HanktheDog Blog

Look, I'm just a regular dog. I put my harness on one leg at a time, just like everyone else. I drool, I snore, and I'm subject to an array of sometimes unpleasant (at least from the human perspective) bodily emanations.

So having to serve as a role model is hard for me. Yet, that's just the kind of pressure I'm under when Lucy Lou comes to visit.

Lucy Lou is Grandma's miniature dachshund, and she's wintered with us the last two years because it's hard for Grandma to find a seasonal rental that accepts pets. (Sheer dogism, that). Grandma comes down to escape the New York winters and visit, so Lucy becomes a house guest with us for a few months.

I love Lucy, of course. (And how could I not with a name like that?). But as with any family members, we have history. Ours began six years ago when Grandma still lived in Florida year-round and Lucy was a nine-week-old doxy terror. What I remember most from those days was the relentless squirming of a puppy that kept licking and nipping my pendulous Labrador lips.

I was just two at the time and had only recently moved out of my own period of impetuous, sharp-toothed adolescence. (It was, after all, the original era of irrational exurberance). Anyway, my main response to Lucy was just to keep gently throwing my head back and forth and thumping down my forelegs, trying to keep her at bay, or to stand up while huffing and puffing at Molly and Mike, begging them to get me away from this slashing, dashing little hellion.

"Aw, you're such a good boy, Hank," Molly would tell me. "You're so patient with the new puppy. Poor Tanky."

Mike was less sympathetic. "Paybacks are hell," he said. He thought it poetic justice. After all, he'd been the worst victim of my own puppyhood and had the physical and emotional scars, the chewed up office chair, and demolished books to prove it. (I've always been a literary dog, having partially consumed a leather-bound Shakespeare at an early age).

Little did I know at the time, however, that pierced lips were just the beginning of the Lucy Lou saga. By and by, I would become less of a nanny/playmate and more of responsible elder canine cousin, looked up to both literally and metaphorically.

(To be continued...)