Charlie's Opening Night

As you will have gathered, Jerry was not keen on adopting a puppy quite yet. After all, with the kids in college and our beloved Lady in dog-heaven, he had moved up the mother attention-chain to first place! In addition, we were escaping the Portland rain and spending the winter in a rental house in Palm Desert. “Not fair to the owners to bring in a puppy” he said virtuously. However, when we had rented the house, we still had Lady and we had permission to have a dog. (Well, a puppy is a dog, right?) Furthermore, this house was perfect for puppy training: tile floors, only one area rug, fenced yard. What could possibly go wrong?

My first clue should have been in the long car ride from the breeder’s house back to Palm Desert, during which he never stopped chewing. By the time we reached the desert my hands, arms, ears, nose and chin were covered with tiny holes. My sleeves were more or less shredded, and he was trying to get to my hair and jewelry.

We made an emergency stop at Pet Smart to buy dozens of chew toys. (I came to wish that I had invented that annoying little squeaker-thing that’s in all of them.) We tried the giant carrot on him right away, but he seemed to prefer skin.

Our plan was to crate him with lots of chew toys – he’d love it in there!- and only let him out when we could supervise. If he chewed us, we would say “NO” and put him in his crate. When he chewed his toys, we would praise extravagantly! As they say in the One Minute Manager, we would catch him doing something right! Same thing with house-breaking. Stay in the crate, then a quick trip outside to pee, poop, and be praised. Maybe we’d start our own dog school when we had him perfected?

We hadn’t counted on the howling.

Crating aficionados clearly do not regard the crate as a “cage”. Charlie did. We placed the crate next to our bed, so we could get up quickly if he woke up and had to go out. Unfortunately, he never went to sleep. He only quieted down if I stuck my fingers in the cage for him to chew. We moved the crate to our bathroom, the laundry room, and finally the kitchen – but we could hear him everywhere, and he never stopped howling. Then we remembered there was a $25 fine if a neighbor heard your dog barking.

We immediately waffled on the crate. (Well,it was 2:00 AM.) We couldn’t let him out in our bedroom because it was filled with problematic chewables and pee-places (bedspread, curtains, upholstered chair, pillows, rug). So we stuck him in the tiled kitchen where the only thing breakable was a magnificent crystal chandelier which he couldn’t possibly reach. We loaded the room with his toys, made a soft little bed for him, and moved the kitchen table over to block the door. He was happy! We slept! After all, there was no hard rule that one had to do the crate-thing, was there? He was safely and happily “containerized” in the kitchen!

We woke up in the morning with bright sun. It was 9:00 and we hadn’t heard a peep from Charlie. “Poor lamb must have been really tired”, I said. Then we heard a sort of scuffling, followed by the sound of ripping. Was he tearing up his bed? We jumped up and went to look.

We found him in the middle of the kitchen, sunlight sparkling from the crystal above him, joyfully chewing tiny bits of wallpaper. If he had just pulled it loose in one giant hunk, we might have been able to glue it back in place. But no, he had yanked yards of it off the wall, and then shredded it to remarkably uniform, miniscule bits. In denial, I climbed over the table and bent to examine the shreds, saying “people do assemble puzzles with more pieces than this”. Then I picked up Charlie and stood, smashing my head into the chandelier. Crystal prisms, beads, and chain parts flew around the kitchen, skidding and banging into appliances, tile, and cabinets. Pounds of crystal dust cascaded down amongst the shreds of wallpaper and onto the poop and pee he had thoughtfully left next to the refrigerator.

I burst into tears, and Jerry said helpfully, “I make this a $2000 morning.” This would prove to be low.

Next week, we seek professional dog training.