Lucky Dog

My boys (and their mom) wanted me to try and win a puppy at a carnival game booth. A puppy? A real live puppy? There they were...a whole litter, yapping away in a large cardboard box. With three wild kids all under the age of six, who needs a puppy? But they would not stop pleading until I finally said I would try. The odds were that I would lose anyway.

The game was a ping-pong-ball toss. Get it into one of the jars and you won. What the heck. I’ll just toss the ball up there without trying. In fact, I’ll close my eyes. That ought to make certain that I’ll lose, right? I closed my eyes and tossed.

I opened my eyes just in time to see the ball go directly into a container without a bounce or a bump. I suggested we take the huge teddy bear prize, but my young fans insisted on the live puppy. The boys picked the one they wanted from the box, and we named it Lucky which seemed like an appropriate name. And that’s how Lucky The First joined our family.

Lucky the Artist

Lucky was a lovable mix of several varieties of dog, the exact blend impossible to tell. She was mostly white with brown spots and big brown ears that pointed straight up. The best we could come up with was some kind of terrier.

Always inquisitive, one day she discovered my tubes of oil paints in my basement studio. She tried for a while to figure out how to use them, but to no avail (she was just a dog, after all) so she ate them. The next day out in the back yard we came upon piles with bright blobs of yellow, green, blue, and red in them. It was a very innovative way of decorating the landscape, don’t you agree?

Lucky Had a Craving for Aluminum

On another day, we filled one of those flimsy aluminum pie plates with water and left it for her out in the back yard. We were astonished to see her finish off the water, then finish off the pie plate. The piles in the backyard the next day glinted with bright bits of aluminum reflecting the sunlight. What a dog!

Lucky Ticks Me Off!

When we moved to a new, larger home which wasn’t fenced in, Lucky would roam the back yard on a long, long rope. We didn’t know it, but in this way she became a walking apartment house for a bunch of free-loading ticks. If you have ever had a dog, you know that ticks (those detestable little insects) love to live rent-free in the forest of dog hairs on any canine they can occupy.

Lucky was host to a large number of ticks it seems, but we didn’t know it until much later when the ticks jumped off the dog and invaded our bedroom where Lucky slept. Apparently, these were pregnant female ticks who laid their eggs where ever they could. In time we discovered tiny ticks on the walls, ticks on the ceiling, ticks in the blankets, ticks in the sheets, ticks in the drawers, even ticks in the ticking. Here a tick, there a tick, everywhere a tick, tick. And it became my job to pick them off. Tick, tick, tick tick; pick, pick, pick, pick. I was really ticked off! Finally, we decided to bomb the room with tick insecticide. Even after that, a hardy tick or two would turn up. It took quite a while, but at last, I’m tickled to say, we were tickless. As was Lucky.

Although I was reluctant at first to add a canine pet to our family, I could not have made a better decision (even though it was foisted upon me by my wife and kids.) Lucky was the first of many dogs that added so much fun and love to our lives. While we named her Lucky, I have always felt that it was our family who were the lucky ones.

More pet tales and others in my book, Looking Back with a Smile, an ebook available for Kindle readers at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007BOMACO or other ereaders at: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/179743