My Two-Cents: Good Old Clearance Puppies
Some of my fondest memories of my now late dog Maggie were the ones that made me mad at the time. I remember when my mom made brownies for me to take to Wednesday night youth group, and then when Maggie jumped up on the counter and devoured the entire pan. So then my mom made another pan and told to me to make sure I hid them in the microwave this time, and I failed to listen so Maggie got ahold of that pan too. To this day, I still always put desserts in the microwave out of habit; a tactic none of my roommates have ever understood. I remember the time my brother Jack colored Maggie green with a marker (which became a recurring issue). And the numerous times my mom would pick my siblings and me up from school and tell us to put the dog on the leash so my mom could hold the leash out her minivan window as we “walked” the dog around the block. Or the one time she ate the carpet and the floor material under it in my sister's room. Or all the times my brother Luke attempted to ride her like a horse. Or the times someone would open the door and she would escape and run throughout the entire neighborhood. There was this one time I attempted to take her on a run with me in middle school and she saw another dog and started sprinting as the leach was attached to my wrist, so I got dragged through a street boulevard on my hands and knees. One time last summer, I brought home fried cheesecake, and I looked away for one second to find out she had inhaled the whole thing. My parents often had to scold us about leaving food on the counter, because anything left out would perish in Maggie's site: carpet, brownies, fried cheesecake, or my mom's beer cracker mix, which would probably be regarded as the dog’s favorite food. In some sense, she may have been the World’s Worst Dog. But that was okay.
Most of the memories I listed enraged me or my mother (mostly my mother) at the time, but since we put Maggie to sleep last weekend, they are the ones I remember the most. The things that piss us off most sometimes have the most comedic effect, and comedy can be the thing we regard most fondly. Though a lot of tears were shed when Maggie would eat my birthday cake and run away causing me to be late to soccer practice, those turned into laughter as the real tears of saying goodbye to our clearance puppy set in. We often regarded her as our Marley and Me adjacent dog, as I think she could have given the movie star puppy a run for her money. Sending Maggie over the rainbow made me realize that not taking the bad stuff for granted should be taken in the same, if not higher regard, as not taking the good stuff for granted. The bad stuff can make us laugh. The stuff that makes us laugh can become good when we reminisce. The bad stuff is the reason I will always put leftovers in the microwave without a second thought, and the reason I laugh when I realize why I’m doing it!
