Puppy Lust
Mason calls my obsessive behavior puppy lust, meaning around a puppy I lose all rational faculties. He said it changes me. And he’s right, but in my defense, Ralphie Boy changed anybody he encountered.
In the short time he spent with us, I took him everywhere I went, stopping first at the Tractor Supply Company (TSC) where I left the four-pound plump pup in the arms of the ooh’ing and aah’ing cashiers, while I grabbed a few cans of soft dog food.
I went by the Robertson County Animal Clinic to pick up our yorkie Annie Daisy after her teeth cleaning, and Miss Gene, the receptionist, swooped Ralphie up, stuck her kind face in his itsy-bitsy maw, and inhaled his puppy breath like it was lavender.
Dr. Dan, a gigantic man that wears overalls and specializes in livestock, came out to say hello, but ended up ooh’ing just like those TSC cashiers, then helping the only way he knew how and giving Ralph a free de-worming, giggling behind his fuzzy mustache while the pup sat in his baseball-glove sized hands.
The only evening he stayed here, Mason and I walked the puppy on the same Springfield Greenway where he had been ditched. We couldn’t get a thousand feet before one of the regulars would stop us: Michael, a toothless factory worker that wears a high-brimmed baseball cap, stroked the puppy’s fuzzy head, gnawing his lips over his gums while a childlike expression crossed his wizened face. “I ain’t never seen nothing like that,” he said.
Rock, the whistling fisherman who camps by the Sulphur Fork Creek, asked, “what y’all found now?” Then he did something I never saw him do before. He set his fishing pole on the ground! So he could squeeze the black puppy with a teddy bear face against his shirtless tattoo-ed chest.
And the always-smiling Hispanic sisters pushing strollers filled with their own pack of small children kept pointing and repeating “bonito perro” in that lovely musical accent while their kids, dressed in colorful clothes, jostled for better views of “el perro.”
As far as animals, our pack accepted Ralphie rather easily, but our foster dog Thelma, a fifty-five pound slobbering lab mutt, was particularly bewitched. After each play session, poor Ralphie was drenched with spit, and I’d have to give him another bath in a mixing bowl on the porch. When he’d nap, which was every twenty minutes, Thelma, a tank-like beast, would stare with eyes exuding tenderness, waiting patiently for Ralphie Boy’s next burst of energy, so she could cover him in drool again.
Thankfully, for both Thelma and I, that cute puppy has been gone for almost a week, and things are running much smoother around the Farnival now that we can focus on our priorities.
Ralphie is now known as Rico and living with Kelly and her twelve-year-old son C.J. in Springfield, Tennessee. A few days after his adoption both Kelly and C.J. admitted to suffering from puppy lust, but who could blame them? It happens to the best of us.