Some people (you know who you are) accuse me of exaggerating when I write about my pets, but honest, they do things that are so much funnier than I could ever come up with.

Take this morning -- please -- I heard the clatter of the cats' food dish on top of the clothes dryer. The cats won't usually touch the dog's food, but he will eat theirs. So I put his dish on the floor and the cats' on top of the dryer. Sasha, my small, dainty, ladylike (I'm being facetious here, folks) Siamese, was noisily batting her empty food dish around. She turned and looked at Maccabee's dish and kind of licked her chops, then sprang to the floor and began crunching away at the dog food.

Mac (a miniature dachshund of the John Wayne persuasion) gave a gasp of horror and leaped to the defense of his vittles, barking furiously, bouncing off the floor with each yelp in righteous indignation.

Now, Mac will annoy and aggravate the two male cats, Traveller and Willoughby, but Sasha has no sense of humor, is not a bit playful, and has boxed the ears of this canine nuisance a number of times just for looking at her wrong. She looked at Mac and gave him a show-the-fangs go-to-hell look and hissed like an angry teakettle.

Mac stopped barking and threw his head back and howled: "Awoooooo, awoooooo!" That was the maddest mutt you've ever seen, but being neither stupid nor crazy, howling was all he did.

I decided it was time to rescue the cat from being poisoned by (Ugh! Some folks will eat anything) dog food. As soon as I filled her dish, she jumped back onto the dryer and began chomping away.

Mac, meanwhile, scarfed dog food as fast as he could; trying to gobble it up before Sasha came back. That may not have been a good idea. Mac is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, if you get my drift. If Sasha had wanted the rest of his food, she would probably have cheerfully disemboweled him to get it.

As you can see I have told a straight narrative here and neither exaggerated nor embellished it. So much for those who say I tell "stretchers."

Copyright © David Yehudah
March 22, 1999