BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

“So… What do you think,” I asked.

“Well,” My friend said. “He’s an Australian Cattle Dog, right?”

“Yep,” I replied. “That’s exactly my point.”

“Yeah, I hear you,” he said with a nod. “It doesn’t look like Australia at all, does it?”

“Not to me. That’s why I wanted you to look at it.”

“Why me?”

“Well, I’m thinking there must be a reason, and since you play RISK a lot, maybe you’d have some insight.”

“True. There is that…” he mused.

We were standing at the doorway to my kitchen. This was several years prior to the gut remodel, so the configuration was less than stellar; not to mention that the decor was already 10 years out of date when E K and I purchased the house.

“Well, I don’t really think he’s trying to take over the world or anything… What do you feed him?” My friend asked.

“Dog food… Maybe a few table scraps,” I said.

“Spaghetti?”

“Not that I recall. No lasagna, or anything like that either,” I replied. “You don’t want to spill a beer around him though. It’ll be gone in nothing flat.”

“Foster’s?”

“Doesn’t seem to matter.”

“Hmmmmm…”

Quigley, the Aussie Cattle Dog was sitting in front of us, a piece of linoleum hanging from his mouth and his tail thumping against the floor. He seemed particularly proud of himself – and, most especially, proud of the rather large map of Italy he had somehow managed to create by tearing up sections of the godawful floor covering.

“Well, if you believe in reincarnation, maybe he was Italian or something in a past life,” my friend offered. “Or, maybe he was a cartographer…”

“Or an interior designer,” I added. “That linoleum is pretty ugly.”

“True,” he agreed. “So, how long did it take him to do this?”

“Well, he did the outline this past Monday,” I said, then pointed and added, “But he just keeps going back and working on that one little section over there. “

“Well, that makes perfect sense,” my friend said with a nod.

“Why?” I asked.

“Simple. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Quigley, the Australian Cattle Dog, really did exist. In fact, Quigley the ACD in the Rowan Gant books is based entirely on the real life pup. While the preceding conversation is an embellished version of the truth, the Quigster really and truly did rip up a portion of our kitchen linoleum when he was a puppy. And, for several weeks, it looked uncannily like a map of Italy… Of course, not being one for sitting still, Quigley eventually expanded the Kitchen Atlas to look much more like Eurasia before we finally began our remodel.

More to come…

Murv