UNITED STATES—Lupe, Lupe, Lupe, can you believe it? Christmas is not even here, and, in an odd way, it would seem that it is already behind us, but this is not so. There are parti-color lights to hang and a simulacrum of a Christmas tree to be obtained. Kind reader, let me turn the narrative over to Lupe herself:
My master is at quite a crossroads. He just returned from walking little Baby DeVille, the obedient Chihuahua-Terrier, exasperated beyond belief. Not the Chihuahua, but my master from whom I withhold the last iota of responsiveness. The weekly pressure of turning out another felicitous episode of ‘I Love Lupe’ is hard upon him. This mental tension, added to the roulette of passwords, is quite enough to unhinge the poor fellow. True, I am a canine creature bursting, nay bloated, with unconditional love. Yet that does not preclude me from some more sophisticated emotions, such as schadenfreude. Heaven knows why they say it’s a dog-eat-dog world: from my perch, on the blue-velour couch, it seems to be a human-eat-human sort of world.
My master, for example, got inside the gate of the house, open and shut in nanoseconds. Deep satisfaction derives from having successfully rewired his reflexes. Then once inside the front door, he slid his back down, exhaling deeply, already unhinged by the indulgences of the little Chihuahua-terrier who’s always game for a walk. My sidekick. Of course, what human wouldn’t be fazed by the dog sniffing at every nugget of carnitas left on the sidewalk by the taco stand. Sussing out every last morsel of carne asada, and the spicy fried chicken, laden with golden garlic and red pepper infused batter that could wreak all kinds of havoc with a dog’s digestion.
I won’t budge from the couch. But then his daughter brought me, paws first, a connoisseur of anarchy, the supreme sower of chaos, into their lives. Even now, as this self-styled scribe seeks to scale the hillock of yet another episode of ‘I Love Lupe,’ all kinds of mayhem is brewing outside. The demonic rescue dog was assaulting a visitor to our humble abode. Had she bitten the hand of our guest. Like pruning bougainvillea without gloves, each Lupecentric encounter extracted its drop of blood. Moments earlier, she was up to her shenanigans, slipping out the gate when her chief dominatrix, guard down ever so briefly, let the gate swing wide open. Off Lupe ran.
She zipped in the direction of a fabled Hollywood boulevard that turns into a freeway when it’s the hour to drive home. The master relaxed, he sought to relinquish the fear that there’s be tragedy if the erratic Lupe got loose the roadway. The task of the day had been to parse the snowballing of fear. And how folks with an inordinate weakness for lager beer are wont to build snowflakes of distress into avalanches.
My master, in the course of Thanksgiving had had a misadventure of sorts. One that had suddenly exiled him from life’s most reliable pleasures.
To be continued…
