Pet tests patience – and expands world

My teenage daughter, Vanessa, decided I needed a dog. Because I lived by myself, she was sure a canine companion would fill my lonely times and give her a dog to play with.

The fact that I didn’t particularly want a dog did not deter her. She was relentless.

Finally, with me feeling powerless, as only a dad can in the beseeching eyes of his daughter, off we went to the Humane Society.

Vanessa led me to a gangly 10-month-old ebony dog with white chest and toes named Oswald. After listening to my daughter’s pleading and running out of acceptable reasons why getting a dog would be a bad idea, I relented.

I signed the papers, and $130 later I was out the door with my new pet, a critter named Oswald (Oz for short).

Upon arrival, Oz baptized his new home by making a lakelike deposit on the kitchen floor. I considered renaming him the Whiz-ard of Oz.

Only his eagerness to play fetch and his dinner demeanor (he didn’t jump on me at the table) kept him from being returned to the pound.

After helping me watch a couple of hours of TV football, I retired him to the main floor bathroom for the night.

Shortly thereafter, as if in retribution for my earlier singing, Oz broke into his own hound dog rendition, which sounded like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit. Finally, just one howl short of sentencing himself to certain extinction, Oswald gave it up and pouted the rest of the night.

In the morning, I eagerly anticipated the inaugural walking of the new dog. Risking frostbite, we made a foray through the forest and returned to the house, after making sure both “jobs” were taken care of.

I then took a brief intermission to feed the wood stove.

Big mistake.

My olfactory sensors suddenly alerted me to two steaming pyramids of gooey dog doo on the living room carpet. The fertilizer factory had struck again!

I banished Oz outside, bombarding him with locker room language, which his cowering posture and hidden tail clearly understood. Holding my nose with one hand and scooping up poop with the other, I was again reminded why I hadn’t wanted a dog.

When I eventually let Oz back in, he Oz loyally followed me up to my bedroom. While I showered, he patiently waited by the bedroom door and later watched me get dressed, anticipating, I’m sure, the moment when my toes would discover the deposit he had mischievously left in my shoe.

As my toes slipped into the shoe, my senses knew immediately the source of the shoe goo. I dashed for the dog.

I futilely grasped for the devil, ratcheted up my rejoinders an octave and chased him down the stairs.

Having only one shoe and one pant leg on impeded my pursuit, allowing my anger to dissipate and preventing “dogicide.”

Finally, after cleaning the tainted shoe and gathering his accessories for his imminent return to the pound, I felt calmer. I finished getting dressed, and I herded the offending animal to the bathroom for the day.

As I closed the bathroom door, something about the affection in his nervous tail and apologetic eyes touched my heart.

I decided to give him one more chance. But something told me my house would never be the same.

My personal space had been altered radically and my life had been changed irrevocably by the affection of a dog and the love of a child.