Let me tell you a little about my dog. She is tiny, even for a shitzu, and has wild eyes (we really should have named her Mad-Eye Moody–one brown eye and one blue eye) and INSANE. She will run circles around the house and all of a sudden flop in a heap on the kitchen floor. She doesn’t know the difference between “paw” and “roll over”–only that doing both will get her a nice little soup bone or bit of scrambled egg.  She is only vocal at mealtimes. I think in her head she fancies herself a poet, for she is always sighing as she lays on the rug or as she stares morosely out the glass door into the distance. She likes rawhide bones three quarters the size of her and digging through the pillows on her dog bed. Once she swallowed a lamb bone whole and puked it up later; it’s still a mystery how something that long got down such an itty-bitty esophagus (that is NOT what she said).

She is picky about her food, refusing to eat dog chow because it’s not as good as what comes off the table (my mother spoils her rotten). If you leave without her she’ll tear up any magazines she can find in retaliation (including my mother’s unread Chinese Readers’ Digest) and then sit there innocently as you yell at her and pick up the scraps.

Chessie is absolutely ridiculous and although my mother got her after I left for college, I fell in love with her right away when I met her for the first time last summer, and she remains my favorite animal in the entire world.