She's the Dog You Can't Resist

The Boston Herald

She's the dog you can't resist

She does terrible things. She terrorizes the cats. She eats their food, drinks their water, plunks her hulking body in the front hall, and pretends to sleep there until, in need of litter or the great outdoors, they come tiptoeing by. Then she attacks, not to kill, just to remind the terrified creatures who is boss around here, who is 'man's best friend.'

She barks at ordinary sounds. An acorn falls on the front walk, somebody drops shampoo in the shower, her tail thumps against the door as she careens into a room, and you would think Cruella DeVil was standing before her. She goes absolutely wild. Her bark is fierce and surprises even her, and fills her with cocky, canine pride. She loves the sound she makes.

'Stop barking!' I yell, but she can't stop. She's on a roll. She's like a record on an old Victrola, or a sled on a steep slope. She is pulled by a mighty force.

She leaps on friends and strangers, no matter how you beg her not to, no matter how many times you tell her she is rude, no matter if you promise to feed her the cats for lunch if she behaves. 'Sauteed, Molly, stuffed, anyway you want.' The doorbell rang the other day. Molly predictably roared and charged and threw herself against the flimsy screen causing it to buckle even more. The two burly men on the other side lost all their color and backed up a few steps. I told them what I tell everyone, 'Don't worry. She won't hurt you. All she wants to do is knock you over and lick you to death,' but they were not assuaged by my words. 'We'll just leave this brochure for you to look at, ma'am,' they said, and hurried back to their car.

She climbs on furniture and eats things that don't belong to her like old socks and new dishtowels and the fresh bagels that were in a bag on the counter just this morning.

She demands to be fed at 650 A.M. and 510 P.M. no matter what I happen to be doing. If I don't feed her, she cries like Shirley Temple in the movie where the sad but determined little orphan spends the bulk of the film searching for her supposedly dead father. Her cry is pitiful. She's an 85-pound black -- lab. She looks like a Marine but she whimpers like a child. Food is the most important thing in Molly's life. 'Don't jump. Go lie down. Don't go near the street' she does not understand. But 'Want to eat?' 'Are you hungry? Want a bagel? A cookie? Corned beef on rye?' and she comes running across a room, a yard, a state. She acts chronically starved. She eats fudgicle sticks, butter wrappers, Omaha steak brochures, food inserts in the papers, anything that has anything to do with food. She hates the vacuum cleaner, so I can't vacuum; she attacks the broom so I can't sweep; she sheds all over the place and because I can't sweep or vacuum, hair blows through this house like tumbleweed across the plain. I try to brush her but she hates that, too. If I even say the word 'brush' she hides under the kitchen table until I say the word 'bagel,' then she slinks out. A colleague's wife has been begging for a black lab for weeks. He has finally agreed to a smaller dog, though he has misgivings about having any dog at all. A black lab, he says, is out of the question.

My advice? My black lab is without doubt the most ill-behaved creature in the world. She stares and drools when people eat. She takes me for a walk, I don't take her. She flunked dog-training and cat-sensitivity school. She is constantly getting into trouble.

And yet she is the sweetest, gentlest, most beautiful dog. She never complains. She never says 'Don't talk to me this morning, I'm in a bad mood. I hate Mondays.' She's never in a bad mood and she doesn't hate anything. She is perpetually happy. We've had smaller, better behaved dogs, but none as spirited, as devoted and as loving as this lumbering beast whose extra big body seems to have been made to accommodate her extra big heart.