TheBanyanTree: Ash's Toybox

[Monique Young]

Ash has a toybox. He had so many toys and bones and empty plastic bottles
and things that we scooped everything up and put it all into a big
plastic/rubber containers, the kind with the lid that snaps down and keeps
everything inside securely. Under optimum conditions, of course, which
living with Ash is not. Don't get me wrong . . . he's not a bad dog. He's
just . . . Ash. Spawn of the devil. But that's another issue. 

                So we put all of Ash's toys in his toybox, and we close the
lid. It snaps shut, so we think we're pretty safe. It's not that we don't
like his toys, it's just that he likes to spread them all over the place. I
gather this is the same sort of thing children do. Sometimes I trip over
them. Some of his toys are squeaky toys, which he adores, and which drive me
insane. Perhaps, we thought naively, we could apportion out the toys as we
saw fit.

                There are many other things that occur in my fantasy world,
and this is certainly not the least of my delusions. 

                It took very little time for Ash to figure out how to
unlatch his toybox. First he attacks it from a corner, and then he slides
along to the latch in the middle, and somehow it unlatches. Don't ask me
how. Once that's done, he slides the lid off and starts searching for the
perfect toy. First he picks a stuffed orange bone that's squeaky, and he
runs around with that for awhile, showing off his catch and making as much
noise as humanly possible. Then he returns to the toybox and takes out his
brush, which really isn't a toy but is more of a grooming product, but he
likes it anyway, and he leaves that laying by the TV. He returns to the
toybox and digs out a bone, and he lies on the floor with that for a time,
until he gets bored. By the end of the day all the toys will be all over the
house again. 

                It's not as if he needs his toys. He's not averse to the
idea of grabbing anything within reach and making it into a toy, no matter
what the item was meant to be. He's not discriminating, this dog, when it
comes to things he can put into his mouth. It's why I never put my glasses
anywhere but inside a closed drawer if I'm not wearing them. He's been known
to eat them. 

                His toybox isn't the only thing he can open. We have a
collapsible kennel for the storage of Ash himself, when we're not home or
when I need to work and he's not cooperating. (Not like right now, when he's
actually being quiet and well behaved, probably because he knows I'm
expecting a furniture delivery and then he can go wild.) It's the third or
fourth or fifth collapsible kennel we've had because he usually manages to
eat his way out of them. But they're cheap, they're flexible, they're easily
stored, we can move them from upstairs to downstairs with no problem, and
they do last a little while. As Ash gets older, they last longer. We
consider this a positive sign. 

                When I leave the house I put Ash in his kennel and I zip it
shut. Usually he moves it about a bit before he calms down . . . he's been
known to roll the collapsible kennel all around and get himself stuck in odd
corners, like he did one day in the kitchen. Lodged between the island and
the counter, a big red nylon package half folded in on itself, he gets stuck
and then just waits to be rescued. Usually he just rolls it around the
living room, then he falls asleep in it. But now he can unzip it himself,
when he gets tired of being in it. This is disconcerting, but then again, it
may be an improvement from when he was younger and would just chew through
it. At least he doesn't ruin it anymore, he just . . . opens it. Then he
looks for someone to tell, because he knows that even if he's locked up and
I'm not here, chances are Andrew's in the downstairs office, working. When
he works he's often on the phone. So Ash goes downstairs by the front door,
which fortunately is still quite a ways from the office, and he barks. What
he's saying is, "I'm out now, come play with me!" 

                And then the person on the other end of the phone may ask,
"Is that a dog I heard?"

                In order to keep up the pretense that he isn't working from
home (his company thought this would be a swell way for them to cut costs,
and we love the new commute time), he ends up making vague excuses,
something along the lines of, "Must be a dog outside."

                This usually works, but if the person on the other end of
the phone knew that the real offices of this company were on the 18th and
22nd floors of a downtown Seattle office building, they might not be as
gullible. Up there, you can't really hear the dogs barking on 3rd Avenue.
That would be if there were dogs on 3rd Avenue.

                So Ash is not easily contained, and neither are his toys.
But it's okay, because he is Ash, and we like him anyway.