dog walkers. They’re younger and more fun than adults). I would sit and stare at the door, waiting impatiently for Bob to arrive for my afternoon constitutional. We’d then go on a 45-minute walk, when I would poo and pee. God, anal Dada would always ask Bob, “Did Mr. Darby do his business?” The few times I didn’t, mon père would go off the rails. He’d walk around the house asking me why I didn’t poo. “Do you want more food?” he’d ask. Daddy is famous for holding his eliminations when he is on a plane or at the movies or in a restaurant. He even had a friend from North Carolina named Jim Bob who could never go to the bathroom in a public place. Mister G caught his phobia.
And a side note: After going on a walk with Bob, I hop on my Dada’s bed and as he describes it, I scrunch my behind on a pillow on my side of the bed. I do like his bed, partly because I didn’t like the alternative when it was first presented: “You can sleep in your crate or on 600-thread count Pratesi million-dollar sheets and pillows.” (Mon père loves to tell the story of how Pemigio Pratesi started the sheet business in Vinci in Tuscany Italy in 1906. He goes nutso over anything Italian and is wont to say he’ll take mafiosa over any other ethnic. I told you that Dada is more than eccentric!) The choice was a no-brainer so I have been on that fancy bed ever since.
Living by Grace
Here’s a too-hot-to-handle saga of another trip to the Dog Park. Dada loves the fact that we dogs can do our business quicker and better when we smell other dogs. Anyway, I was sniffing and working myself up to potty, thrilling mon père with every whiff. All of a sudden I spotted this canine babe with chestnut skin and a tail wagging a million miles a minute with excitement at seeing me. I ran to her like a good ole boy from Powderly, Alabama, chasing a southern slut in a twirl skirt. Her name is Grace.
Wouldn’t you know it? My Daddy knew hers, a chef named Alan. It seems that Alan’s restaurant Fork in the Road recently closed. Fork in the Road was where Daddy and Scott took clients for their graduation dinners. Mister G is real picky about restaurants. His measuring stick for a great restaurant is Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham and Picholine in New York. He’s been known to drop a few bucks for rack of lamb at Rene’s in Tlaquepaque in Sedona. Yummy, yum, yum.
Grace was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, all of eight weeks old. She was frisky and she ran from me —and of course, I caught her every time and rolled her over and checked her area code. I had my paws all over her. What a honey. Already, I was in love. She may be too young for me, you say? Keep your two-legged opinions to yourself. When I come to the Dog Park it is open season for all bitches and me. Daddy asked Alan if Grace could come over to our yard for a play date. I’ll show her a play date. She’ll soon know that I may be neutered but I am still all man and then some.
I don’t know a Rhodesian Ridgeback from a Heinz 57 variety slum dog. But I do know that whatever Grace’s tendencies, I’ll lick ‘em and like ‘em as long as they are hers. When we came home, Daddy looked up Rhodesian Ridgeback on the internet and here is what it said: “Red wheaten in color, ferocious in the hunt but at home she is calm, gentle, obedient and a good dog. They grow to be 60 to 80 pounds.” Holy Toledo, Nellie. She is going to be a big one. Daddy always liked bigger women just like Tom Cruise. What I loved about the description is “ferocious in the hunt,” especially if she is hunting for me. I think I dig ferocious. Fur will fly!
Speaking of bitches, I have been putting the thought in Daddy’s head to get another Wire Fox Terrier, but a girly girl. He and his friends go to dinner and to movies. Ever so often they fly off to New York and hunt old digs in Egypt and go to the French Open in Paris. He’s been bitching a lot lately about his Southern-based airline. Although he’s a million-miler on this bucket of bolts, he is thinking of switching to another airline. I can tell him, but he won’t listen: they are all crummy. They have too many hidden fees. Always late. All these hot air balloons will soon stuff so many people in smaller spaces that the obesity rate in the world had better fall or it will not be a pretty picture in the boxcars in the back. Anyway, his travel schedule may not allow for a sister act for me. Pity, I say.
TV, Joy and Stupid People
For as long as I could remember, mon père ate his dinner on a TV-tray watching one show at 6:00 o’clock in the evening: Joy Behar. She is a big-mouthed redhead with more opinions than a den of Beverly Hills ex- housewives trying to tell the Tri-Deltas how to catch a husband and take him for everything she can run away with.
Joy Behar is quick to curse and throw barbs at people she doesn’t like, most of all Ann Coulter, a real mean-spirited potty-mouth blond. The yapper doesn’t talk. She spews. Joy also hates that Aussie actor Mel Gibson who got into hot water with his wife and the press when he got some Russian chick pregnant. His wife finally divorced him and got a zillion dollar settlement. Joy would probably tar and feather him if she could. Oh, and Joy is Italian, which of course causes il mio papà to roll his eyes in a paroxysm of, pardon the pun, joy. The television maven, one of his majesty’s favorite words, uses Italian words when she holds court.
After Joy Behar says, “Goodnight everybody,” Dada reads for an hour and then turns out the light. That’s when I hop out of the Italian finery and go to my own bed, which mon père got for me when I was done with the crate. If he gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, he picks me up and takes me back to his bed and holds me tight. Soon enough, he turns his back to mine and goes back to sleep. I stay in bed until he wakes me at 5:00 o’clock with, “Wake up Mr. Darby, it is time to go potty and pee.”
And that’s how a dog with peerage and an ordinary garden-variety human ends and starts his days.
Glenn Beck Needs to Be in Judge Judy’s Court
One thing I like about il mio papà and our nightly bedtime ritual is that he no longer makes me lie under the covers like he used to. He stopped scrunching me in his arms and holding me tight. We recently watched the U.S. Open and saw Venus Williams and Roger Federer win their opening matches. I was catnapping and Dada scratched my back every now and again while he was glued to every swing of the racket from these two-legged stars. And when he turned out the light and we were close for a few minutes, he told me I could go to my own bed if I wanted to. I did, and jumped off that million dollar bed and those Pratesi sheets. I was fast asleep before he was.
It’s time for me to weigh in on some of the yakety-yak-yak nonsense that is floating around terra firma. I was around during the Pony Express days when two-leggeds got their news a few weeks after the Indians lost another chunk of land and Abraham Lincoln got shot and killed by some nutcase. These days, humans get info in a nanosecond. Speed isn’t always a good thing. What’s wrong with turning things over in your mind? Why not give a thought impression time to breathe? Thank God my Dada didn’t fly off the handle and ship me back to Iowa every time he got mad at me.
Oy vey, as the Jews lament. I would like to send Glenn Beck, a real television fruitcake, to Siberia. He rips and tears at any and everything liberal and humane and he orates and bloviates — an expression I heard from Bill O’Reilly, one of those other opinionated commentators on Fox, the most right-wing TV station on the air. Daddy actually declared “enough is enough from the insane asylum” so we don’t even pause on that channel. He says it in such a sanctimonious voice that he sees devils and snakes crawling around Beck and O’Reilly and the rest of the mean-spirited commentators on Fox. Il mio papà believes that 2012 may mean the end of these irritating talking heads. What I can tell you is that I am glad that I can’t be heard by anybody but Daddy because I would be on a lot of Hit Lists, locked up or “put to sleep” by these douche bags.
And then there is this issue of terrorism, which makes everybody from the four corners loonier than Olivia de Havilland in the snake pit. Two-legged types are trying to keep Muslims from building a mosque near “Ground Zero” in New York. God,
