Drooling Bassetoodles

So today I went over to my customer’s house--the lady I met at the lake and who wants me to do a bunch of portraits and a mural of her dogs.

Glennshire Chase is a rich hamlet in the country and my customer is the first property as you enter the village. You round a curve in Route 97 and you can sense it coming. Everything seems manicured. The woods, the riverbed. The water seems cleaner. Even the roadkill I’d followed all the way seemed to be conspicuously absent from the pavement as I approached their property.

But the sounds of the country were not sweet. Since the duct tape has fallen off my driver’s side window, I could hear the sounds of dogs barking, and even, I thought, howling. That was my first sense of foreboding.

When I got out of my car, the barking jumped up a notch, like an alarm being set off due to the noises my car makes. The door has been replaced and the new one doesn’t fit quite right into the body. When you open it, the door snags the front fender and bends it in until it bends far enough to snap back with a bang. Stepping out of the car, my heel always manages to hit the metal trim that’s peeled away and that makes a nice, reverberating twang. Back in the day, that combination of sounds would have set off car alarms in the parking garages, but today I was setting off the dogs.

My customer was coming down the walkway to meet me. Hush! She admonished the dogs and one or two stopped barking. The rest carried on as before from within the huge, fenced-in area of kennels.

“Come on in,” she invited me.

She welcomed me into a grand foyer and several animals ran up to me. She explained that they were Basset Hounds, and told me their names, which I forget, and told me not to mind their excessive salivating. Then a couple fuzzy beasts, about the same size, came gamboling in.

“The Bassetoodles don’t drool as much,” she said as one of them shook its head and showered me.

“What kind of dogs did you say they are?” I asked, crouching down to pet them, pretending to show interest.

“Bassetoodles. Basset hound and Poodle. Everybody wants a hybrid these days.”

“Wow, that’s something” I said, wiping slobber from my hand, only to find that my pant leg was no drier.

“A friend of mine crossed a Basset Hound and a Saint Bernard,” she said. “Now that dog could drool.”

As I stood back up, I could see that she was waiting for something to dawn on me and when I pictured the size difference of the two parent dogs she sensed my awe and smiled with delight. A disturbing delight. Like she was flirting with me. This was my second sense of foreboding.

I’m not a big believer in mental telepathy but at that moment I was projecting the thought to her with all my might: “No, I don’t want to know which was the female.”

Still flirting, she said, “oh, come around back and look at my Pocket Puggle.”

“There’s a sentence never before uttered,” I thought to myself. But of course, I was wrong. People around here probably say that all the time.

This was becoming tedious. We were entering her kennel and I realized that it was filled with designer dogs. She introduced me to the Puggle named Pete. Peter Pocket Puggle for long.

“But he’s an anomaly around here,” she explained, oblivious to the fact that in some places her whole brood are anomalies.

“Here’s our main area of focus. Poodle hybrids. Everybody wants a little someone with some Poodle in her! We have Cavoodles, Labradoodles, and Boodles.”

“Why not just a Poodle?” I ask naively. She’s got an answer.

“Oh, they’re just too fru-fru for the men. Get a nice Lab for the guy and a little poof-ball for the lady and mix it together for a happy marriage.”

I want to see this lady’s self-help shelf. No. No, I don’t.

“These are all part Poodle?” I asked. Even the word Poodle was starting to sound funny to me and I wanted very much never to say the word again. Not that it is the Poodle’s fault. The only reason they are fru-fru is because of the topiary-like haircuts. With their entire coat intact, they look fine. Like sheepdogs.

“No, we also crossbreed with Yorkies. We have Norkies, Morkies, and Chorkies. And of course we have Yorkipoos.”

Of course.

Bassetoodles, Norkies and Yorkipoos? Where am I? In a Dr. Suess book?