Teal, the family mutt, has come for a visit!
My parents are away for the weekend so we're watching him for a few days. I admit, I was a little worried. Teal is a weird dog. He is an indeterminate mix of lord-knows-how-many breeds, but one thing he decidedly is is very, very easily freaked out. He's had a wound on his paw for two years, because whenever he's anxious he chews on it and it can't heal! Nothing will get him to stop - not socks, not creams, not stinky sprays, not even a cone (yes, we coned him. The craziness won). An unexpected visitor? He chews on his paw. The mentally disabled kid from down the street walks by the house? He chews on his paw. You get the idea. For whatever reason - maybe my parents put him on doggy Paxil, I don't know - it's been better in recent months, but I figured if anything were going to aggravate his Anxiety Wound, it would be a trip to Brooklyn, the land of noise and unfamiliar smells, not to mention frequent dissing from our dog-hating cats.
"Get away from me."
Yet it turns out, miraculously... that Teal loves it in Brooklyn. He bounds up and down our big stairwell with his occasional limp every time we walk in the door, ready and eager to go out and smell more new stuff. He happily tugs on his leash to say hi to the nice Polish couple with the Polish baby. He joyfully follows me from room to room in the apartment, even when I am clearly not going to get him a treat. And see the red blanket on the floor behind him? I put that down for him to sleep on, but he loves our floor so much that he just sleeps next to the blanket, as if to preserve the experience of sleeping on something soft for his next visit. He's very spartan that way.
Looks like Teal just needed a quick visit to the big city to spice up his boring suburban life. I do wish the cats had larger memory capacity in their pea-sized brains. Then maybe they'd play with him, or at least be willing to hang out on the same plane. Don't they know he was their guard dog when they were kittens?
Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
