Owen the Destroyer

A couple of years ago my wife Dawn brought home a surprise for my son Sean's birthday.
"Here hold onto him for a minute," she said and handed me an eight-week old Golden Retriever.
The pup looked up at me with scared little eyes and
proceeded to poop all over me. In one way or another,
literally or figuratively, he has been pooping all over me
ever since.
I wanted to name him Ruger, after one of my favorite firearms, but Sean opted for Owen, after the English soccer star Michael Owen. Yes, that's the tail end of a poodle on the left side of the photo, but please, only one embarrassing story at a time.
Early on I knew there were going to be problems. Window screens, for one, was a concept Owen couldn't fathom. He went through them to go in and out as if they weren't there.
We closed the downstairs windows his first summer and suffered through the heat. One day we left him in the house while we went out to do some errands. When we got home there he was in the driveway to greet us. He had gone through a screen again -- this time through a bedroom window on the second floor. He had only a scratch on his snout to show for it. So then we closed all of the windows. Like the proverbial Big Bad Wolf, he huffed, puffed, pushed and prodded and took out the whole window casing.
Doors were a bit more of a challenge for him. He's scratched and clawed them and on a couple of occasions tried to tunnel under them. He was successful only in tearing out several hundreds of dollars of carpeting in the process.
If you didn't keep him otherwise occupied, he'd find something he just had to chew to pieces. The house siding and moulding, garden hoses, pens and pencils, table legs, my daughter Stephanie's stuffed animals, everything was included in his comprehensive taste-testing experiment. Oh, we gave him plenty of chew toys of his own. Plastic, rubber, rope, rawhide, nothing could withstand his determination to shred them all. The result has been a house littered with bits and pieces of one half of all the doggy chew toys we have ever given him. What happened to the other half, you ask? He swallowed them, of course. I have to say that has ultimately made for a more colorful lawn and a much more interesting chore when I take shovel and poop bucket in hand to clean up the yard.
Poop, slobber and enough shed dog hair to clog several vacuum cleaners, yes Owen has certainly blessed our lives. I guess if you add up all of the extra work, annoyance and property damage, he's no worse than an other member of the family, except of course that he's the only member of the family who pees on my car tires. My wife and daughter are quick to come to his defense.
"He got into the trash again? Oh, don't yell at him. It's just a misunderstanding. He doesn't know any better."
"Muddy dog foot prints all through the house? Never mind those. Just make sure you take off your shoes at the door? We're trying to keep this house clean."
I look at him now and I don't see the scared eyes of a pup. I see a cold, calculating adversary scheming to drive me to a complete nervous breakdown.
"Go ahead put on that sad puppy face," I tell him. "I'm not buying any of it. No, forget about it. No way. Oh, all right. Let me get my jacket. We'll go for a walk and talk about it."