UNITED STATES—The wheel turning the calendar page feels a bit rusty due to the rains. Lupe, the pit-bull lab is best loved at arm’s length. Lupe the erratic, explosively energetic canine stayed behind in Hollywood, as DeVille, the obedient Chihuahua-terrier got a salvoconducto (wait, please while I go look up salvoconducto in English and stir up all kinds of environmental mischief in data centers to provide a translation) pass, that is a safe-conduct pass. That is, to get into that land of freedom and relative safety, when all heck has broken out in one’s neighborhood.
Now I live in relative safety during the holidays, since my nearest kin lives in Arkansas. A trip without the volatile, highly charged leapin’ local Lupe was to know true peace on earth. She would not be schtupping the pillow, nipping a neighbor’s butt or hitting a visitor in the groin with her long, spindly legs that have uncanny accuracy when it comes to hitting the pain jackpot.
It was Baby DeVille, the Chihuahua-terrier rescue who rode shotgun with me to an idyll of a town up the coast. People are happy to see him, and he’s happy to be with them. Lupe, on the other hand, can sow terror and lawsuit-phobia into the bravest hearts. It has been foretold that the pit-bull in her was bred to crush another dog’s cranium in the dogfights sanctioned in merry-old 1800s England. Let the doomsayers be wrong, and little DeVille be spared.
Lupe is still quite lovable, despite the physical assaults, and existential threat she poses to the erroneous sense of well-being this gray, rainy day instills in your obedient humorist. In fact, this boundless love is what drives her to stand up on her two hind legs and aspire to the verticality of an Estes model rocket, meanwhile one of those white-tipped paws on those long spindly forelegs migrates south to a sensitive spot of the male anatomy.
One thing this trip up the coast revealed was that for all Lupe’s faults, I, too, have acquired a new one, as keeper of these hounds. It has turned me into something I thought I’d never become: a hoarder. Upon arrival back in the concrete jungle from this lovely tourist town, it dawned on me that I am a hoarder of kibbles. I really should not have bought that 3.5-pound bag of adult kibbles, as my Tupperware receptacle of kibbles and milk-bone neared the bottom of the receptacle. In one of the most serene and spiritual spots of the Golden State–this side of Saugus–I caved in to their scarcity mindset.
Yet when I arrived back in LA, there was an 18-pound bag atop the fridge. Another 14-pounder on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.
Silly me! I shoulder the blame, with a little help from the rat who gnawed into the first bag when left on the floor. And then, the second bag yet, when raised to counter level. Smart little devil, that rat…
To be continued…
