One of the first things you learn when you become a dog-person is that normal people look at you funny when you talk about your dog too much.
This is usually because these people have normal healthy lives, with real kids, real jobs, and retirement plans.
Well, I never had any of those things. I spent adulthood working crummy jobs. I don’t have kids. And retirement is a three-syllable word used in Charles Schwab commercials during baseball games.
The highlight of my workdays was coming home to find the silhouette of a bloodhound in our front window. Her name was Ellie Mae.
In her heyday, Ellie was obsessed with a cat in our neighborhood named Dexter. Dexter was born of Satan and had eyes like the kid from the movie “Poltergeist.”
Dexter would torment Ellie by visiting our backyard and sitting right in Ellie’s food bowl as if to say, “Look! My butt is on your food! How do you like that?”
And thus, Ellie became transfixed with Dexter and his feline butt. Ellie
would sometimes spend entire days at our window, keeping track of all the illegal activities Dexter committed in our yard. She would turn circles, whimpering.
Dexter would make eye-contact with Ellie through the glass. He would stare her down until she hurled herself against our window hard enough to shatter it.
Dexter was a professional competitor when it came to games between canines and felines.
There was the time, for instance, when I drove to the bank. Ellie came with me. She waited in my truck with the engine running. I ran inside. I was writing a deposit slip when the teller pointed out the window and shrieked.
“Your truck!” she hollered.
My vehicle was rolling into a flower bed.
I sprinted through the parking lot and when I reached the truck, I realized that my crazed bloodhound had knocked the gearshift out of park. She…