Profile
Photos
Comments
Here is an article I just had published on Associated Content. (Please feel free to check out my website there at www.associatedcontent.com/user/745209/jim_hetrick.html)
I hope you enjoy this!
A Growling Dog Never Sleeps
Okay. Who wants to buy a German Shepherd? She’s a beautiful black and tan five-year-old with, normally, a great disposition. She’s full of life, happy, playful and funny. I love her, and last night I was ready to take her out, string her up by her back legs, and beat her to death with a very heavy blunt object.
Mary Ellen is away visiting our son and his wife in Seattle. Whenever she is gone, I always have a hard time sleeping. However, Dixie, our shepherd, loves it because she gets to sleep up on the human bed.
Last night, I fell asleep around 11:30. (That’s really lat4 for me. I’m usually heavily sawing wood by 10 p.m. because I’m old, and I’m also up and moving by 5 a.m.) Around 2 a.m. I woke up with a start. My eyes flew open and my heart was pounding like John Henry’s nine-pound, steel-drivin’ hammer.
Did you ever wake up from a sound sleep and find yourself so “out of it” that, for a second, you don’t know where you are or what is going on?
It took me a moment to get my bearings, but I finally figured out that I was in my own bed.
But what had awakened me? After a few more moments of careful pondering, I came to the conclusion that it was the dog. Dixie was next to me with her head on Mary’s pillow, wide awake. Her eyes were open, and she was eliciting a low, menacing growl not six inches from my good ear. (Don’t tell Mary about the pillow thing. I’ll wash the pillowcase before she gets back. I promise.)
I spoke her name softly, and reached over and pet her, trying to get her to shut the hell up.
Well, instead of shutting up, she sat bolt upright in bed and cocked her ears towards the open window. Her growl increased a few decibels and was accentuated by the occasional “woof!” She was definitely disturbed by something that was taking place outside.
Okay. That was it. I was wide awake. I shot up to a sitting position in bed and strained my ears in a vain attempt to hear what my companion’s acute canine hearing was picking up.
Nothing. I heard nothing.
Scenes from all of those old zombie movies and “He Knows You’re Alone” movies starting racing through my head. I remember thinking that right about then, it would have been nice to have a Louisville Slugger under the bed…or a fireplace poker…or a bazooka. But nothing, being no so much of a pacifist as a coward, I owned very few of implements of destruction, and the ones that I did own were all the way down stairs in the knife drawer in the kitchen…the one that the intruder was probably going through at that very moment!
By now, Dixie was off the bed, and she had her front paws up on the window sill, staring intently out into yard.
Shit!
I turned on the light and leaped out of bed. I painstakingly worked my way through every room in the house, going from window to window and peering out into the black and ominous night.
Nothing.
I then got up enough nerve to turn on the outside floodlights and step out into the evening air.
Again, nothing.
I slowly inched my way out into the barn. All three horses and the pony were there. All three were sleeping peacefully.
Nothing.
After one cautious sweep of the pastures and the lawn, I made my way back into the house. I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, now absolutely wide awake with my adrenaline pumping through my veins like water through a firehose.
When I walked into the bedroom, I was confronted with a scene that made my blood boil. There, on the bed, with her furry little head resting again on Mary’s pillow, was Dixie…sound asleep!
Well, being the compassionate and forgiving individual that I am, I quietly crawled into my side of the bed, and then reached over with both hands and shook the damned dog violently while at the same time screaming her name at top of my lungs.
If Daddy can’t sleep, ain’t nobody going to sleep…damn it!