A SHAGGY STORY ABOUT A DOG

The only time when I do not tell the truth is when I can tell a harmless joke.

So it was when my girlfriend at the time and I decided that we wanted to elevate a beautiful blend—female Border Collie/Spaniel—with a hi-falutin’ “breed” name.  Marianne was fascinated both by Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Albigensian Crusade against Aquitainian heretics.  So we hit upon the name “Ellie” and a breed “Aquitanian Hunter.”  That was the easy part.

The harder part was making up a history of the breed and an account of my having such an exotic breed.  It went like this:  Most of the breed were wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade, but a few survived and are closely held in remote mountain villages where Albigensian descendants still use them for sheepherding.  Ellie came to me as a “reverse” dowry gift from my future son-in-law, with distant relatives in the area.  I was required to have her spayed so that the breed would remain an exclusively French one.

The lie worked the first time tried.  In a Potomac riverside park in Alexandria, VA, two women with French poodles ran up to us as we walked Ellie, who they said was simply beautiful.  When they asked about her breed, I told the story.  One woman said that she had never heard of it.  In the Washington tradition of one-upmanship, the other said that she had.  When they left, Marianne turned to me and said, “You are a caution!”

And it kept on working.  A few years later, walking with Ellie by Horseshoe Lake in Cleveland Heights, OH, I met a woman walking a Vizsla.  I praised her beautiful dog, then asked why she had such an unusual breed.  She said that her husband wanted a breed few people had.  After a pause, embarrassed to have said nothing about Ellie but afraid to prompt an admission about a dog whom she probably deemed a mongrel, she hesitantly asked about her breed.  I told my story.  Her reaction was priceless: she couldn’t wait to tell her husband; it would just kill him!