Furnace Troubles

Troubles was a dog of completely nondescript appearance. Nothing about his floppy ears, bobbed tail or pudgy body alerted an observer that here was an animal with a remarkable ability to act dumb.

     Yet it was an act. And he was so good at it that even we, his family, fell for it. Well, the adults did. My sister and I knew better all along. For example, the three of us—me, my sister and Troubles—liked to play a game in which my sister and I ran and he tried to catch us by the heels, causing us to trip and skid across the polished wooden floor of our living room. (My mom wasn't as fond of this game as we were.)

     Troubles knew that he had to grab our shoes, not our heels above our shoes, or he'd hurt us.  We learned that he knew this and would yell ouch to get him to let go. And he always did! He was smart, but he wasn't willing to take the chance that he might have a little Achilles tendon in his teeth. When we laughed because we'd fooled him, he'd sulk until we scratched his ears and shared our penny candy with him.

     It was a simple case of revenge that finally tipped off Mom and Dad. He was a housedog—a people house dog, that is. Outside he had a doghouse that he refused to use. If we left him out and it happened to rain, he'd sulk for days. 

     But in our house we had a utility room with a concrete floor. Even if we were gone longer than we intended to be, and he had an accident, he couldn't do any damage.

     He didn't have accidents. He'd wait all day—even 10 or12 hours—to avoid using the papers we so conscientiously put down for him.

     Then one day, when he was a middle-aged dog, he must have had enough. Maybe we'd been gone too often or stayed too long. Whatever it was he was definitely pissed off. (No pun intended.) And in that indestructible room, he found the one thing he could do that would really, REALLY get back at us.

     He peed on the furnace filter.

     We came home to an entire house that reeked of dog urine.

     Of course, my parents thought it was just an unfortunate accident—the first time. After about the third time he did it, even they caught on. And yes, they were upset. Very upset.

     But my father, though not so nondescript as the dog, was no dummy either. And he was determined that no dog was going to outsmart him. Chuckling as he worked, he connected one end of a wire to the metal honeycomb that held the filter and the other end to a battery. "This'll teach even a dumb dog like you a lesson,” he informed the dog.

     Troubles watched intently. And the next time we left home for the day, leaving Troubles in the utility room... Did you guess? Troubles did NOT pee on the furnace filter.

     In fact, he NEVER DID pee on the furnace filter for all the months my dad left it wired to the battery. The day after my frustrated father took his invention apart and we left home—yup, you guessed it. Troubles peed on the furnace filter.

     My dad stood in our highly perfumed house with his hands on his hips and said, very seriously, to the dog, "OK, you win this round. But if you don't cut it out NOW, you're going to find yourself out in the ice and snow next time we have to leave town."

     And Troubles never peed on the furnace filter again.

The Anniversary Cake -- Judgment

“Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.”

Any man and woman who put up with one another for 50 years deserve a party.  My sister, Holly, and I agreed that was especially the case with our mom and dad, who had eloped during World War II after a one-month courtship, skipping all the non-essential trappings of a wedding—like guests, a reception and a honeymoon.  They'd had their honeymoon to Hawaii after they had grandkids, but they'd never had a wedding reception. Now, we reasoned, they could have the party they couldn't afford when they were barely 21 and not quite 18.

So we rented the hall, booked the band, ordered the hors d'oeuvres and sent the invitations.  Holly, a professional caterer, would drive up a few days early and use my kitchen to bake and decorate a special cake to take the place of the wedding cake they'd never had.  It was going to be beautiful. (Bad judgment call #1.)

I had only one oven, strictly amateur-sized, so the cake had to be baked in shifts.  Holly started early in the morning, reasoning that although May in Illinois is usually cool, because I didn't have central air, there was no point taking chances.  She'd get a jump on the sun.

It was the hottest May 13 on record.

As layers and layers of cake accumulated on the dining room table, heat accumulated in the kitchen, spilled out into the dining room and started to intrude on the living room.  All the windows were open and fans running. 

My sister is a trooper.  She worked on until she had a multi-layered tower with roses filling the top, spilling over the edge and down one side.  Then the icing, turned into sweet lava by the sun pouring in the glass patio doors and the heat pouring out of the oven, began to flow.

"Let's put it in the basement," I suggested.  "It'll be a lot cooler down there."

We carried it carefully down the stairs into the cool, dark quiet and placed it on a fold-up table in the middle of the room.  The icing firmed up, my sister repaired the sags, and we shut the door and went back upstairs, relieved that it had worked out so well and we could now finish up the rest of the preparations for the big party the next day.

But before we could continue our work, we decided that my sister's dog, who'd spent the morning shut in the guest bedroom, needed to get some exercise, not to mention relief.  Thumper was a docile, friendly little dog who seemed sublimely ignorant of the fact that some of his ancestors had been bred to subdue stubborn bulls.  He coexisted happily in my sister's house with three cats, a rabbit and a bird.

My dog, Vargi, was a golden ball of fluff with a curled, feathery tail and a little pug nose who was the sweetest, most enthusiastic, most affectionate dog you'd ever want to meet.

With people.

When other dogs approached, she morphed into a hairy pit bull.  That's why Thumper had been in the bedroom, which, judging from his stretching and yawning when we let him out, hadn't been especially taxing for him.

We kept them apart and made Vargi be, if not nice, at least distantly aggressive.  Then, when my husband came home from whatever errand he had been on, we went to do our chores, instructing him to "watch the dogs." (Bad judgment call #2.)

When I returned about 15 minutes later, I saw Thumper in the back yard and no sign of Vargi.

"Where's Vargi?" I asked.

"She wouldn't leave Thumper alone, so I threw her into the basement."

"The basement!" I shrieked.  "That's where the cake is!"

I ran down the stairs, nearly crashing through the door at the bottom, my husband only a step behind me.

It was too late.  Vargi sat there looking up at us innocently through the bangs that nearly obscured her big brown eyes, daintily licking her pink nose and protruding lower teeth. Nearly too small to reach the table top, she had nevertheless taken a large doggy bite out of one side of the bottom layer of the cake.

I broke the news to my sister when she returned a few minutes later.  "The bad news is" I said, explaining how the dog and the cake had come to be in the basement together.  "But the good news is, she's a small dog, so it's not a very big bite."

She gave me "the look," rolling her dark eyes at me the way she had when we were kids and I'd said something she considered typically big-sisterish. Then she sighed and went down to inspect the damage.

"You're right," she finally admitted.  "I can fix it so no one will ever know.  We can put this side in the front because we'll be cutting from the back, and we can just work around it. (Bad judgment call #3.) But Mom and Dad will have a cow."

"They never need to know," I said softly, with a wink, “and neither does anyone else.” (Bad judgment call #4.)

And they never did—until they read this essay several years later.

And neither did the person who, in spite of all our efforts, cut himself a big piece of cake from the center of the dog bite.