Today I was working in the yard. I was pulling weeds from the gardens and putting mulch down. It’s not like I enjoy working in the yard. Some people enjoy it. Some people enjoy colonoscopies, too. I don’t enjoy either. I would almost rather have a tooth pulled than to have to work in the yard. But, today I worked in the yard.
We bought 50 bags of mulch and 10 bags of garden soil. As you may know, LA (lower Alabama) has red clay soil. It is good for growing cotton and pine trees, but not much else. We live in LA, but the garden soil isn’t for the flower gardens. I built two huge raised vegetable gardens that we have to add dirt to each year. We spend probably four hundred dollars to produce nine stalks of Asparagus, two dozen tomatoes and about a thousand jalapeno and habanero peppers.
Today, while working in the yard, the amazing similarities between a teenage kid and a Labrador puppy struck me like a wet tongue in my ear. Both a teenager and a Lab puppy are incredibly energetic and enthusiastic. Their wild exuberance sometimes leads to misfortune. Having observed my brother’s son destroy numerous expensive things simply by touching them, I frequently told my offspring “If you don’t touch it, it won’t break”. Truer words were never spoken. Catfish touched the firebox door to my 18ft, trailer mounted competition smoker when he was last here. Let’s let it suffice to say I need to visit a welder now.
Another similarity is that either one will eat almost anything. Caesar, our Lab puppy, eats shoes. He doesn’t just chew them. He eats them. The remains come out the other end. When Dixie, our Meth Lab, was a puppy, she ate a seventeen pound brisket, and developed a case of the brisket farts that offended our senses to the extent that our sense of smell remained tarnished for six months. God only knows what a teenager eats that causes them to produce the gas that they do. When I was a kid, there were no worse farts than Strohs Beer and pickled egg farts. An afternoon of drinking Strohs and eating pickled eggs was guaranteed to produce and ‘entertaining’ night of lighting farts and laughing.
Dogs sleep with amazing completeness. Caesar, Dixie and Maggie all will sleep peacefully in terribly contorted positions and wake up with no ill effects. While I struggle to get out of my Tempurpedic bed each morning, they sleep on the floor and are eagerly waiting for me in the pre-dawn darkness of each early spring Florida morning. Ratboy sleeps like a dog. He can fall asleep anywhere, anytime. He fell asleep in the back of the van once on the way to Bethel Woods (Yes, the place Woodstock was held). In New Jersey, we lived only about two hours from where it was. This happened to be Dixie’s first road trip. She was about nine months old and this was her first trip to the ‘woods’ with us. Traveling was new to her, and a moving car did not agree with her stomach. She barfed. Our van had vent windows in the back, which were open in case Ratboy farted, so the stench never came forward in the van, and Landi and I were unaware that Dixie had barfed. Catfish sleeps with amazing completeness. Catfish was unaware that Dixie had puked, until he woke up.
“UGH! Dixie Puked On Me!!!”
When you are on your hands and knees working, a Lab puppy will want to help and so will a teenage boy. A Lab will lick your ear, eat a washer, carry your wrench off somewhere, and pee on your foot. A teenager will ask you why are we doing it this way, deny they have ever seen your shovel, suggest that we could do this easier with a bigger hammer, try to taste your beer, and want to know if she/he can start learning to drive in your Jaguar.
When you dog gets a little older, he will lay at your feet and watch reruns of the ‘Friends’ with you. He doesn’t laugh, but he really enjoys it. When you go outside, he’ll do his business and come right back. Together in the afternoons, you watch the birds fly and enjoy the breeze. You don’t need to talk and neither of you want music to disturb the sounds of the birds and breeze in the trees. Being color blind, I suspect we both enjoy the same version of a blue sky and clouds.
When your teenager gets a little older, they will move away. You hope that they will take with them all the things they learned when they helped you do things. Lessons about electricity rarely need to be learned twice. Carpentry skills, too, are vital. You really hope that they have learned how important dogs are. Kids should understand how important it is to have something, someone in your life to be kind to, someone to care about, someone who cares about you. Girlfriends and boyfriends may come and go, but dogs are forever. No one, except a parent, loves you like your dog loves you.
You hope that they know that it is really important to help those who can not help themselves, and to defend those who can not defend them selves. You hope that they are a courteous and kind at all times.
Most of all, you hope they will come visit to listen to the sounds of the birds and the breeze in the trees.
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