My Fire Hydrant

A lot of you dogaroons wanted know how I came to get my very own fire hydrant. I have my dad to thank for that. He used to be a crazy collector guy when we first met….I'll explain more about that later.

The September after my adoption, he and my mom took me on a vacation all the way from Michigan to Colorado. I was three months old and they wanted me to be comfortable so they rented a rolling dog house to keep me cool and give me room to run. It was twenty-four feet long and it even had a people bed and bathroom inside. By the time we'd gotten the Indiana state line, my mom was sick of refilling my little water dish and she said if I was going to keep sitting in it and splashing water I might as well go all the way. So my folks bought a big, deep dish pan, filled with water and I played inside of it most of the way out to Colorado.

Back in those days---before Dad got the rolling chair---he collected memorabilia from old gas stations. Porcelain signs, oil cans and bottle, pumps, give-a-ways, road maps and other stuff from the 1900s to the 1940s. So every where we went on that vacation he'd stop at flea markets, garage sales, and auctions looking for stuff. At one antique shop he got it into his head that he wanted a parking meter but the one he saw cost too much so he started stopping at small town municipal places until he finally found one that sold him four old parking meters. Off we went with those things taking up space in the middle of my rolling dog house floor.

We didn't get very far. Just as we were ready to turn back out on the main street my dad noticed a field covered with old fire hydrants and he did a U-turn right in the middle of the intersection. Long story short, he bought me a big hydrant and another smaller, antique one for himself. I actually pee on mine but he just looks at his. Humans, go figure.

When we moved after my dad's stroke my mom made the movers dig up my fire hydrant and plant it in my new outdoor space--it's got a foot and a half foot pipe that goes in the ground. My old space had some nice scrubs around the hydrant, as you can see in my puppy photo in the right hand column. My new space is kind of boring but it does have a white picket fence on two sides. My mom says it isn't fair that she always wanted a picket fence but I got one first. By the way, she wasn't too happy about hauling two fire hydrants and four parking meters all the way home from out west either, but I guess they grew on her. She saved both fire hydrants and one meter from getting auctioned off when my folks did our major downsizing a few years back.

Some people say I'm a spoiled dog. What do you think? I think I'm just a normal, well-loved four-legged kid.

Oh, if you noticed the hole chewed in my lattice work to the left of the fire hydrant, I didn't do it. The yard rabbits did. My mom used to worry that it was my black friend with the white stripe down her back that did it. Boy, was Mom happy the day she saw a rabbit shooting out from under the desk. ©
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