by Leo Ginley

Created on: January 20, 2010

Bruno
A dog’s life.

We didn’t choose him.
He chose us. More accurately, he chose Pearl. When the breeder opened the gate to the backyard, he bolted out and sat on Pearl’s foot, looking up at her and wagging his tail. The only thing left to do was hand over the purchase price.

When we eventually got him home, he claimed a blue and white checked cushion as his own. It was enormous for him but we let him keep it. It wasn’t enormous for very long anyway, but he kept it for a long time. His very first effort to empty his bladder was interrupted when Pearl scooped him up and ran to the garden with him, where he completed the job. That was the only time he even considered toileting in the house.

Bruno had a great sense of humour. He would steal pegs from the basket and run away to be chased when Pearl was hanging out the washing. He never pulled clothes off the line, or did anything ‘bad’, just stole the pegs. Except for the time he upped the ante on the peg trick. Pearl and I were away somewhere and Russell, our son, was helping Judith, our daughter, to tidy up the house (they were house sitting for us). Russell was hanging out the washing for Judith, and Bruno this time, just for a change, went to the peg basket, put his head in it, and shook his head, scattering pegs all over the back garden! I won’t repeat here what Russell called him!

There was the wonderful Christmas 1999. Bruno is still a small puppy 3 months old. Our son and daughter, Russell and Judith, have bought Pearl and me tickets to Ireland as our wonderful Christmas present from them.
They wanted to surprise us and keep us guessing up until the last second as to the nature of the gift, so they had obtained a very large television box from a local household appliance dealer and dressed it up on the inside with a diorama including a map of Ireland, photos of other European sights we would see, clouds of cotton wool, model airplane cruising the imaginary sky! Of course, they wanted us to believe it was a new big TV, so dramatized pushing of the ‘weighty’ carton into the lounge room on Christmas morning. They did a great job of miming moving a heavy carton in to the center of the floor. It was all going very believably until little Bruno bounded past the ’heavy’ carton, barely brushing against it, but moving it across the floor and shattering the illusion!

He was a true comic with the Chaplinesque talent equally capable of drawing laughter

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>