Jarring Discoveries

For a moment I thought Manny had been playing with fire. The other day I returned home to find what looked to be a half burned out honey colored candle sitting on my bedroom floor. Stopped dead in my tracks, I wondered where Manny had found the glass encased wax and, more disturbingly, what he had been doing with it.

To say Manny has been "acting out" over the course of the past week would be a gross understatement. He refuses to go out for a walk, insisting on staying close to home, I assume, just in case Leo shows up. He sniffs incessantly, picking up the scent of his big brother and mentor everywhere, even on the patch of grass near the street where Leo loved to go pee, just to torment me as I watched the traffic whiz by. As far as Manny is concerned, Leo's disappearance is my fault. I left with him last Sunday -- bringing in reinforcements to lift him since Leo obviously didn't want to go -- and I returned empty handed, except for his collar. Manny is determined to make me pay.

The king of snuggling is refusing to snuggle; the dog who would whimper with joy when I arrived home after a few hours just remains on his chair when I walk in, his good eye half open as he silently sneers at my arrival. No longer do I pull up to the garage to see his silly scrunched face at the window, his fat torso trembling with uncontrollable joy as he prepares to greet me at the door. Nothing. Unconditional disdain.

I've been trying to allow him to work through his anger, trying not to react. So Manny ups the ante, and does things like leave what appear to be half burnt out candles in the middle of my bedroom floor. Outlandish theories went through my head. Baffled, I hypothesized he had created some makeshift ancient shrine to Leo; I could almost imagine him barking in tongues as he chanted some indecipherable tribute to his lost best friend.

I approached the odd shrine with trepidation, lifting it up gingerly as I expected the heat of the glass to burn my shaking fingers. Shrine, my ass. It was a half empty jar of peanut butter, the label peeled off, the lid nowhere in sight. The peanut butter that remained was smashed flat, as if, say, by the flattened snout and expert tongue of a mischievous puggle. After an extensive search, I found the lid on my bed, a small portion of it neatly chewed off (I still can't figure out how the wretched little creature managed to dislodge it from the jar) and a large peanut butter stain on my bedding, just for good measure.

Manny sat downstairs doing his best innocent dog imitation, which may have worked had I not noticed a small glob of peanut butter stuck in his left nostril. In a way, I'm glad Manny got up off his perch to do some damage, to make some noise. He may be playing with fire, but sometimes that's what you have to do when you've been burned. Leo would be proud.