I wanted a dog, but not a puppy, so I bargained with a friend for a dog I had never seen and now I have Wag, a golden retriever. He is a beautiful dog, and I suppose I’ll grow to love him, if I don’t go nuts or broke in the meantime.
I’ll lay out the good things first: beautiful, energetic, loving, and has a soft mouth that allows me to pull slobbery things out without fearing a trip to urgent care for stitches. He sleeps on the bed most of the night and, so far, hasn’t piddled a puddle for me to scold him about. Basically, I like him, which is an immeasurable distance from loving him, but my husband says these things take time.
His bad traits are that he sheds, likes to eat at the same time we eat, keeps water in his jowls until he puts his loving head on my lap, then kerplop, my lap is wet, and he looks at me like he’s given me a present.
He wasn’t very expensive, so I guess you get what you pay for, but so far, I’ve put out a bunch of bucks that I could have used elsewhere, like vacations, which COVID19 extinguished a couple months ago. For example, he likes a certain kind of dog food…go to the top of the scale and that’s the one. He can’t sleep without a pillow, and luckily the My Pillow guy has recently begun manufacturing them. He prefers bottled water over tap water, but I drew a firm line there. I drink tap, he drinks tap. So there. He brought his own leash, but he figured out how to unsnap it, even while we are walking, so I either have to buy a new one that he can’t open or leave him in the back yard and hire a pooper guy.
It’s been a long time since I had either kids or dogs, but I remember the difficulty of a fourteen-year-old boy (whom I threatened to expel from my life more than once). Wag is two…fourteen in dog years. Somebody needs to talk me into keeping him.
