THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 28, 1994 TAG: 9410270193
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: OVER EASY
SOURCE: JO-ANN CLEGG
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
``Listen, Chuck,'' I said, snuggling my favorite Lhasa apso under one arm while I tried to soothe the trembling little beast with the opposite hand, ``just believe me, there are no monsters living under the back porch.''
My four-footed fuzz ball was too traumatized even to protest my use of the hated nickname ``Chuck.'' A quick walk across the deck had reduced him to a quivering glob of fur, fat and neuroses.
Whatever it was that had terrified him last spring was back again.
You may remember that episode, the one that happened when Charlie flew through the door and crawled behind a recliner where he sat trembling for three days.
The only time he came out was for food, leg-lifting and occasional attempts to escape through the garage door at the opposite end of the house.
After three days we took him to the vet to see if she could figure out what was wrong with him.
``Unless he learns to talk, I don't think we're ever going to know,'' she said after she'd checked him over in every fashion she could think of.
A couple of weeks later we took him to Dr. William Meisterfeld, a dog psychologist I was interviewing for a story.
Meisterfeld talked to Charlie for a while and pronounced our usually cantankerous dust mop to be a fine, intelligent dog.
Charlie looked at Meisterfeld with the adoration he usually reserves for his beloved vet, small blond Yorkies and any female between the ages of 8 and 108 who makes a fuss over him.
His anxieties were forgotten until last week when two things which happened almost simultaneously gave us our first clue as to what had upset him so.
First there was the smoke detector.
At 7:30 it began making the sound that means the Energizer bunny inside is ready to launch into a mournful rendition of ``Taps.''
Charlie, who had already gone back to bed, came straight off the floor from a sound sleep and went into his trembling routine.
Before Bill could replace the battery Charlie had made his way into our bathroom where we finally found him huddled in a far corner of the shower.
I hauled him out, cuddled him for a while and finally convinced him that everything was just fine.
Which it was until the day that Charlie and I stepped out on the deck, hit a loose floor board and produced a squeak which, to my untrained ear, sounded exactly like the sound made by the smoke detector.
Charlie, whose sense of pitch is much keener than mine (so is your average bed post's sense of pitch, for that matter) apparently thought so, too.
Once more the trembling started. The mystery of why he'd been so upset last spring was finally solved. Or at least partially so.
I remembered very clearly that the deck had made the same sound that day as well. I also remembered that temperature and humidity were about the same then as they were last week: cool nights, warm days and little rain.
The part of the mystery that hasn't been solved yet is why the sound of the smoke detector and its acoustic twin are so upsetting to him. The only time it ever went off in the line of duty was when some spiders had built a web deep in its innards and confused the living daylights out of the sensor system.
I called the fire department and Charlie and I both trembled a little while we waited. When they did get here Charlie attached himself to one of the firefighters, a young woman named Jennie who scratched his ears and told him how beautiful he was.
That was definitely not a traumatic experience. I reminded him of that when he was so upset the other day. He perked up a little.
``Call 911 and get Firefighter Jennie,'' he pleaded. ``She'll make me feel better.'' I told him I didn't really consider this an emergency. He argued a bit, then settled down.
Until he made his first trip outside this morning.
A blue jay sitting on a branch by the door let out a squawk that was a dead ringer for both the smoke detector and the loose board. Only about 100 times louder.
Charlie went into the air, did a U-turn and raced back inside ``Get Jennie,'' he gasped, ``that thing out there is going to get me for sure.''
So that's where we are at the moment. He's trembling, I'm stroking and, as far as he's concerned, both the board and the blue jay are lurking in the background waiting to attack.
As for me, I'm tearing through my business card file, looking for Dr. Meisterfeld's number. If there's anything this dog does need, it is a qualified dog shrink.
Or a nice firefighter named Jennie to scratch his ears. by CNB