Tippy, Tippy II Too

This month I have written about the Westminster Dog Show and about other dogs.  GOOD dogs.  To be fair, I should mention the BAD and the UGLY.  I can do it by re-running a post from the past:

For eight years we lived across the street from the meanest, dumbest dog in the county.  It wasn’t even the same dog all those years, but no one could tell the difference.   They replaced original Tippy with a replacement from the same disreputable breeder and even gave it the same name.

I know little about Boston Terriers, but Tippy could not have been a worthy representative of his breed.  Edna and Harry apparently liked their dogs slobbering, wheezing, snapping, and stupid.

Edna’s voice could crack ice.   The woman scared  flying geese out of formation.   The high pitch and volume carried easily over to our house any time  she was outside.

Once a cockatiel owned by someone on a nearby street escaped and flew into a tree near our corner.  The owners rushed over and set its treat-laden cage a short distance away,  then stood back and  made soft noises to coax the bird out of the tree.  A small group gathered as time went on, watching tensely and silently until  Edna happened upon the scene.

“What’s going on?” she called out to no one in particular.

Someone whispered that a pet bird had escaped and they were trying to get it to come down from the tree.

“That’s too bad,” Edna  rasped in a stage whisper.  “What’s its name?”

“Freeway.”

Edna gave an ear piercing whistle that would have raised Lassie from the dead, clapped her hands several times, and yelled at full volume, “HERE, FREEWAY!  HERE, FREEWAY!!!”

The cockatiel, of course, headed to Mexico, never to be seen again.

How to describe Edna?  Nice–but in a scary way.     One year she asked me to be her partner in a bridge club.  I was horrified at the thought.   I was a “Please, Lord, let me be dummy ’cause I don’t know much!”  kind of bridge player.  I declined, but she bulldozed me and I ended up being her partner that year.  She assured me she was strictly a social player and promised not to get upset.

To her credit, she never appeared angry, but she made certain I learned from my experiences.  The dumb-assed ones, I mean.  Without  looking up from her cards, she’d drone intonations like, “Nothing short of death should keep one from returning one’s partner’s lead.”

We weren’t really even  friends, just friendly neighbors.  I knew because of the grapefruit.

Edna  and Harry spent every winter in Arizona, partly because of the weather but mostly because  Harry loved to gamble.  They always returned with cases of  large, juicy grapefruit which they shared with friends.   We did not make the grapefruit list.

Tippy lifted his leg on every set of draperies in their house.  The neighborhood knew that because we’d hear frequent shouts of  “Harry, the damn dog pissed on the drapes again.”   Harry took  Tippy on short walks, but the dog viewed the neighborhood mostly from Harry’s big Cadillac.  A “car walk,” so to speak.

Our  breakfast room bay window was less than 10 feet from the sidewalk.  Tippy designated that area as his prime dumping ground and if we were not watching,  Harry would simply leave the pile.   If, however, he saw us inside, he would look around until he found a large leaf, then carefully place it over the mess and continue on his way.

One morning after their ride, we heard Harry call, “Edna, come look at this!  Somebody has spilled something in the back seat!”

Edna strode out to the car and leaned inside the back door.    In the same pitch that had sent Freeway south, she yelled, “That’s not something  spilled, Harry. . . that’s SHIT!”

Not being housebroken wasn’t even the worst of Tippy’s vices.  If he got free for even a minute, he would run for the first man, woman, or child he saw… and bite them.  Harry, not a friendly man, finally grew worried.  Tippy’s growing rap sheet brought threats from Animal Control.

Once I was sitting on a lounge chair in our postage stamp-size backyard, reading a book, when dog and owner walked through the alley behind our house.  I had my back to them, but recognized their wheezing, snorting grunts.  They had already passed my chair, when  Tippy suddenly strained on his leash, reversed course,  and chomped down on the only thing he could reach:  my elbow.

The bite broke the skin and hurt like crazy, so I ran inside  to clean it.  Less than five minutes later, our back doorbell rang.  Harry stood there,  holding a large paper sack.

“I thought you might like these,” he told me, not mentioning the bite.

“Harry,  that’s not necessary, “ I told him.

“You’re good neighbors,” he continued, “I wanted to give you something.”

After he left I set the bag on the kitchen counter and examined  the contents:  eight frozen ears of  corn and a frozen pot roast.

Damn!  I thought it was going to be grapefruit.