Major’s Corner….Gilbert the dog

When I was a boy our family had a dog by the name of Gilbert. He was of uncertain provenance but had a pleasing look about him.
I adored old Gil. In many ways he was my best friend, for I did not mix well with my contemporaries as I was thought to be odd. I was beaten by bullies and generally flung about by life. Mine was not a happy childhood.
But Gilbert forgave me for all my strangeness and cared for me as I was. He was not a young dog when my father acquired him from a distant aunt who had gone mad because of a recalcitrant fiancé. He did not warm to my father, who felt the dog was a reactionary, but he became my companion from the start. 
When he passed away with only a soft burp and a sigh, I was bereft and very much alone. I entered a dark period. My parents gave me a sort of monkey teddy bear, in other words it looked like a monkey but was soft. This was to make up for the death of my best friend?
In the end my mother threw out Monkey because she found he was always moist from my nighttime slobber and highly unsanitary.
My parents then packed me off to boarding school. If First Nations think they were the only ones to suffer at school, I have a few stories that might raise eyebrows in the sweat lodge.
However my original point was that I started out life with the greatest companion, Gilbert, and now that I am married and very old, I am ending it with two bloody-minded cats foisted on me by my wife Kitty. When originally she had brought home Pericles and Bertram, these two beasts of hell, I said fine, but I wanted a dog around the house to offset them.
Kitty merely said no. I found that an unacceptable response. So she ran off and returned with some idiot who claimed to be a cat psychologist. This chap with a little beard purported to be the “Freud of Felines” and advised us that mixing species with two high-strung cats in the same abode might lead to cat anxiety on the highest level.
I was about to say something like “Fiddlesticks” when I caught the look on my true love’s face and swallowed my words, and that is the way it stands today some 10 years later.
When does a chap become the king of his castle? That is the question for the ages. The fact is Pericles and Bertram have become worse if that were possible. Because they are getting on, their highly sensitive digestive tracts have begun to go wonky. In short, they have scent about them not unlike an open sewer.
We used to have their Kitty kibo at the bottom of the basement stairs, keeping some distance between us and the cats’ motions. Not now. Bertram was finding it difficult because of back pain, brought on, no doubt, by heinous crimes, to make it down the stairs to their biffy. Since we could not have two of these, it is now in the kitchen!
Thankfully (and I never thought I would say this), we have grown used to the smell, but problems arise when others visit us. A few weeks ago Kitty felt we simply had to have a cocktail party as friends were always having us over and she insisted we should reciprocate. She poured her Chanel No. 5 onto the cat bathroom, which produced the most dreadful appetite-suppressing perfume, but Kitty thought we could get away with saying, “What smell?”
That worked for a short while but Pericles had to go in the middle of the party and Kitty’s original attempt to cover the puss-puss miasma broke down. Friends with handkerchiefs held over noses made desperate excuses and bolted for the door, pouring onto the lawn gasping for air. All my wife said is “I thought that went very well.”
I want a dog like Gilbert.
Copyright Christopher Dalton 2016
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