Crazy dog

(In which I occasionally dip into bathroom humor, but it is hot outside so let me get my crazy on.)

It is hot. Hotter than the aforementioned devil in a fur coat. Triple-digit hot during the day. At 11 at night it's now 92 degrees. So I'll attempt to divert attention away from the heat by telling y'all The Legend of Crazy Dog.

Grady and Fee both have nicknames - he's always been Fat Boy, or Schmade, or Sam. (I mean that endearingly.) Fee has always been Bunny, Trixie or Bird. (Bird is a reference to the movie Blow Up, because she is my photographic muse.)

But my parents' dog Zeke only has one nickname in my book: Crazy Dog. Here is Zeke. He is a Great Pyrenees, and he sleeps on the couch whenever he feels like it. I got to see him this weekend, so it seems a fitting time to tell about his particular brand of crazy.



Back when my parents lived in Daytona, he would often inexplicably fall into the pool. We never saw him swim, but occasionally he'd be soaking wet, miserable and sitting outside when they got home. (He's a mountain dog, not a retriever. Sheep don't swim.)

There was the time my sister and I went through the Walgreens drive-through to pick up a prescription for him. The label said "Zeke Dog Smith" and we put it in the tray and waited. The pharmacist picked it up and asked "Is this a dog?" and my sister is over in the passenger seat yelling "No, it's my KID!" and we nearly died laughing about her imaginary kid, Zeke-Dog. (The pharmacist was strangely quiet after that.)

But by far the tastiest quirk in his character was his penchant as a puppy for eating everything in sight, and the ensuing gastronomical distress that followed. Cords, computer products, chicken bones, dirt, sticks, napkins - all went down into his amazingly tolerant gut in the name of giving everything potentially edible a fair shake. The topper, though, was the time he ate the toilet brush in my mom's guest bathroom. He ate the entire thing - including the bristles. He did seem to spend some time chewing up the handle, so at least he broke it into parts. If I remember right, Mom caught him while he was doing it, and decided to let him - it was too far gone and probably too dangerous to stop him. She told my stepdad about it. You can imagine what the yard looked like that week. It apparently never hurt him.

There was the time he ingested a whole wrapped box (BOX!) of sugar-free Godiva chocolate bars under the tree at Christmas. My mom is diabetic, which means sugar-free, which generally means that any candy she gets contains sorbitol. Sorbitol is not only a good sweetener, it's a...cathartic. (Moves the mail.) Zeke stayed outside that Christmas. Chocolate is poisonous to dogs, but he never seemed to suffer at all for it, beyond the sorbitol.

The most baffling thing he ever ingested was an entire ear of corn leftover from dinner one night. My sister was scraping the plates into the dog dish and asked if she should cut the corn off the cob for him. "No," said my stepdad, "throw it in there." He thought Zeke would gnaw on it a bit and then leave it alone, but when supper was over for Zeke, there was no cob in the dish. So we figured he hauled it off somewhere to work on later. Imagine our surprise when Zeke threw it up whole a few days later. We never could figure out how he got it into his stomach, or why.

(Gross body functions stuff aside, that really is funny.)

From that point on, he's been Crazy Dog to me, my sister, my nephew, and other family members. He answers to it! If I say "Hey, Crazy Dog!" he'll come over to say hello. He will go down in the history of my family as the craziest dog we've ever had.

Schmade says "Humph." And Bird says, "Is that Crazy Dog out there? Should I run away??"