A Dumb Story About Franke
If you were to psychologically profile my mother’s side of the family, one of the things that you would note is their pathological love of bad dogs. I swear to God, my mother gave at least three dogs back to the breeder for being too well behaved. “There’s something wrong with this one,” she’d say. “I think it has epilepsy.”
From Bunny, my great-grandmother’s dog, who gave Granzy five stitches in her hand, and was, in turn, shot to death in the woods behind my house; to my Aunt Peggy’s dog, Molly, whom her boyfriend Rod said he was afraid to walk because then he became that “black man with the black dog who bites white people”; to our bulldog, Jack, who was not only allergic to grass (it gave him open sores all over his body), but also ate two cats; to our current mastiff, Nell, who cannot leave the house because she weighs 180 pounds, and attacks children, my family only loves dogs if they hate other people.
(There is a child screaming right outside of my window right now, and I have to say, if Nell was here, I’d let her out to pee.)
The current matriarch of the family, Nana, prides herself on being liked by all of them. If Cesar Millan had a red perm, lipstick on her teeth, a Subaru Forrester full of milk biscuits, and a taste for egg salad sandwiches, he would be my grandmother. That would be fucking weird.
It only takes Nana a few minutes to tame any unruly beast. She does so by filling the left pocket of her jacket with treats. Then, she sits down in the general vicinity of the dog in question, and lets them sniff her out. Once they find the treats, she empties out her pocket. Twenty milk biscuits in, and they’re eating out of the palm of her hand. Literally.
Now, most people hate Franke the Dog. Not only does she bite, she also barks, shits on the carpet, begs for food, and is a bigot.
Which is why I knew that all of the women who raised me would absolutely fucking love her. So, instead of buying them each a present for Mother’s Day, I brought Franke the Dog to my parent’s house in the Jeep, and let her lose in the yard.
She emerged like a bullet, and ran straight for my grandmother. Fortunately, she was wearing her muzzle, so she couldn’t bite. Instead, she hurled all 5.5 pounds of herself, repeatedly, at my grandmother’s leg. “Oh my gawd, isn’t she ADORABLE!” my Nana yelled, bending down, and putting her face close to Franke’s. Franke, in turn, went fucking berserk.
“Can you believe how cute this thing is?” my grandmother exclaimed joyfully to my mother and sisters, who emerged on the porch, and ran down the stairs to see for themselves.
For the next few minutes, they cooed over Franke, while Nell, locked in her crate, howled and peed all over her blanket. When Franke calmed down enough that she was no longer a cheese grater sized weapon, I took off the muzzle. Then, with a trail of treats, the women in my family lured her onto the front patio, all the while extolling her virtues. To thank them, whenever they would bend down to pet her, she would bite their hands.
“Little thing,” they said. “She doesn’t mean to hurt anyone. She’s just protecting herself.”
Eventually, she calmed down enough to notice the world around her. While we sat on the lawn furniture and talked about her like she was the fucking Queen of England, she ran like a bullet around my parent’s property, chasing groundhogs, and rolling around in patches of sun.
Twenty minutes into the visit, and she was sitting on my grandmother’s lap.
Another twenty minutes, and she was letting my sisters pick her up, and kiss her head. Being picked up and kissed on the head isn’t even something she lets Caleb do. She lets me do it all of the time, however, because I am a woman true to my own blood.
Within an hour, the girls had her on a leash, and were walking her up and down the driveway, ordering her around. “This is better than Christmas for them,” my dad told Caleb, appreciatively. I never thought, in my life, that my dad would accept a man in my life because of a small dog.
By the end of the day, Franke had run wild for two hours, gone for a 2.5 mile hike, and ingratiated herself to every woman in the family except for Nell, who would have eaten her despite the fact that if you hold up a treat and say “bang,” Franke will roll over like she’s dead.
Needless to say, everyone was sad to see her go at the end of the afternoon. “Bye Franke,” my sisters cooed at her, holding up their hands for a high-five. Franke, lying in her crate, was so exhausted that she couldn’t even manage to hold up her paw.
It was the best Mother’s Day in recent memory, if not in our entire lives, thanks entirely to a fucking tiny monster of a dog.
