I had a ‘free’ afternoon Monday, when Burke had to take the dog to the vet. It was part of the dog’s upkeep and maintenance retinue consisting of shots, eyedrops, checkup, prodding, pushing, what’s-that-lumps, and pills against a menagerie of small animals that can attack her: worms, fleas, and ticks.

Knowing nothing bad was happening at the vet, I kicked my feet up and read. I had bought this ‘free’ couple of hours with a ‘I buy, you fly’ deal with Burke. I gave her my card and she brought the dog to the vet. I was in a zen moment born of reading and having a fan directly on my face, when my credit card’s notification came in with the recent payment at the vet. Before I looked, I hazarded a guess for what the cost would be. Then I looked.

My first drink of the afternoon came in tandem with Burke’s message: sorry it’s so expensive, she needed shots for Lyme Disease and she needed that tick pill.  

That tick pill.

The tick pill looks exactly like a slightly-smaller individual piece of Rolo candy – a little brown thimble of medicine – and it costs roughly the same as what my dad paid for his last car. My irritation at its cost is both exacerbated and quelled by the fact that it works so well. Once this little flowerpot goes down her gullet, she will essentially have 3 months free of ticks. There is no such medicine for humans, I gather.

But now we’ve located the tricky part: getting it down her gullet. For as much as this helps my dog, there seems to be nothing she hates more than this little truncated cone. The key is masking the smell. In the past, we have attempted to do this by slipping it into a meatball, rolling it up in a pad of pate, and balling it with peanut butter.

You’re asking now: Well why not do that again?

Sure. But it seems that dog gets wily to our schemes. This animal, who can’t figure out that it can’t hold two sticks in her mouth at the same time, has evidently figured out that on occasion we try to sneak a small pill into food she otherwise loves.

This year I think I have outwitted her by breaking the pill up and putting it in her food. Only after he starts eating do I realize my huge mistake. She’s not only avoiding the spots in her food that carry the pill, but now I have to find the broken parts and put them into a vessel she will eat.

This is why, at 6:45 am on Tuesday morning, my neighbors wondered why I was making mashed potatoes. I worked some of the dog food into it and made it like dumplings. One or two went down, but then she narrowed her eyes and turned her nose away from the other potato balls tainted with the pill. My frustration grew.

“But these look just like the rabbit poop you like eating on our walks!”

This is true. In the park in front of our building there live a warren of rabbits. The ancestors of these rabbits evidently mated with horses at some point because these guys are massive. Surely, enterprising folks in my neighborhood will start training these rabbits and offering older folks rides to and from the metro on their saddled backs. These rabbits leave droppings the size of Cadbury eggs all along our walking path. And my dog will gobble them up as nonchalantly as if I were throwing her favorite cookies in front of us.

But mashed potatoes with a bit of tick-pill meat? No.