:)
One Sunday dinner my mother made a country ham as well as the usual roast beef or chicken - I don’t know why, I guess she was thinking “the boys should really eat more meat. Maybe I’ll ease them into it with a 12-lb ham. Hey, I should invent a diet where people only eat meat…call it the Fatkins Diet!” Somehow the ham made it through the meal virtually untouched – I vaguely remember our family having a rousing discussion on the possible ramifications of the upcoming Jupiter Effect; my brother believing the gravitational effect of the other planets on the Earth's crust may be minimal even at their closest approach, and me patting myself on the back the rest of the meal for coming up with claiming my brother was a victim of The Stupider Effect…which got no laughs, but showed an early proclivity for being able to perform in front of different kinds of meats. Anyway, a little while later my brother and I were outside, kinda bored looking for something to do. I suggested we work on developing a tv channel that plays music videos all day, and my brother was wondering how much of the ham Gladys could eat if we gave it to her. I quickly ditched the tv idea and my brother and I snuck into the kitchen, grabbed the ham and took it outside behind the shed and called Gladys over. She walked over “hiya, fellas!”, started sniffing the ham and then of course got down to chowing. My brother and I stood there watching as she ate. And ate. And ate. This little bitch (calm down - bitch means female dog!) ate the whoooooooole thing. Incredible. This would be the single most exciting event in my life until a few years later when I had my first menage a mois (congratulations Catherine Bach!) She polished off the ham (Gladys, not Catherine…that was later), staggered away from the bone, and plopped herself about three feet away in the shade. Looking miserable. Seems like a dog who had gotten the neighborhood’s first slow clap standing ovation would be a little happier, but she looked miserable. After shaking our heads in wonder and inventing the fist-bump to celebrate, my brother and I walked back across the yard to sit on the back steps and talk about what we had just seen. Which went something like this:
“Man. She ate the whole thing!”
“Gee whiz…you see her eat the whole ham?”
“Yeah! The whole ham!”
“Man.”
“Don’t you think the advertising for a demographic consisting of teens and pre-teens with disposable income as the recession lifts would be through the roof on a channel that plays music videos all the time?”
“Dude. We agreed to focus on Gladys and the ham.”
“God, you’re so right, sorry!!”
As Gladys lay there moaning and groaning, her innards surely cursing her out, it occurred to one of us that boy, wouldn’t it be funny to mess with her by calling her to come over to us? My brother and I didn’t spend our childhood being cruel to animals, I saved that for my college girlfriend, but this was an idea we could not let ourselves pass up and we found ourselves excitedly shouting at Gladys to come to us, shouting and clapping. This poor bitch (female dog, remember!!!!) sloooooooooowly creaked herself up, her legs about to splinter like popsicle sticks holding up a block of concrete. She looked at us with that “I can’t believe you little shit bastards are doing this to me” and started to heave forward. She took one step and WOOMP! WOOMP! Her belly, which looked as if someone had slit her fur and inserted a watermelon before sewing it up, swayed back and forth, lightly scraping the short blades of grass below her. After two or three steps she said “eff this” and collapsed back to the ground. Throughout the next few days she looked like a balloon with a slow leak as she slowly got back to her normal self again. Brutal.
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