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Dog Days of Bachelorhood

Ah, glorious bachelorhood! Nothing to do but lay about in one's underwear, talk back to the television set, and leave the toilet seat up. A golden opportunity to opportunity to drink, smoke, spit, and cuss (please circle all that apply).

Not quite.

With Julia and Emma on the road visiting family, the highlight of my bachelorhood plan was to get the wood floors refinished, and allow the house to air out and the polyurethane finish to harden before their return. The flooring contractor claimed the fumes are no big deal, probably because he didn't plan to be there. The sullen teenager he dispatched to do the dirty work seemed to consider vertigo, drowsiness, and amnesia as job perks.

I opted to pass on the chance for solvent-induced cell damage in favor of four action-packed days in a tent in the backyard with Wilson the Mastodon ð I mean Labrador.

The job was going well until Wilson decided to jump into the house through an open window and walk on the wet finish, just to see what all the fuss was about. This made me so angry that I did the most useless thing possible: I yelled at him. Although unable to comprehend the finer points, he seemed to grasp the core concept; namely, that I was waving my arms and making the Bad Noise.

Wilson operates in two basic modes, Happy-Confusion and Fear-Confusion, and my outburst must have triggered the latter. Which is why, later that evening, he made an Executive Decision to take appropriate remedial action: he dug up the flower garden.

I didn't witness the act itself, but the perfectly-intact crime scene left little to the imagination. A fifteen square-foot patch of clever landscaping (if I do say so myself) laid waste in an orgy of gleeful destruction, with a perfect dog-body imprint the size of an adult werewolf where he apparently flopped down to admire his handiwork and bask in his re-established connection to the universe.

If he had fingers he probably would have smoked a cigarette.

Little did he realize it would only prompt more yelling and arm-waving on my part. First the floor, then the garden, and now I'd have to wash him, a process I find only slightly preferable to root canal. Still, it was inevitable. He was totally encrusted with mud.

Except it wasn't mud. It was dried polyurethane. Not only had he jumped in the window ad walked on the wet floors, but then had decided to lie down on it for good measure. He had it on his belly, on his haunches; he had it in places that should only be discussed by professional dog breeders.

What was he thinking? Probably nothing. His little brain was just rattling around in his skull as usual, like a BB in a tin can. Who knows, maybe he got a little stoned on the fumes and decided to rest for a minute to regain his train of thought.

I had no choice but to go ahead with the bath anyway. At least, I figured, he'll have a nice shiny coat.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.