Road Apples
March 23, 2009


Try not to step in the Ooby Dooby

By Tim Sanders

Maggie is our dachshund. One of Maggie’s main duties is to lie by the glass patio door with her eyes closed, snoring.

This is only a subtle canine trick, because while from the outside she may appear to be lying down, she is actually standing bolt upright on the inside, in full guard dog mode.

Her vigilance over the years has kept the small planes that taxi down the old airport runway behind our house out there on the runway where they belong. Oh sure, Maggie knows they’d like nothing better than to fly right through that patio door, but she stands her ground and barks. It makes no difference that she’s seen those planes taxi back and forth, day after day, week after week, for nearly seven years. She still barks. And barks and barks. So far her strategy has worked. Not a single plane has ever made it into our dining room. The fact that none of us has any propeller scars is all Maggie’s doing.

Sometimes we get registered mail, and our postman has never pulled his postal vehicle into our driveway without an endless series of warning barks. From Maggie, I mean. He never comes into the house, he only sits in his vehicle and honks his horn until one of us responds. The honking naturally sounds like barking to Maggie, who barks more energetically, to make sure he tucks his tail between his legs and goes away without inflicting damage. He does, and she is satisfied that she’s done her job.

She has likewise kept our home absolutely free of horses. Occasionally people will ride their horses down the old airport runway. We might not notice them, but Maggie barks immediately. The runway is a long way off, so she knows she must bark incessantly, and with a great deal of volume, until they hear her and gallop away. We’re not sure if she thinks the horses are huge dogs with saddles, or the riders are just tiny people. But whatever she thinks, she’s kept them at bay for years.

We’ve also never been attacked by deadly joggers disguised as neighbors.

Or lethal teenagers on four–wheelers, or youngsters armed with kites.

Or by killer blackbirds.

Or horseflies.

Or large garbage bags. The vicious black ones with those nasty red drawstrings.

Or by new shoes, which her finely-honed canine instincts tell her are not to be trusted until that new shoe smell is gone and Daddy’s reliable old foot smell has taken over.

And after all these years she still growls suspiciously at the vacuum cleaner, which she is convinced has evil intentions.

Nothing gets by Maggie.

I say all of this so you will understand that Maggie is not just some dumb creature who, unless you count yakking up mouse parts and hairballs on our deck, is simply a waste of perfectly good fur. No, that would be our cat, Sylvia. Maggie is a contributing member of our family. Often, when I watch Maggie sniffing her way across the backyard in what seems to be a purely random manner, I reassure myself that she is in fact checking for signs of danger. Oh sure, she may eventually find a dead worm and roll on it, but that doesn’t mean if a Piper Cub were to land in our backyard, or a Clydesdale, she wouldn’t stop rolling and take action. She certainly would. She’d raise her hackles, plant her little feet, bark loudly, and if all that failed, she’d bravely do her duty. By which I mean she’d poop. (I’ve seen her do this before, when a menacing stranger–meaning anyone with a pulse–has entered the yard.) Then she’d run to the deck, barking all the way. To sound the alarm.

I don’t want to brag or anything, but I believe that Maggie would not be nearly so intelligent if it weren’t for Marilyn and me. We’ve broadened her horizons, intellectually.

Consider her musical taste, for example. Maggie is fully housebroken, and is more than happy to let us know when she needs to go outside to relieve herself. Except, of course, when it’s raining. She has been known to hold her fire, so to speak, for an entire day if it is raining out. That is perfectly reasonable; I wouldn’t want to poop in the backyard during a thunderstorm, either. But Maggie’s aversion to pooping in the rain tends to make Marilyn uneasy; she doesn’t like the idea of a fully loaded dog wandering around the house. Her solution is to take Maggie and an umbrella outside until something happens. She often distracts Maggie from the rain by singing to her. She sings a little tune she composed herself called "The Boom-Boom Song." She claims Maggie likes it. I believe Maggie poops to get Marilyn to stop singing "The Boom-Boom Song."

Although Marilyn has asked me to use the same song, and has even sung a few high-pitched bars to demonstrate its laxative effect, I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to sing that stupid Boom-Boom Song to a dachshund, even during a rainstorm, in the privacy of my own backyard. Not me. I go for the classics. I’ve found that Maggie prefers either the Sinatra version of "All Or Nothing At All" or Roy Orbison’s "Ooby Dooby." It usually takes just a few notes to activate her lower colon. I think it’s something in my voice. Sometimes she’ll poop before I even get started, rain or no rain.

So I guess you could say Maggie is your average, non-rocket scientist dog, and Marilyn and I are your average, non-rocket scientist dog owners. And while I can’t speak for Marilyn, I can confidently say that I’ve learned a very important lesson from Maggie. I’ve learned not to sing my favorite Sinatra or Orbison tunes in the shower anymore. I certainly wouldn’t want to step out of that shower onto a fresh pile of Ooby Dooby some rainy morning.