Everyone says she looks just like the Advantix television ad pup and she'd likely offer paw prints to her adoring fans if we let her.
So confident is she of her role in the realm that she did the unthinkable without a thought.
I pulled my iPod out of my briefcase the other day at work only to find the earbuds and wire in shambles. "Milkteeth" my cousin called them the other day, precision wire snippers is more like it.
I punched out our home number in rapid stabs to tell my husband what HIS dog had done.
He said he knew.
"You knew she destroyed by earbuds and you just put them back over the side of my bag?" I asked, frankly reconsidering 10 years of relative happiness together.
"Earbuds?" he said. "I thought you meant the USB cable for charging and download."
Pause.
"I guess she got that too."
What type of nefarious beast would stoop so low as to pull one cord from a desk and another from a purse in another room and destroy both undetected within a 12 hour period ?
What monster could not only identify both necessary pieces of my prized possession but leave the same unscathed for Charlie's iPod?
Bundle of love and light, hardly. This was one bad bitch.
As I stared at her in horrified amazement, she tilted her head slightly with that vacant puppy stare that others might read as unquestioning adoration.
I knew she was simply plotting her next move. I wondered how long our major appliances were safe.
All the puppy books say any corrective action must be done within the course of the actual indiscretion or the animal will not know why he or she is being punished.
It seems to me like the perfect way to raise an accomplished sneak.
So I couldn't punish her and I certainly couldn't just hand her to a stranger on the street-- bad kharma and she cost more than the iPod both in initial purchase and related accessories.
Then again the iPod has yet to need a 4 a.m. run outside. It doesn't:
- eat dirt
- flirt with crack whores through the back parking lot fence
- jump on company
- torment the cat who was previously the poster child for placidity into a hissing, howling dervish
- remove all the tags from the underside of furniture which we previously didn't even know were there,
- or feign a squat in the elevator just make sure you're paying attention.
When I returned from spending $63.08 on replacement parts at the Apple store tonight, Demon Dog came bounding out from the bedroom.
Her tail was doing triple time and I instantly realized that all the commentators were wrong, she is actually much cuter than the Advantix pup.
She nuzzled and snuggled the kinks out of a particularly brutal day at the office and sat contently at my feet as I hooked the new cable to the computer and recharged the iPod.
She stared unblinking with eyes that offered a deeper truth.
The cat did it.




Copyright 2006 Judi Griggs