “accidentally” miss a train so I could squeeze-in a quick beer at the Union Station bar.

Now, I drive three days a week along the paved toll-road pathway to the west filling my mornings and afternoons with NPR, good tunes, and views of ladies putting on make-up, guys picking boogers, and the occasional douche camped out in the left lane going the speed limit.

But the most important thing about that last paragraph was the word "toll-road."

Yeah, I have to stop to pay a toll two times each way every time I go into work. Now, they do make this amazing little magic box called an “IPass” that attaches to your windshield and automatically deducts the toll amount from your bank account so you never have to slow down or stop at a toll booth.

When we first moved to Illinois the wife didn’t work at a job…instead, she had the lowest-paying, most difficult job there is—stay-at-home-mom. One weekend after going through a toll road with her I said, “hey, I heard you can buy an IPass at the grocery store. Next time you go you think you can snag us one?”

I did all I could with that sentence…I used positive words…words like “snag,” “us,” “next time”—seemed harmless.

But what the wife heard was, “hey wife that I own and tell what to do all the time. Go fetch us a toll booth thingy now…and take the kids and fucking like it! And while you’re there, wrestle us some food and beer woman!!!”

Months passed and the IPass never came to fruition. Weekends passed where we’d roll-up to toll booths with no change or cash. We’d blow through them only to frantically go online days later hoping we hadn’t missed the deadline to pay them.

The “fuck you, you do it” dance had begun.

The wife didn’t want to feel like she was being “told” to go do something. I wasn’t going to give in and go buy it myself because…well, because I’m a guy and I never give in.

Except for that time I painted every wall in our entire house…all 1,700 square feet of it and asked the wife if she’d just toss some paint on the spindles going upstairs. Four years later we go to sell the house and who was on HIS hands and knees along the stairs holding a paint brush?

And this was no different. This past week I filled out the paperwork online for an IPass, pressed the “submit” button, all the while knowing damn well what the true meaning of the “submit” button meant in this case.

Twelve years and you’d think I would have learned my lesson by now. You’d think I’d know not to fight battles I know damn well I’m going to lose. You’d think I’d know when to give in because at the end of the day…I’m just slowly backing myself into a corner filled with pointy, sharpy things while the wife kicks back, Shiraz in hand, pointing, laughing, and patting herself on the back and saying, “you silly silly man.”