The frank, the beans, Tom and Jerry and the whole nine yards

By Pocket

Just before bed Daddy takes us out for a trip around the grassy area in the center of our development. When we get to the top of the driveway, by the woods and the meadow, we see the kitty brothers, Casper and Oreo, one white, one black, who lie by the weeds staring into the darkness.

“What are they staring at?” I ask Foley. “They’re hunting,” she said. Holy crap!” I said, and then I crapped, and Daddy told me I was a good girl, and I didn’t want to tell him it was a fear crap not a good girl crap. “We have to get inside, I don’t want to be hunted.’

“They’re not hunting us, they’re hunting mice and critters and things,” she said. “Like the way we chase squirrels?” I asked. “Yes, except they catch them, kill them, and leave them on their Daddy’s porch.” “Well what the hell do they do that for?” I asked, leaking some pee, and being told I was a good girl by Daddy, who was really starting to annoy me.

“They just do,” she said. I looked at them, smugly sitting there, staring into the weeds, and I reached way down in my belly and gave them my most fearsome: “Yip, yip, yip,” and they never even looked my way. Well that got my hackles up and I started pulling on the leash.

“Pocket, leave the kitties alone,” my Daddy said, but I was determined. I do not like being ignored. I pulled and pulled as hard as I could. Foley looked at Daddy and said “let her go, she’s got to learn,” and so Daddy followed me, with Foley, who knew better, staying behind Daddy.

I kept barking and this white kitty didn’t even turn to look at me and I got madder and madder. I performed my big move. The run up and bark and then run away. I ran up and barked and ran away. The cat didn’t move. I ran up again and it turned and it bipped me with it’s paw right in my nose.

“Yeoooow!” I cried and this time I ran in the other direction so far that I reached the end of the leash and flipped in the air, fell, ran back in the other direction, toward the cat, and turned and ran the other way again before Daddy picked me up. Foley sat on the pavement licking her paws.

“Arree those dogs botherin’ my kitties?” our neighbor yelled from his porch. I began shaking in my Daddy’s arms. Foley and I don’t like our neighbor. He is loud, he is mean, and he doesn’t like dogs. And worst of all he doesn’t wear pants.

Blake, Mommy’s and Daddy’s first dog, told Foley that one day when Mommy and Daddy were working in the garden in front of the house Blake ran out the door, turned, and saw our pants-less neighbor standing in his bathrobe drinking a coffee and she ran up and put her head inside the bathrobe.

And there were the frank, the beans, Tom and Jerry, the whole nine yards and Blake ducked her head out of the bathrobe ran back in the house up the stairs and under the bed. Then there was the night Daddy and Blake were in the back yard, looked up and saw through his French doors the neighbor flipping flapjacks naked.

Daddy told me that it was all right and he put me down and we walked back towards the house. The man was sitting on his porch in the bathrobe, which isn’t very long, it only goes up to, ugh, mid thigh, and as we passed Foley kept whispering to me, “don’t look, don’t look, for the love of the baby Jesus don’t look.”

“Don’t let those dogs around my kitties,” he said, and Daddy replied the kitties were tougher than us, and, through the corner of my eye, I could see him lift his legs, and spread them, and there they were, the frank, the beans, Tom and Jerry, the whole nine yards. I put my head down and ran right into the screen door.

Daddy opened the door and I ran in and jumped on Mommy’s lap and she saw me shaking and said “Did you see the frank, the beans, Tom and Jerry, the whole nine yards?” and I buried my head in her lap and trembled right up until I got my cookie.

I can’t wait until we sell this place. Mommy needs to live on one floor before her knee surgery. Do you know anyone who wants to buy a townhouse across from the state mental hospital, with a squirrel obsessed neighbor, a naked neighbor, two stalking kitties, and a sinister Chihuahua?

Oh God I’m gonna live here forever.