The Town Crier: Sleeping dogs

Published 8:00 am Sunday, July 16, 2023

It’s the Dog Days of Summer, those hottest, humidest, slowest moving days in the middle of summer where we all slow down a bit and realize a cold glass of lemonade is what everyone needs. It reminds me of the old joke: It’s so hot I saw a dog chasing a cat and they were both walking.

I know, I’ve been watching the dogs. Sure, my dog will still chase after a thrown stick, but, unlike the fall or wintertime, not incessantly. When it’s cool or there’s a nip in the air, my rotator cuff will go out and I’ll have to have Tommy John surgery before she stops fetching. Ah, but these days in the middle of the afternoon, she’s as happy to see me in the yard as any other time of the year, but after about five fetches she’s kind of done.

She’ll watch me throw the stick and take a few steps in that direction, watch to see where it lands (I’m guessing so she can remember and fetch it come October) and then kind of turns back to me. The look in her eye says “Yeah, that’s fun but while you’re tossing, could you just toss it right to me, right into my open mouth, and we can both be done with it, it’s hot.” With the heat up, she’ll eventually just lie down and look at me or go to get some water from one of the water dishes we keep around the yard. She’s not really a lemonade fan.

They say “Let sleeping dogs lie” and that’s along similar lines as “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” In other words, if you do something where nothing needs to be done you’re probably just stirring up trouble.

One of my wife’s expressions is “What I invent for myself,” which she says once she has metaphorically woken a sleeping dog, tried to fix something that wasn’t broken or more likely tried to help someone. Next thing she knows she’s got extra work on her hands. and sometimes it’s a four-hander situation (that means I get to help).

I have a buddy and his expression involves “Poking the bear.” I called someone up just to say hello and check in with them and my buddy and I both know they’re going to end up asking for a favor, because that’s what they do. When I told my buddy I had called, he said, “You just had to poke the bear, didn’t you?” I’d never heard the expression before but I got it immediately. I don’t know if it’s a sleeping bear or just a bear with his back to you, or perhaps a bear focused on a honeycomb up in a hollow tree, but the point is if you poke the bear there ain’t no good coming out of it. With the sleeping dog, there’s at least a chance he’ll still be sleepy and go away grumpy to find a quieter place to resume his nap.

Sleeping animals are cute. and it always amazes me how little it takes to wake them up and conversely how much it takes to wake them up. My dog sleeps most nights in the laundry room on a nice bed we have for her, but other nights she likes to stay outside. She especially likes to stay out on full moon nights, and during the Dog Days she likes to sleep out because it’s actually a little fresher outside than it is in the laundry room where the only breeze is in the dryer.

Sleeping inside, it takes her a while to get settled (a dog has got to have a little belly-scratching before she can relax, you know), and then for a while she’s lying there listening to what’s going on in the rest of the house. But sometimes, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I can’t help but go and check on her. I’ll open the laundry room door and she’ll barely open her eyes to see what I’m up to, but with no interest in moving. Other times, if she’s deep asleep, I can walk right up to her and there she is, eyes closed, tongue out and dreaming of who knows what. I know when she’s been really sawing logs because the side of her bed will be wet where her tongue was hanging out. I don’t know why she sleeps with her tongue out. I tried it once and it’s not very relaxing as far as I was concerned.

Dreaming of being a dog

When it comes to most dogs, they are on this wonderful schedule where they can sleep whenever they want. It’s almost like they are unemployed or perhaps retired. Wanna play? Play! Wanna chase squirrels? Chase squirrels! Wanna sleep? Sleep!

I know dogs never dream of being me but sometimes I dream of being a dog. If it’s a full moon night, where she’s going to want to stay up all night barking at the dogs a half-mile away, she can sleep during the day.

During these Dog Day Georgia scorchers, there’s the (relative) cool of the front porch concrete or the wooden back deck with the slats in the boards to let a little breeze through. and there’s always the cool of the shade tree in the thick, summer grass. If I slept in the grass I’d get chiggers, but the dog seems immune to bug bites. Of course, during the day, the sleeping is just a light nap, because the opening of a door on any side of the house will stir the dog and here she comes to see what’s up. Asleep on the front porch, the back door, even eased open, will stir the universe just enough for her to know and here she comes ‘round the corner.

My two previous dogs were such that I could sneak out of the house and ease down to the road to do a daily jog. I didn’t want them coming along with me because of traffic and a couple of houses along the way that had dogs of their own and there was always “tension,” shall we say, if the dogs crossed paths. So by checking out the windows of the house I could see where those two were hanging out or catching 40 winks and quietly exit out the far side of the house and tip-toe to the road. My current dog however always knows when I’m on the move. It’s really got me wondering how she’s doing it because I know she can’t hear me as quiet as I am. The only thing I can think of is A) her sense of smell is so sensitive that as soon as I walk out she gets a whiff of my scent or B) she’s a canine mind-reader and knows what I’m up to no matter what.

I would actually go for the B) explanation because she even seems to know when I walk out of the house in the morning if I’m leaving to go to work or if I’m coming out to play with her. She has her little spot next to the front door where she “hangs out” and if I come out to leave she just looks up at me and doesn’t bother to move. If I’m coming out with time to play, she will immediately jump up ready for a stick-throwing fun time. I’ve tried to purposely not do anything different as I walk out the door but it seems she still knows exactly what’s going on. You don’t think she understands English and hears me talking in the house before I exit, do you? Nah, it’s definitely mind-reading.

Do not startle

One of the aspects of the “Let sleeping dogs lie” saying is that you don’t want to startle them. I’ve startled some dogs before but they’ve also startled me.

One time I was driving to visit a friend in a strange town and ran out of gas. It was already dark and I didn’t know where I was, so I headed out along the sidewalk to try and find a gas station. This was before smartphones and GPS maps, so if you’re old enough you might share with younger folks we called this “getting lost.”

It was a November night and the wind was blowing, moving all the fall leaves around, so it was actually kind of noisy. I was pretty nervous because I didn’t know what kind of neighborhood I was in. The sidewalk curved around a bend along the road and as I came around the corner there was a dog coming the other way.

OK, he wasn’t sleeping or lying, but a startling was on its way. I came around, the dog came around, we were both a little nervous about the night and when we spotted each other we both jumped half our height and took a step backward as our eyes went saucer-sized.

Once we both saw that neither one of us was a bear we had unintentionally poked, we shared a good chuckle and went on our way. He was a cute doggy, but I think if he had been asleep on the sidewalk and I had startled him awake he would have bitten me. and I would have had it coming!