The Saga of Cowboy and Percy

 The Saga of Cowboy and Percy

By Bobby Neal Winters

With the death of Obidiah, Jean and I have been between dogs.  

We’ve never been intentional about dogs. We’ve always gone emotionally.  We’ve not planned; we’ve been in the moment.

Obidiah’s death was a release to him.  He’d been slowly going blind, but that didn’t cause him to slack in his duties: He would bark at danger whether it was there or not.

He’d been preceded in death by his partner in mischief Charlie, who was the more easy-going of the two.  Obidiah was a schnauzer, dutiful and regimented like the German he was.  Charlie was a spaniel.  His personality was that of a Celt: He was calm, placid, and good company until something triggered him.

We’d chosen not to replace Charlie when he’d passed as we’d done before.  Previously, we had tried to have dogs in pairs so they would keep each other entertained.  But Obie’s blindness--and perhaps dementia--was keeping him entertained enough.

So we allowed Obie to live out his remaining time alone.  It turned out to be a year.

Since that time, I was allowed to have a simple pleasure.  I could mow the backyard without fear of stepping in anything...nasty.

That was glorious.  And it happened exactly once.

This is because my youngest got a dog.  She lives part time in town and part time away.  For reasons known only to her and God, she got a dog of her own.  Spent money on it.  Yep.  A non-trivial amount of money.  This goes against years of tradition in the Winters Family.

When I was growing up, we didn’t buy dogs.  We lived in the country and they just turned up.  There was never a time we didn’t have dogs.  We fed our dogs table scraps.  If a new dog turned up, and could find a place among the rest, we had a new dog.  

When I got all educated and civilized and married someone who wasn’t a hick, we got rescue dogs for free, never paying more than the price of neutering them.

My daughter, however, ignored years of tradition and paid money for a dog.  His name is Cowboy and he is an Aussidoodle.  For those of you who don’t know, that’s a mixture of Australian Shepherd and poodle.

Cowboy is a smart dog.  He’s smarter than at least one of my grandsons.  

I won’t say which one.

Cowboy is a frequent guest at our house.  He’s a house dog.  This is something else that is new in my family. 

This is where I will tread some hazardous ground.  I ask you to read my full explanation before you get mad at me. If you are mad at me after that, I am okay with it, but at least you will be fully informed on why you are mad at me.

We never had a dog in the house when I was a boy because we knew we were not good enough people to handle it.  To understand that, let me tell you a story.  I once went to pay a workman who’d done some work for me.  He was “the business,” so I went to his house to pay.  I was invited in and greeted by his dogs and the intense smell of partially digested protein.

This was an incredibly vivid experience.

Two things have to happen to have an inside dog without the above consequence: You have to train them; and you have to allow them to train you.

I am learning this now not only because of Cowboy, my frequent house guest, but because this same daughter badgered my wife into paying money for a dog herself.

There was five minutes between the period in the previous sentence while I sat at the keyboard, shaking my head, not believing what I’d just written. 

We now have an inside dog--a cocker spaniel--named Percy.

While I thought of Obie and Charlie as being a German and an Irishman, I have to think of Cowboy and Percy as being an Aussie and a posh Englishman. Cowboy is gregarious.  Cowboy will get in your face. Cowboy loves the out-of-doors.

By way of contrast, Percy is more reserved in his behavior. He is calm.  He’s not sure he even likes the out-of-doors as an abstract concept.  We took him out to do his business when there was a heavy dew on the ground and he was horrified. 

So we are training Percy, and Percy is training us.  I just spent an hour improving an egress to the backyard for the dogs to use.  

Yes, dogs. Plural.

We are keeping Cowboy for our youngest daughter as she’s had to move to a new place that doesn’t allow dogs. (Hallmark: You should develop a new line of cards for this; it happens a lot.)

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.