It had to happen sooner or later April 5, 2005 ~ 9:52 am
Posted by Julie in : Daily Grind , comments closed
Look! More blurry Gates in the snow, courtesy of my cellphone.
I got my first dog bite yesterday. I should preface this by saying that I had another first yesterday, too - my first birthday party for a dog. Rick’s friend, Cullen, has a buffledog (Bernese Mountain Dog) much like Seamus’s, and it was the puppy’s 6 month birthday yesterday. So Cullen threw the dog a party. I’m not kidding.
Cullen dotes on Oliver (the buffledog’s name). Did I mention that Cullen’s middle name is Oliver, and thus the buffledog is named after Cullen? Yeah. Anyway, Cullen is in his 50s/60s, and actually has grown children, although you couldn’t tell it by the way he treats Oliver. Oliver is the apple of Cullen’s eye and goes everywhere with him. Yesterday Oliver rode the Central Park Carousel for his birthday (he rode in a chariot, not on a horse), and on Sunday, he went with Cullen to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Mass. Cullen was serenading Oliver with birthday songs as we sat in the park, asking everyone who came by to join the party. This is the environment we were operating in. It was nuts.
Anyway, the dogbite story. Oliver is at that stage of puppydom where everything on the ground looks like a tempting morsel. Especially sticks. I think he’s still breaking in his permanent teeth. We spent a goodly amount of time pulling small sticks out of Oliver’s mouth, because he had an annoying habit of trying to swallow them. Finally, when I was trying to grab a wood chip out of his mouth for the 73rd time, Oliver used his new adult teeth to chomp down on my pinkie finger as well as the chip. Instant puncture. It’s not awful and I know he didn’t mean to do it, but still - “Ow!”. That’ll teach me to pull sticks out of a dog’s mouth. Only took me 27 years to learn that lesson!
