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.
Course 3 consists of tick pill, mashed potatoes, and duck pate. My dog is now eating like spoiled Central European royalty. A comparison that only intensifies as she sniffs around the meal, picks a bit, but then haughtily turns her nose up at it.
Though I am against it, Burke attempts a forced feeding. I leave the room to make sure I’m not implicated in the coup. When I returned, it’s clear that the plot has failed. The bowl is full of food, Burke’s hands are covered in paste and pate, and the dog is lying in her bed looking away.
“I’m screwed.”
“That’s why I left.”
We roll the remaining mixture into balls, locate the parts of the pill, and put it into the fridge.
We confer.
Maisy loves food. A pepper can’t be cut, the fridge opened, the oven clicked on, a pack of turkey unzipped without our dog’s immediate and persistent interest. The list of her favorites rolls on an on: yogurt, pizza crust, ham, turkey, ham and turkey; there’s a particular affinity for French fries and mac & cheese. If she has either, she will gloomily sit in the kitchen alternating her wide-eyed and longing glances between the underside of the counter and my guilt-ridden face.
Then there are the things that we don’t want her to eat: aside from the egg-like poop of a Chernobyl rabbit, there’s also the protein-filled excrement of cats, the aged specters of vegetables and pasta that hit the floor and evaded the vacuum cleaner, any poor multilegged creature that tries to cross the vast floors of our flat to better pastures. Eaten.
But not the tick pill. No, not the very expensive tick pill.
We’re at our local bar. At our wits end, we had no recourse but to find alcohol. The dog has been taking a constant supply of piskoty from me and the waiter. She is in utter joy. Though we brainstorm a way to coat the hard-cookie piskoty with the tick pill, we eventually abandon the idea in lieu of more shots.
“There’s one thing we haven’t tried,” Burke says. In answer to my ocular question, she looks south from where we are sitting. I follow suit. What’s there? The metro, the shopping center, the McDon—
“Yes.”
A tipsy visit to McDonald’s is always a very happy occasion. Anyone can see the glee on a person’s face when they’ve had one or two or five or nine and they are finishing off the evening with 4500 calories of takeout. But even the guilt I might normally feel over eating badly is extinguished by one basic fact: this is for my dog.
Yes, I’m getting food too. But the reason I am there is because of my dog. Nothing else I can do. No other recourse. In the back of my head: if this doesn’t work, I’m going to scream like a child.
I get her a cheeseburger.
When McDonald’s comes home with us, the dog is like a great white shark around the table, waiting for some chummy French fries or the nip of a McNugget to make it down to her.
In a bowl, I mix a third of the burger meat, a few fries, and her mashed-potato-cum-pate-covered tick pill and mash it up. I put it on the ground and she buries her snout into it. When she pulls her head out, the bowl is empty.
We rejoice.
Three more tick-free months.
We dine.
She enjoys her occasional fries and chicken.
We are exhausted.
The dog for her part is in utter glee. I run down her day. She has been fed five times, including mashed potatoes, duck pate, cookies, and McDonald’s. She was brought out to a bar where she was adored by the staff.
The dog smiles.
I doff my cap.
A free day is never a free day.
