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

M: Meals (To be eaten while seated—not in the car, and not standing at the sink. Space them out over the day.)

V: Vacuum Cleaner (About three feet tall, with a long bag attached to it and a hose coming out the side. I don’t expect you to use it, but I didn’t want it to scare you if you opened the closet by mistake.)

X: Xylophone (It’s the only word I know with the letter X. You may play one while I am gone.)

She also made it quite clear that she expected Brett and me to eat healthy meals. So that Friday night, I ordered an extra-large pizza from Noble Roman’s with toppings representing all the major food groups. The pizza was big enough for the next three dinners and a couple of breakfasts. The phone rang as Brett and I sat at the kitchen table.

“It’s probably Mom,” I said. “I’m going upstairs to take the call. Watch the pizza.”

It would be about ten minutes before I first realized what part of “I’m going upstairs to take the call. Watch the pizza,” Brett paid no attention to. At first I thought he’d headed back to his homework, but I had confused him with the boy next door. No, he apparently still had four hours left on his Nintendo game.

When I returned to the kitchen, there was no pizza left. And no box. And I knew that Brett seldom ate the box, so it must have been the canine trash compactor.

The culprit was hiding behind the couch, which was apparently tough for him because before he ate the pizza he weighed forty pounds and now he was tipping the scales at forty-five pounds. He was stuck, wedged between the sofa and table. He was gasping. Hopefully, I thought, it was an errant piece of mozzarella that would work its way down and nothing to worry about, but on more careful analysis I decided it was best to panic.

I got Barney from behind the couch and tried to get him to walk, but Barney’s tummy was so distended that it scraped along the ground like a basset hound’s ears. His stomach was making strange gurgling sounds as though it was about to erupt like a volcano.

Now I figured I had to get all that pizza out of him. I wasn’t sure why this was a good idea, but it gave me a sense I was doing something. I had read about it in some pet firstaid book, but I had confused in my mind the appropriate over-the-counter drug that would accomplish this. I had a sneaking feeling that the difference between hydrogen peroxide, sodium bicarbonate, and hydrogen chloride was pretty significant. It was one of the three, but I couldn’t be sure. But I did remember it was two teaspoons. Of what, I didn’t know.

I ran to the phone and called Barney’s vet, Dr. McCune, who answered the phone from a dead sleep at his home. Charlie Bob, as his friends called him, was a great guy with forty years’ experience. But could he handle an emergency of this breadth and magnitude?

“Doc, it’s Dick Wolfsie.”

“What’s the matter, Dick? It’s awfully late.”

“Barney just ate an extra-large pepperoni pizza. What should I give him?”

There was pause. I’m sure that he too, at this hour, was trying to remember the difference between hydrogen peroxide, sodium bicarbonate, and hydrogen chloride.

“Doc,” I repeated, “what should I give him?”

“A Budweiser?”

Then he hung up the phone. All great comedy lines require the proper denouement. The click of the phone beautifully framed the irony of the situation, highlighting my hopelessness, my frustration, and my sense of futility.

Clearly this was not the emergency I thought it was. As Dr. McCune would later explain, the treatment for Barney was the same as for humans: do nothing and let the patient vomit. For two hours.

I have to admit. It worked like a charm.

Usually after an experience like this I would promise myself that the next time Barney ingested something I considered inappropriate, I would just kick back and chill. The dog had ingested so many things, his stomach had clearly made the necessary accommodations. But two weeks later, another crisis.

It was Friday night—actually very early on Saturday morning. “What’s that noise downstairs?” asked Mary Ellen. I loved questions like that. Either it was a burglar or it was nothing. And either way, I had no intention of going downstairs. I sat up in bed and it was clear that it was Barney snooping around in the kitchen, grazing for food. Barney had sometimes made his way down the steps in the middle of the night to see if he could rustle up a snack, so I figured he was pawing at the pantry door where his treats were kept.

I stumbled down to the kitchen and there was Barney chewing on what appeared to be a piece of aluminum foil. No, it was an ant trap that the beagle had negotiated from beneath the fridge with his paw! The blue “poison” was dripping from his mouth.

Again, my career flashed before me along with the headlines of the next day: BARNEY POISONED. ANTS MOVE BACK UNDER FRIDGE.

I wrestled him into the car and raced to a local twenty-four-hour pet emergency clinic just a few minutes away. It was 3 in the morning and I began ringing the bell, then banging on the door. The on-call veterinarian, who had been sleeping prior to my interruption, hastened to the entrance. She peeked through the peephole in the door. Unfortunately, she recognized me.

“What is it, Mr. Wolfsie? Is Barney okay?”

“He ate an ant trap. Is he going to die?” I watched her expression. She didn’t seem to be taking my extreme angst very seriously.

“Heavens no,” said the vet. “Those things don’t even kill ants.”

I once composed a list of the ten most interesting things he ever ate. None of these things ever caused any distress. Except in me. This is