Tag Your Guests

Every now and then, I have a guest or two stay over for a few days or sometimes up to a week or two. This usually happens when their humans take a trip somewhere and decides that the family dogs would be happier on terra firma.

I, of course, consider myself the family ambassador and welcome the company of my foreign cousins, not to mention my delight in their tarriance. I always say, nothing expands your horizons like experiencing the rich diversity of customs and cuisine from other cultures.

I do always have my Miss Priss, the household feline, but she is not one for an intellectual conversation, preferring to work on her hunting and attack skills with my tail as her target and usually when I happen to be taking an afternoon nap. I admire her dedication to her sport and do try to help facilitate her training program by chasing her around the kitchen, preferably when my humans are cooking so they are there to appreciate my efforts.

There is also my neighbour Dee Dee, (she insists I call her Aphrodite because apparently she believes she has some aristocratic breeding) who adopted my humans’ grandparents some time ago. However, she is getting long in the tooth (if she had any that is) and is obsessed with regaling me with tales about “the good old days when I could gnaw a bone to nothing in 10 minutes flat.”

Being of impecable breeding myself, I always attentively listen to her with the same rapt attention as if I I were hearing her apologue for the first time, but I have to tell you my patience wanes thin at times. 

My profound apologies.... I seem to have inadvertently segued.

For this last week, I have been entertaining Annie, a high-strung Shihtze cross who has illusions that she is of royal parentage. From the moment she arrived, “Princess Annie” walked through the dog door like she owned the place. She terrorized Miss Priss into retreating to the roof, and made Dee Dee hoarse from warning her that “if she even THINKS of coming to her side of the fence she will tear her from limb to limb”.

Apparently they are from apposing kingdoms.

Princess Annie was not entirely happy with the prospect of vacationing at what she considered to be a commoner’s house and had not even completed an evening in my company before she managed to find a space in between the fence boards large enough to squeeze through to the freedom of the other side. I watched her trot into the sunset but I was confident that I would see her again soon, because I knew something she didn’t know.

What I knew was that when Princess Annie arrived at our house, my humans attached a special tag to her collar, not unlike a similar tag that I wear myself that has some kind of homing device built into it. If you are wearing this homing device and if you are outside our yard any human who finds you is compelled to immediately escort you back to our house. Sure enough, it didn’t take very long before Princess Annie was coming back in the company of one of our human neighbours. By that time it was dark, she was hungry and not opposed to sharing my food bowl or the comfort of my dog bed.

As someone wise once said, “Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were.”