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Jon de Vos: The continuing tail of Freeta Goodhome

Jon de Vos
Friday Report
Fraser, Colorado

Our Basset Hound, Freeta Goodhome, awoke from her favorite recliner, yawned wide enough to engulf a volleyball, looked around and barked, “Hey! Hey! Hey! HEY! Hmm, where’s dinner? Doggone it, I’m starving. It’s been hours since I’ve had a decent meal. I better get my man on it, where is he, anyway? Cuervo, have you seen The Master?”

The dogs looked at each other and giggled. Freeta came from the Granby Shelter with a note that said, “Not good on a leash,” an understatement of Biblical proportions.

Admittedly, our dogs have it pretty soft. The tradeoff for us is having someone wag when we walk in the room. The other day, I took our Bulgarian Weasel Hound, Cuervo, to the spa (vet) for a routine nail buff and teeth-whitening. Cuervo is not really a Weasel Hound, we just call him that to help him feel better about himself. In reality, he’s a little yellow yapper, also from the Granby Shelter, but don’t bring it up. He thinks he’s royalty.



My wife usually takes the dogs to the spa but she had a meeting. As she was walking out the door, I asked if she thought it I could leave Freeta alone while all three of us were out of the house. She looked back over her left shoulder and said, “Use your own judgment,” and scurried off to her car.

I looked down at Freeta, sound asleep on my recliner; I smiled and I trusted her, just like folks trusted Bernie Madoff. What could go wrong? The dog loves me. The mutt loves me like Glenn Close loved Michael Douglas in “Fatal Attraction”. While I was gone, she burst through two kid gates (Alco $47.99 each) rendering them into toothpicks. (Note to editor: Do you think I need to explain why I have kid gates and no kids? Nah, me neither). She was searching for me. She rummaged through every trash can in the house; she ransacked my desk; she gnawed on all the wires coming out the back of my computer, she rooted through a big bag of shredded junk mail and led her corpulent butt by her delicate nose through a maze of cupboards and then capped the frolic off by eating a two-year supply of fish food from under the aquarium, causing her to hurl all over the carpet. Apparently, upon hearing my tires receding down the driveway, Freeta decided she’d been abandoned and instinctively began to forage for roots, berries and maybe some chewing gum I’d left at the bottom of a wastebasket.



I can hear her little brain now, “They’re all gone. I’m alone. Nothing ahead but a sad, lonely death of starvation. Hey, what’s this? A box of tissue? GRROWWFF! Ha, ha, ha, I made short work of that. Oh, a banana peel! I’ll just chew it up on the sofa. Yum! Look, right here in this can. Is that … is that a bag of sugar? It is! What a lark! I’ll chew holes in it and drag it all over the kitchen! Hey! Hey! HEY! Are you fish going to finish all this food in these cans here under your tank? No? I didn’t think so. I better claw around in this cabinet to see if I can find any cookies. I like cookies. Hey! Hey! I like being abandoned.

Uh-oh, is that master’s car in the drive?”


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