Dogs Can't Fly

To introduce my new refrigerator magnets, I thought I'd tell a brief story. I hinted to this earlier. I'd always told people if Tuck were a human boy, he'd be the kid who tied a towel to his neck and would jump off the garage roof to see if he could fly. Then he tried it.

He didn't mean to try it. He was merely attempting to rip the head off of his archenemy, the giant black lab (aptly named Zeus) that lives in the apartment level with ours, but in the building next door. They have a wooden walkway (like a deck) that crosses across a garage roof, from the stairs they take to get up to the second level. My deck stairs run parallel to this garage, and at the top, there is one stair that is dead even with the top of the roof. For some reason, the space between the spindles (or whatever you call them) is a little wider here, and Tuck figured out he can fit through and onto the roof.

This one night I was in the yard, and thinking ahead, knew he would try it. The lab and his boy were walking across the walkway into their apartment, and I ran up the stairs to beat Tuck to the wide space. I made it, unfortunately Tuck decided to try a different wide space that was a hair lower than the roof line. It was snowy. He didn't make it across.

He lost his grip and slid down the side of the garage between my steps. It's about a one foot span, but a 15 foot drop. The neighbor boy and I looked at each other (I think the lab laughed) and I ran down the steps. (25 of them) When I got around underneath, Tuck was still clinging to the side of the garage, nails dug in tight, resting on top of a group of antique windows I'd bought and some ductwork leftover from the remodel. His head was turned toward me with a look of abject terror and "please save me" on his face.....

And, after I pulled him free.---all 45-50 pounds of him---and detached his claws from the wood while whispering soothing "poor baby's", I realized that the image of him clinging there was permanently etched in my mind, and since I'm kind of cruel that way, I decided to permanently imortalize the moment in a refrigerator magnet.

The claw marks were still visible the next morning---more reminiscent of a Warner Brother's cartoon than real life.