A Christmas Mac Attack

It was the day after Christmas, and in the kitchen I was savoring my supper of left-over beef tenderloin, absorbed in a book. A bit at a time, a noise intruded on my peace and quiet: paper being shredded. I knew what it meant straight off. Mac, my Dalmatian, has recently become obsessed with eating all kinds of paper products off the desk in my study. I’ve lost at least a ream of copy paper, hundreds of Post-its, and even a pile of manuscript pages. Bad dog!

I shot into our adjacent family room. Mac was stretched out beside the Christmas tree, diving with joy into a package from my friend Lucie, one which I’d been waiting to open till we could get together after the holiday. Her present had been in two parts—a jar of homemade marmalade in a gift bag, which I had put in a cupboard immediately, and also a small box, which I had set under the tree.

The box was demolished, reduced to scraps of cardboard and torn wrapping paper; Mac was now happily pushing what looked to be a hand-blown crystal vase around the rug with his nose. I grabbed it, swept up the mess, and then spanked him. Of course, this did no good at all, as he simply wagged his tail while I yelled.

When I called Lucie to report the destruction and to reassure her that the vase had made it through unscathed, she asked, “but what about the ornament?”

“What ornament?” I responded, seized with foreboding. Apparently, there had been an ornament, along with the vase, as part of the gift; she had made it herself, a felt star decorated with sizeable, antique buttons of brass and glass.

I moaned, raced back to the foot of the Christmas tree. No ornament. Searching the house room by room, I found no scraps of felt or stray buttons. Only one conclusion was possible: he had eaten the whole thing. We were off to the vet to drop him off for an x-ray. And possibly surgery.

Home again without him, I froze as something new occurred to me. What if the ornament hadn’t been in the box with the vase, but had instead been in the gift bag with the marmalade—the bag I’d discarded after removing the jar because I’d assumed it was empty.

I scurried to the kitchen trash bucket, but Brad told me that he had just moved the garbage out to the street for pick-up, and he wasn’t going to retrieve it. “You’ll never find it,” he said. “Just kiss that ornament goodbye.”

But the thought of it buried out on the street tortured me. The temperature was in the low 30’s, so I pulled on gloves, boots and parka, and then moved the car out of the garage so as to have room to dig and make a mess.

Nearly to the bottom of the second tightly-packed bin, after having tossed out heaps of Christmas wrap, I sighed and dug out a last scrap of red tissue paper. It felt fat and squishy in my fingers. I paused for just a second and then peeled the layers back: in my hand lay a blue felt star.

Before beginning to scoop up the mounds of garbage, I hurried to the phone to abort the x-ray. Too late, the vet said. But upon hearing the story she started to laugh. “This makes my day. I’ll give you a break on the fee.”

When I called Lucie and told her the star was safe, I could hear that she was relieved for both Mac and her handiwork. Back at the tree, I hung the ornament alongside the one that was most precious to me—my mother’s miniature typewriter. And then I went over to the vet’s to collect my most innocent dog.

However, this is not the close of Mac’s story. The very next night, Brad was making a sandwich from a liverwurst he favors, which comes wrapped tightly in an oblong roll, its two ends pinched off by small metal clips. He cut off the first clip with a scissors and tossed it toward the kitchen trash bin. As if by magic, Mac rose on his hind legs and snapped the clip out of the air, thinking, surely, that it was some of that fragrant meat. Down his gullet it went. I compared the second metal end with the first, and it was, as I feared, sharp.

Before we made yet another trip to the vet, a home remedy seemed appropriate. Brad drove around to four pharmacies trying to find hydrogen peroxide, (ours had expired), and when he returned with a bottle, I doused Mac. We waited only a minute before his dinner came back up. And then it was my good fortune to be elected to poke around in the slimy vomit. Eureka! One sharp metal clip into the trash, at last. And there’s the end to that story. With Dalmatians as a part of our household, I’m sure there will be more to come.

Is there a moral here? Perhaps. Don’t put your presents under the tree if you have dogs who are paper monsters. Don’t toss your garbage high into the air on its way to the trash bin if those sneaks are nearby. And, even should disaster strike, don’t forget to give the naughty fellow a hug and steal him a cookie from Santa’s sack—rather than a lump of coal. Remember that dogs will be dogs, Dals will be Dals, and a good “parent” always forgives.

Yours,