Mornings With Barney by Dick Wolfsie (e book reader .TXT) 📕

yards out, I had the two scents part. The raccoon smell led to the tree, and the beefy odor led to a picnic area where I placed the entire snack on top of a table.

Lights, camera, action! Live TV. The dogs were off. The four coonhounds rumbled ahead while Barney, who was beginning to sport a few extra pounds, managed to waddle up a sweat from behind. The coonhounds were dashing. Barney was lumbering.

The hounds realized that the raccoon scent was veering to the right. They followed in hot pursuit, panting in anticipation of the kill. The kill? There was nothing in the tree. But they kept yapping at the empty limbs.

And Barney? Nose to the ground, he also veered, but to the left, and within seconds launched himself onto the picnic table, where he inhaled his greasy reward. He was Everyman ... er . . . Everydog: the hero of the common canine, outdoing, outnosing, outsmarting the highly trained and expensive purebreds.

In my mind’s ear, I could hear the viewers laughing and applauding for his good old midwestern common sense, cheering him on. “This is not just your dog, Dick Wolfsie,” Hoosiers were saying. “Barney is our dog. And we are so proud of him.”

The Escape Artist

Of course, first Barney was my dog. And despite what they may have wished, he was Brett and Mary Ellen’s dog, as well. Sort of. I think as Mary Ellen observed my growing obsession with Barney, she realized I had become Frankenstein. I didn’t set out to create a monster—it just came naturally. Okay, that’s not true, either.

Yes, Barney was the monster because I had molded and shaped him. I accept the credit. My wife gives me the blame. With all the love that Barney enjoyed from the community, he created havoc at home. It wasn’t so much the destruction he caused, but the distraction he became.

By the fall of 1994, Mary Ellen had gone back to Community Hospital full time as vice president of marketing. She had cut back at work after our son, Brett, was born, but now it was becoming more difficult for her to maintain her executive position as a part-timer. There was always more to do at the office, so what should have been four hours at work turned into an entire day. She was putting in forty hours and getting paid for twenty. She didn’t need her MBA from the University of Michigan to know this was just silly.

Now back at the hospital every day, she realized that the hours she spent with seven-year-old Brett had to be quality time—at least that was what she aspired to. It reminded me of a favorite New Yorker cartoon: A father has approached his son, who is playing a video game. The dad is clutching two baseball mitts and has, we assume, asked his son to play catch. His son replies: “Quality time? Do we have to, Dad?” Barney had made quality time almost impossible in our house. I saw trouble ahead.

Barney bonded with everybody he met, but he and Brett never connected. I don’t think Brett was jealous. It was more a question of alternative lifestyles. Brett was a focused, play-by-the-rules young man who was ill at ease with unpredictability and chaos—Barney’s two middle names. For example, Brett often squirreled away his favorite snacks in his bedroom so we wouldn’t discover his craving for Chef Boyardee. He’d hide the easy-open cans under his bed. On more than one occasion, Barney also easily ate through the container, proving they were also easily gnawed through.

Barney seemed to have an obsession with Brett’s room, sneaking in at night, knocking over the trash, and chewing his toys. One evening after a particularly tasty Italian dinner that Mary Ellen had prepared, we were puzzled by the disappearance of a huge loaf of Italian garlic bread we had left on the counter. We assumed the culprit was Barney because his breath was to die from. When Brett climbed into bed that night, be suddenly began to kick wildly at his sheets.

“Oh, yuck. This is, like, the grossest thing I have ever seen. I’m going to hurl!”

We were wrong, Barney had not devoured the entire crusty loaf; he’d decided to bury it, instead, under Brett’s covers at the foot of his bed. The bread was wet, slimy, and half chewed. Crustiness was just a memory. On another occasion, Barney snooped into Brett’s book bag and ate every No. 2 pencil he could dig out. My son, bless him, did find some humor in this. “Hey, Dad, when Barney does number two tonight, it’s really going to be No. 2.”

Brett finally installed a chain on his bedroom door because he thought, correctly so, that when Barney put his mind to it, he enjoyed full access to any place in the house. It was hard to criticize Brett’s defensive behavior, considering that I had to duct tape the refrigerator door shut at night to prevent Barney from literally nosing his way into the meat bin.

Brett was unimpressed with the idea of Barney’s celebrity. He was also unimpressed with mine. He once said to me, “Hey, Dad, you’re on TV, radio, in the newspaper, and you write books. If you get your own Web site you can annoy people five different ways.” I think he must have felt something akin to the way actress Candice Bergen recalls her own childhood as the daughter of famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, continually being asked how it felt to have a wooden dummy as a “brother.” But Barney was flesh and blood and couldn’t be hidden away in a closet, though Brett might have welcomed that option.

When people heard Brett’s last name, they would ask if Barney was his dog. “No, he’s my dad’s dog,” he would always say. A smirk would then follow, Brett’s way of boasting that he, unlike the millions of other residents of Central Indiana, had not been hoodwinked by the mutt, as he