What's Really Eating Molly? A Laundry List of Complaints

The Boston Herald

She eats things. Not just ordinary dog things like newspapers and Coke cans and gardening tools, which she pilfers from the garage. Not just brooms and rakes and speaker wire and toilet paper and paper towels.

Molly's preference is cotton - woven or unwoven, plain or printed, new or old. It doesn't matter. She's into all kinds. Dustcloths and facecloths. Cloths that you use to dry dishes, to polish cars. Cloth that you wear on your body - shorts, T-shirts, underthings.

I think she was a boll weevil in a previous life.

Her predilection for ingesting items designed "for external use only" has caused some major indigestion, but it got her in big trouble last December. She ate a new tube sock, a thick one with a ribbed top not yet worn down by dozens of spins in the dryer. Who knows where she got the sock? My children swear they never leave anything in the family room. Molly swears she didn't sneak upstairs and steal it from any of their drawers. The mailman swears Molly orders from Victoria's Secret only and they do not and would not sell tube socks.

In any case, she found the sock and ate it and, because it was thick, it got stuck somewhere south of her neck and north of her tail. Almost instantly she started acting normal, which should have been a tip-off that she was sick. But I saw her more docile and well-mannered behavior as proof that she was getting older and quieting down and finally learning that it was rude to forage through the trash, to stare and drool while people ate, to steal napkins off the table and towels off the counter and devour everything in sight.

It was only when she suddenly stopped eating that I knew there was something wrong. I brought her to the vet. He did blood work, felt her belly, took X-rays, called in an ultrasound specialist. Then the specialist felt her belly and took more X-rays. Neither could feel anything and nothing out of the ordinary appeared on film.

They operated anyway, and when they did - voila! - wrapped up in her intestines was the missing sock.

One would think that a dog would learn a lesson from such an ordeal. One would think that a dog, having been cut up, sewn up and laid up, would be a little bit more discriminating before swallowing. But not Molly. She was home less than a week when we caught her sneaking down the stairs with a pair of red tights between her teeth.

Cut to September, nine months later. Molly's thing for cotton is worse. We cannot leave anything that she can fit in her mouth where she can possibly get it. She is like a frog with a fly. One gulp and, if it's small enough, it's gone.

So we keep Molly confined to the kitchen and the family room these days - or, at least, we try. We keep the doors shut, but sometimes, when we're not looking, she opens a door and tiptoes upstairs, grabs a facecloth or a little half shirt or some unmentionable, and a minute later, it's gone. Or sometimes she sneaks downstairs into the laundry room and ingests anything she can; sometimes she goes places we know nothing about, through an invisible trap door in the back yard - she must, just like the 12 dancing princesses - because we have found clothing parts that we don't recognize under trees and half buried in holes in the ground.

Last Wednesday night, Molly devoured a scrunchie in record time. (A scrunchie, in case you don't know, is a stretchy, round cloth thing that kids use instead of ribbons and rubber bands to put their hair in a ponytail.) My 17-year-old was wearing one. She was in the kitchen, making lunch for school, and Molly, of course, was right beside her, staring and drooling and waiting for something to drop.

What dropped was the scrunchie. It fell out of the lunch maker's hair and landed on the floor and, before she could bend over and pick it up, Molly had grabbed it, raced off and swallowed it.

And because it was the only scrunchie in the house, and because the stores were closed and school was starting the next day, and because the scrunchie was needed, the 17-year-old screamed, "Molly, you're a jerk," lunged after her, pried open her mouth and shouted, "Spit it up. Spit it up," as if she'd actually want the scrunchie if Molly did.

Molly's unfazed response? A shameless belch, a satisfied sigh, followed by a nap under the kitchen table.