Blue Dog

Yes, I know it looks like he's blue on his eyebrow. That's the light. The ink is only on his cheek and throat.

Jack has been a remarkably well-adjusted dog, for a rescue dog, but he does have his little ways.

Some dogs can be destructible when left alone, bored. Our first dog, Trooper, when left alone, chewed up the carved leg of an antique table, in a house we rented from a Cornell professor.

Jack's predecessor, Kotzie, once chewed up one of my very favorite shoes - this was the left member of a pair of Amalfi high heels that I treasured because they were the only high heels I've ever owned that I could wear for eight hours. I nearly wept when I found it, mangled and covered in drool.

But Jack is different. Jack doesn't chew up shoes or furniture. His fixation is exceedingly narrow. He consistently attacks only two items. Eyeglasses and pens.

He eats little plastic objects. The eyeglasses are usually drug-store cheaters, costing less than ten bucks. We arrive home to find lenses and mangled ear-pieces scattered on the living room rug. Twice, though, he's attacked [The Man I Love]'s prescription glasses - a couple hundred dollars damage.

The other object of his fixation is plastic pens. Yesterday when [The Man I Love] came home from work, the remains of a pen were scattered on the rug.

But this time Jack's guilt was obvious. It marked him with a stain.  He has a blue spot on his cheek, and another blotch under his jaw. His lily white paws are streaked blue, too.

He takes these objects from the low-slung coffee table in our living room, and you'd think this would teach us not to leave things there when we're out of the house. I guess it takes a lot of training to teach old dogs new tricks.