Theresa Lewis

The adventures of Misty and Sasha continues

One day, my husband took Sasha for a walk and when he arrived back home, Sasha was missing her dog tags. I don’t know how it happened, but they had fallen off her collar. I went back to the field with my husband to search for the tags. Unfortunately, we didn’t find the tags. I wasn’t too concerned though because I knew that City Hall had a record of us having paid for her license. I never expected it to become an issue. Was I ever wrong about that!

About two months had passed and I never gave the missing tags another thought. One Friday night I had had a miserable night’s sleep, or lack of sleep, I should say. I tossed and turned all night and could never get past the twilight sleep. Consequently, the next morning I felt like a dishrag. My husband got up and asked me if I was getting up too. I said that I wanted to sleep a little longer because I was still tired. He said he was going to take the dogs for a walk in the field behind the condos where we lived. I remember grunting something at him then I fell into a deep, deep sleep at last.

I don’t know how much time had passed, but all of a sudden my wonderful deep sleep was interrupted by someone screaming my name from downstairs. I could feel the panic in his voice. I shot off the bed like I had been shot out of a catapult. I was bleary-eyed. I raced downstairs in my raggedy nightgown without any regard as to how I looked. The neighbor had said that a security guard was trying to take Sasha away from my husband because Sasha had no tags. I burst through the doorway and in my bare feet, I ran like a cottontail over to the field where I knew my husband would be.

I saw the security guard and asked him what was going on. He said that he was perfectly within his rights to take our dog. I folded my arms across my chest and told him that he really didn’t want to do that because I was within my rights to protect my pet. I told him that if he insisted, I would take him on. I said that the only way he would ever lay a pinky on my dog was over my dead body. Right away, he took a step backwards. He was just a young short little runt dressed very efficiently in his security guard uniform. I knew that if I had to do battle with him, I was confident that I would win in the end.

At some point, I became vaguely aware that many of our neighbors were standing around watching the standoff. I told the security guard that we had purchased her tags and that City Hall had a record of it. He didn’t seem to care. His point was that any dog without tags could be picked up. I had heard stories of security guards picking up dogs and taking them to a field and shooting them. I’m big and I’m heavy and I told the pint-sized security guard to back off, or prepare himself because I was ready to do battle. I stared him down.

In that moment of staring him down, a scenario played itself out in my mind. I grabbed his arm and threw him over my shoulder which knocked the wind out of him. I stomped on him until he curled up into a fetal position. My mind raced with the kind of moves that I knew I had been trained to do and could easily execute if I had to. I was ready to rip his throat out. In reality, all I did was stare at him until he backed down and left.

Suddenly, my rational mind returned. I became aware of the fact that I was standing in the middle of a field in my shabby old wrinkled nightdress and bare feet. I also knew at that point that I had a Woody woodpecker hairdo. Oh crap! Oh freakin’ crap! I knew that there was no way I could get out of that predicament gracefully. I really blew it… major big time.

As I stood and glared at the security guard, he slowly retreated and got back into his vehicle. The whole time, my husband was standing behind me saying nothing at all. As soon as the security guard had driven off, my husband asked me where I had come from. He said that he left me sleeping in bed not even ten minutes earlier. I told him that one of our neighbors had come to get me because he said you were in trouble.

Once I had responded to my husband, I had to walk past all the neighbors to get back home. No one said anything. Even though I held my head high as I passed the neighbors, the term “trailer trash” (in reference to myself) came to mind. I had just given the whole neighborhood a show they would never forget, even though I wished they would forget it.

I’m sure that once the security guard saw how freaky I looked, he didn’t want to tangle with me. Actually, who would want to challenge a big fat woman in bare feet and wearing only a wrinkled shabby nightdress with her sleep-flattened side hair worked up into a frenzied point on top of her head? I couldn’t possibly have looked any worse if I had tried. For all those who stared at me with their mouths gaping open, I’ll just bet they don’t look so good either when they jump out of bed in the morning.

As for the neighbor who shrieked at me to wake me up, I hope he learned a very valuable lesson… let sleeping fat ladies sleep. Never awaken someone the way I was awakened. At that moment, I was not responsible for my appearance, or for my irrational behavior.

THE END