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A simple country girl and a simple country boy left their homes and went to town for college. After we cut the apron stings, moved, unpacked, and mastered our culinary Top Ramen skills, we united in the mayhem of marriage, err, I mean holy matrimony. In our newfound collegiate adulthood, we gained higher levels of knowledge, but occasionally we came across an educational opportunity outside the brick and mortar school walls.
And in at least one such case we were the professors…
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One laundry day we left our clothes swirling in soap and water, and instead of reading textbooks during the wash-n-spin cycles, we wandered around the mall. We always found ourselves in the same place and that day was no different; our collective drool dripped down the pet store display case. As we stared at a litter of black lab mutt pups, an pet store employee wrangled another box of puppies and dumped a heap of Rottweilers in with the cute Labradors.
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Immediately, a small lab pup raised up, crawled over the others, and stood before the newcomers, as if she was the self-appointed guard dog for her baby brothers and sisters. She growled, a little, yet effective, guttural threat at the obnoxious Rott-tots. They backed up in wide-eyed dismay at her daring ferocity.
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“Why look at that!” I exclaimed.
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“Yeah. That one black mutt is protecting all her kin,” my husband said.
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“She’s little, but she’s fierce.”
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“And she’s dang cute.”
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I sighed and fixed my eyes on my man. “Hey, she reminds me of me. Does she remind you of me?”
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“Yeah, whatever.”
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“We gotta have her,” we said in unison.
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We looked at one another, I smiled lovingly, and then we began a frantic search for money. We emptied our pockets, we pawned our car’s spare tire and my husband’s belt buckle, and instead of using the quarter-hungry machines to dry our wet clothes back at the laundry mat, my husband dragged three sacks of soggy laundry to our rig. And I grasped one bundle of store-bought, wriggling puppy mutt. The three of us wagged and gave out sloppy kisses whilst my husband drove us home.
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Because I always wanted a dog named Elvis or Earl we had a couple days of heavy debate before we agreed upon a name. Since the pup turned out to be a she instead of a he, my favorite names were nixed until I had the bright idea to insert various letters in front of both names to come up with a gender-friendly girl name.
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We test-drove our alphabetical options: “Here Pelvis! Here Pelvis!” didn’t sound so good but we tried again; P + Earl = Pearl. Bingo! Our first dog was a precious black Pearl.
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Fast-forward a few months. Autumn had sprung. It’s always my favorite time of year, but the serenity of bright blue skies and crisp leaves was shattered by the couple who lived below us as they intensified the training of their mighty, papered, and registered hunting dog, aptly named “Hound.” Secretly though, we were privy to his lack of know-how so we secretly called him “Blockhead.”
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The dog. Not the man.
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Anyway, one afternoon my husband and Pearl snored in our makeshift sleeping bag bed on the floor as prepped potatoes for the oven. I heard the neighbor man’s wife leave and five minutes later he knocked on our door. Pearl rushed toward the rude awakening with a menacing growl, but stopped short once I opened the door and she saw her wagging canine buddy on the porch with his master.
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Our neighbor convinced my husband to take the dogs for “a mock grouse hunt” in the nearby field. Basically the man wanted to show-off his dog’s dummy retrieving skills and his response to both voice and hand signal commands.
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So my husband followed the man and his pedigreed dog with our eager mutt, who sleeps on our bed, lounges across the backrest of the couch, routinely eats wicker baskets, and who sometimes walks around in t-shirts (cause I think a dog in clothes is funnier than without).
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Because it’s been said that these here blog posts should be around 1000 words,
you will need to stay tuned for the continuation of this saga on another day.
You’ll come back ’cause you don’t wanna miss the primary lesson do ya?
Oh forget it! This is my place and I’ll ramble on and on if’n I see fit.
And if’n you see fit to keep reading, look below.
If not, come back another day.
And look below.
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Within an hour I heard the man put his barking dog into the condo unit below. Our door flew open, Pearl wagged in, followed by my husband, and before I shut the door, the neighbor man squeezed through. He stood stoic and white-faced as he leaned against the entryway wall. From behind his back, my husband then produced a dead grouse and a poorly stifled grin.
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“Hey, honey, look what we got!”
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“Uh, I thought he was only practicing with Hound today,” I said as I nodded at the man.
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My husband said, “Oh, they practiced all right and Hound did a pretty good job until the last dummy toss and retrieval. Hound landed on top of an unsuspecting grouse. The grouse finally freed itself from beneath the dog’s belly and took off.”
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“What did Hound do next? And where was Pearl through all this?” I asked.
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“Oh, Hound barked, chased his tail, and drooled a lot,” my husband said. Near giddy with excitement, my man continued with his story. “And the last time I had seen Pearl she was somewhere across the field following her nose. Anyway, when that grouse took flight, she ripped across the hillside at full tilt, jumped six feet off the ground, and caught that dang bird by the tail feathers.”
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“Yeah, well, she doesn’t have a soft mouth like my dog. She broke its leg,” said our neighbor man in a huff.
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“Well, there’s that. But dude, did you see her run? And what about that jump?!”
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“I did. I did. And you are right, it was spectacular,” said the man as he focused on the floor.
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“So, I’m assuming you have your bird hunting license, right?” I said to the man, who by the way, was enrolled as a second year law student.
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“Uh, not exactly.”
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“Counselor, did you go grousing without a license? Well, at least you had permission from the landowner, right? I reckon you could get kicked out of law school over something like this.”
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The man shook, his knees buckled, and his lower lip quivered just a bit.
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This moment proved to be our first lesson in the School of Country Folk Common Sense. Well, actually it was the second lesson because as I later found out, my husband had already taken to the lectern with instructions on how to put the injured grouse out of its misery.
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Although neither of us had time to make a syllabus, draft an outline, or prepare a handout, we effortlessly continued with our country-tainted, real world instruction.
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“Oh, for Pete’s sake, just leave the evidence here. The oven is still hot from some potatoes I baked. My husband will dress it out, I’ll cook it, and you two can eat the proof. And if we play our cards right, no one will ever know what dastardly dog deeds went on in that field.”
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My husband walked the pale man outside and returned to make the dead bird edible.
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I baked a foul fowl and later that night as the two men ate grouse and ‘taters, they discussed the varied nuances and diverse methodologies of basic dog rearing and birddog training.
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Soon thereafter, I took the feathery trash out to the curb and a saw movement in the downstairs window. The great and mighty hunting dog stared at me with frightened eyes from the cushions of the once-forbidden couch. He wore a white t-shirt and had a party hat strapped to his big, black blockhead.
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Simply Darlene, is there a moral to this story? I don’t know for sure, but I squeezed out two for ya.
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One: not all schooling needs books, but all learning needs some sense.
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Two: it doesn’t matter if your pooch is pampered, papered, pedigreed, or pinstriped, he’s only going to catch what he’s got a mind to bite. Just like us, aye? Whether we comfortably fall in with simple folks, country bumpkins, city slickers, saucy suburbanites, or worldwide wanderers, we’ve got to exercise some mental acuity in our choices to follow God.
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Otherwise, all we are collectively gonna do, is wear dorky t-shirts and chase our little waggy tails.
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* PLEASE HELP!!
