When an Angel Swoops In to Save Your……Bottom.
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She first came to me on my sixth birthday — one of the first Doberman Pinschers in our area of the county. Dad had seen the movie The Amazing Dobermans and just had to have one. He thought he was getting her for himself, but Mom said I wanted a dog, so he could get her for me. He could think what he wanted, but she took up with the youngest anyway. Me.
She slept in my bed, sat beside me while I ate breakfast, walked me to the bus, and waited at the end of the driveway when I got off. She went everywhere I did until I went to bed — then she'd go out for a while until Dad came home from work around 11:30. (Snicker.)
If Mom forgot to turn on the outside light for Dad, the guy he carpooled with would drop him off at the end of the driveway and Dad would have to walk to the house in the dark. Dutchess — yes, that was her name, and I know, a Doberman named Dutchess — but it was the early '70s, so we might have been original. Anyway, Dutchess never barked, and she moved very quietly. She would walk up through the garden, down the ditch beside the road, and then quietly sneak up behind Dad and softly growl. Talk about hollering — and the language!
Now here's my story.
Dad had to build a special chain-link fence lot for Dutchess when she had to go on "time-out" for a couple of weeks so we didn't end up with little Dutchesses running around. Well, she was in time-out and I was playing in the yard when all of a sudden Dad started yelling, and somehow I just knew it involved me.
Come to find out, somebody — could have been me, could have been someone else, I really don't remember (probably me) — had shot the windshield of his '69 Chevy truck with a BB gun. And as luck would have it, I was the only one who owned one. I explained it to Dad the same way I just explained it to you. He was not amused.
In fact, he grabbed me by the arm, jerked his belt off, and was preparing to administer justice. But he froze when he heard the chain-link fence start to rattle. He turned toward the noise just in time to see Dutchess coming up and over the top of that fence. You should have seen him run — straight into the house, through the back door, into the kitchen.
Dutchess came straight to her little boy.
There I stood in the driveway, Dutchess at my side, Dad at the kitchen storm door hollering at me to GET IN THIS HOUSE — and me shaking my head no while I rubbed my dog. I knew I was getting a whooping, but I was hoping he'd calm down a little. He seemed to be getting madder though. What I didn't know was that Mom was sitting at the other end of the table laughing at him.
Well, I got grounded and the BB gun got put away for a while. All was good.
Life Lesson: Always be good to your pets, your animals, and your fellow humans — because when things are going sideways, you never know WHO is going to swoop in and save your……rear end! 🐾
Speaking of things built to last — just like Dutchess...
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