Big Brass Ones

Just looking out for Number 2

Despite the occasional temper tantrum on his part, or act of willful disobedience on mine, the biped and I are best buds, always looking out for each other. Like the time I told you about a couple of weeks ago when I tried to score a new (to him) pair of socks for him out at Garland Park. Or the time he... Um... Well, there was that time that...

Well, anyway, while I am always alive to his sartorial well being, he is always most concerned with my physical safety and well being. Which brings me to the point of this morning’s entry:

In yesterday's mail we received a care package from Kirby's peeps in New Mexico. It contained lots of swell stuff: a New Mexico T-shirt for the biped, a beautiful silver and turquoise spider pin for the bipedess, some genuine New Mexican chilly spices for everybody--everybody but me, that is.

But, first and foremost, it contained a lovely big bag of dog treats for me--and I must stress the for me part of that last sentence.

Now, this was a cellophane bag with "PETCO" written right on it, imprinted all over with little paw prints. There was very little doubt in my mind who the intended recipient was. The treats inside were in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. Some looked quite traditional: bones shapes, little heart shapes, that kind of thing. Others were in the shape of pretzels, but were clearly made out of dog-treat material, not real-pretzel material.

But many of the treats were shaped like human-style cookies, some Orio style (pale, though, not chocolate), some chocolate-chip style. And these apparently gave the biped pause (if not paws, ha, ha). Because they looked so like people food.

He took one of the Orio-style cookies out of the bag and smelled it, fully expecting it to smell like a dog treat. But it didn't. It smelled like a cookie. He gave it to me. I took it very gingerly. It was, after all, an innovation, and you know how I tend to feel about innovations. But it turned out to be quite a good innovation, and I ended up scarfing it right down.

But the biped remained concerned about those chocolate-chip cookies. Surely, they could not be real chocolate-chip cookies. Everybody knows chocolate is bad for dogs. But perhaps there had been some potentially-tragic mistake. He decided to make the supreme sacrifice for my well being and taste one of the cookies himself.

It tasted like a chocolate-chip cookie! He ate the rest of it to make sure. Then he ate two more. The third one, he said, began to taste a little bit doggy. It was good, though.

Well, anyway, he decided that all the remaining treats in the bag were, in fact, perfectly fit for canine consumption. So if there are any more of those chocolate-chip ones hiding down in the bottom of the bag somewhere, I may get one today.

Happily, eating dog treats does not seem to have done the biped any harm. If anything, they may have increased his flexibility--he's lying in the street licking himself even as we speak.