Published: October 19, 2009 11:12 pm      

Cathie Shaffer: To tell the tooth: 10/20/09

The things you see when you don’t have a camera ... that was one of my dearly departed Hubby’s favorite sayings, along with some that aren’t suitable for a family newspaper.

I think of that sometimes when something happens I not only don’t have a camera at hand, but my cell phone isn’t near, either.

My cell phone isn’t one of those super-duper ones that does everything except your taxes (and maybe the new ones do). Mine lets me dial, text and, if I so wish, take photos.

Since I have a high-quality digital camera I keep in the car and take along when I think there may be a photo op, I don’t use that camera phone much. In fact, I think the only store in the phone’s gallery are a few of my nephew on a machine tearing down an old garage and a couple of the dog.

Maggie has a good sense of humor for a dog and enjoys making us laugh. She also has the Sheltie tendency of claiming anything lying around her as hers, which brought us to an interesting habit.

Sometimes it’s the cat’s toys that Maggie decides to claim, or maybe the day’s mail. She’s sniffed out bottle caps and hair ribbons and dragged them to her rug, but she has a real passion for office supplies.

Pens, pencils, rolls of transparent tape, even all sorts of paper clips are great favorites of hers. To keep her from doing damage to herself and others, we recently began negotiating trades.

She finds something she’s not supposed to have — like the pair of children’s scissors she dredged up over the weekend — and stands just out of arm’s reach with them. She knows that rather than fight for the forbidden object, I’ll say “Maggie, trade” and offer a puppy biscuit in exchange for whatever she has.

Alas, this has become a game for her. As with the scissors, she’s started looking for the most unlikely items for a dog to use as a plaything. She was in a real mood Sunday afternoon, and things became interesting.

I suspect it was because I bought her a new brand of dog food that she fell in love with. She would have eaten the whole bag; I refused to give her more than her normal dishful.

All evening, she “found” things and traded for tiny biscuits or bits of cereal. Then I decided not to wait for grandgirls to show up and opened the bag of iced animal crackers.

Maggie went into full alert mode. She posed by my chair as if she was trying out for the Westminster dog show. She leaned her head on the arm of the recliner and gave her best “I’m such a good girl” begging look.

I watched TV and ignored her.

Naturally, she decided to find something to trade. What she wound up with was a pair of those cheap plastic vampire fangs that kids bend in half and stick over their own teeth.

I heard a small “wff” and looked down to see Maggie with those teeth in her mouth, clutched just right to give her a set of bright white vampire teeth over her own canine choppers.

I laughed, and yes, I traded two animal crackers for the teeth. And I looked heavenward, just in case Hubby was glancing down, and said, “Yep, the things you see when you don’t have a camera.”

CATHIE SHAFFER can be reached at (606) 473-9851.