April 11 – “Cat on the Porch”

I am a dog person.  We have had dogs as a part of our family for as long as I can remember.  Queenie was the Boston terrier we had when I was a kid.  She came from a breeder friend, and the only reason he let her go was because she had never had her tail clipped.  That made her more of an oddity than a commodity.  When we went to pick her up the breeder had an old clothesline pole set up in his backyard with lines hanging down from it.  The Bostons would each grab a line start running in circles until their feet left the ground.  A most amazing sight. When we got her home, Queenie wanted to continue her circular adventures, co she would grab hold of an old bicycle inner tube and letting us swing her around and around in circles.   We had several other dogs after Queenie died.  One died on the table when we took her in to be spayed.  Another one that was around for awhile was short and brown and looked like a cross between a dachshund and a spitz.  Suzy did absolutely nothing special.  She just hung out and let you pet her when you wanted to.  Great match for teenage boys as long as there was an attentive Mom in the house to take care of the minor details like food and water.   When we got married our first pet was, well, not a dog.  We lived in the college apartments and they wouldn't allow pets.  Besides, I got a huge raise when we got married to a whopping $35 a week, so it would have been tough to include dog food in the budget.  So our first pet was a parakeet named Noah.  Classy name.  He knocked over his water dish the first time he entered his cage, but he lived through the flood.  When we bought our first house, we also got our first dog.  Now that was some little creature.  His name was Gideon.  They told us he had some poodle blood in him, but he looked just like a toy fox terrier – a rat terrier.  And he was about the size of a rat.  I could hold him in one hand.  He had to jump off of the carpet onto the tile in the kitchen.  Gideon used to sit on my shoulder when we went somewhere in the car so he could look out the window.  I guess there is nothing quite like that "firstborn" pet.   After Gideon there followed in succession such rich names as Becca (short for Rebecca because we wanted to keep the biblical thing going), Taffy (the totally ignorant dog that had seizures and used to sleep in her water bowl), and Gretchen (She was a schnauzer, so we shifted to the German.  Her middle name was Friedereke, after my grandmother.  When she was alive we used to tease my grandmother about naming a child after her.  She was violently opposed to pinning such a horrible monicker on a human being.  Worked well for a dog's middle name, though).    Our present resident canines are Fritz and Heidi.  We continued the German thing.  Actually Heidi the dachshund was named after our next door neighbor Hedi, but the vet for some reason refused to call her that, so Heidi stuck.  We rescued her from the shelter as a gift for Christi's birthday one year, but they decided they couldn't keep her where they were living.  But they didn't want us to return her to the shelter, either.  So she stayed.  Fritz was a gift to Mom from some friends in our home group.  He is a cross between a Boston terrier and a spitz.  Problem was, though, that Fritz was so hyper, Mom couldn't keep up with him.  We became afraid that he would knock her over, so we brought him across the street.  He is still hyper.  Mom does a good job of being firm with him, but he has no idea what she's talking about.  He's still just like a two year old running around who hasn't learned to talk yet.  Or maybe it's like a twelve or thirteen year old who forgot how to listen.    We have been dog sitters for our kids, as well.  I finally got back to my roots when Nathan got a Boston terrier named Scooter.  He reminds me a lot of Queenie.  And he is as smart, or smarter than the smartest any dog I have known personally, my brother's weimeraner named Simba.  Kel and Christina rescued a mutt named Lucy.  She is really good with kids, but sometimes I think she needs a psychiatrist.    Wow.  All that dog talk, and all I was going to say was that when I went out to get the paper the last two mornings, there was a black cat asleep on our front door mat.  It belongs to a neighbor, but is over here all the time.  I hope it eats mice along with the birds I have seen in its mouth.  That's a cat's created purpose, isn't it?    Lamentations 3:25-27 says, "The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.   It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young."   Father, thanks for the good friends you have sent over the years in the form of dogs.  Amen.