Birch is sitting next to me as I write this, waiting for The Word. It is a marvelous word and makes life worth living, and so he waits.
Meanwhile, a little biography. Birch is a rescue dog, which sounds like he was held hostage in a bank robbery and I snuck in through a ceiling vent and said "Here, boy," dangling some jerky.
No. He was a shelter dog, brought up via the pipeline that transports Southern strays to good homes in the cold North. When we met in the cold cell he was a sweet, mild, easygoing little pup.
Because he was sick.
Birch came with every possible dog problem in the book, from tick-borne blood grot to parasites to the dreaded heartworm, which we are extirpating in a yearlong course. Once modern medicine did its trick, he sprang to life, and revealed his true nature:
The insatiable eater of things. All the things.
He ruined a throw pillow I hated, and I couldn't be mad. "Birch! Bad dog, in the sense that you oughtn't chew pillows! But! I understand! The pattern was banal and the colors were boring! Now I can throw it away! But you should have asked my wife! Bad dog!"
I put the pillow in a closet, thinking it might be sewn up and returned to the sofa. A month passed. One day the closet was open. He found it, and spread its fluffy foam guts all over the floor: We meet again, my friend. En garde!
