This is from the time of my career in the political side of life.

It’s the story of Bear.

Bear was a dog owned by Mayor Jeremy Harris and his wife.

A long time ago our Maltese had five puppies.

That’s a lot of puppies so after the suitable waiting period we started looking for some good homes for a few of them.

You know what a hot item a cute Maltese can be.

The Mayor’s wife really, really wanted one.

The Mayor waffled – I kept telling him they were going fast – and he waffled some more.

One went to my sister, one to the wife’s friend and one to her brother.

The fourth went to a federal firefighter and his family.

We kept the fifth.

Thirty minutes after the firefighter left with number four the Mayor calls asking if he could get one for his wife.

Sorry sir, the boat sailed.

Out of time and out of luck the Mayor turned to a newspaper ad and probably paid a bazillion dollars for one male Maltese puppy for his wife.

So why this story?

Because this was the craziest dog ever to walk the Earth.

His wife took him everywhere: meetings, dinners, city events, campaign events.

You name it and Bear was along tucked in a bag under her arm.

That’s a lot of stimulation for an 8-week old puppy.

Bear grew up to be loud, boisterous and a real handful.
He would make a perfect politician.

I ended up babysitting him when they went out-of-town.

I liked Harris and his wife and was glad to help out, but…

Oh my God.
That dog loved to bark.

All day.
All night.

And at night he also loved to jump up on the bed, pace around and walk all over me.

He was a handful and he made me real grumpy.

Squirt guns didn’t work – rattling coins in a can didn’t work.
Nothing worked.

I went to the Humane Society to see what it could do.

They gave me a collar that you fill with this liquid.

When Bear barked, the collar squirted out some gassy thing that really smelled bad.

I put it on Bear and waited.

It didn’t take long before he ripped a loud one.

The collar went off, he looked surprised as hell and barked again.

Cloud number two.

He shut up for about two days before he learned to bark and then run like hell for the other side of the room leaving the smelly cloud behind.

Now what to do…

I won’t go into how we discovered this, but we stumbled on the one thing that made the dog quiet.

He actually loved it.
Wanting to make him happy that’s where he spent the majority of his time.

There’s some moral in here somewhere but I’m too lazy to figure it out.