WESTSIDE — With an abundance of possessions comes an abundance of care and concern. It’s true. The more one has, the more one worries about how to protect and keep those possessions, whether it be the hours of work which go into caring for and maintaining them or the securing of what we possess with alarm systems and insurance policies.
And not only is this trueof us humans when we have more than what we need each day, it's true of animals and particularly of my dog.
I expect you’ve all seen the television insurance commercial in which a dog fretted and worried about a bone, burying it, putting it in a safety deposit box and finally insuring it. Well, my dog is a little like that. Give her a bone more than she needs at themoment and she’ll hide or bury the surplus but worry about it and move it from place to place. In fact, if a hiding place for a bone or dog biscuit is discovered or she gets caught in the act of hiding or burying, she’ll whine and cry and attempt to move it to another location when no one is looking.
Being mostly an indoor dog makes burying a bit more difficult even though she’ll occasionally attempt to hide something in one of Mrs. Griz’ flower pots. But instead of burying, she’ll hide things under pillows on the sofa, in her bed and sometimes ours, and in our closet - usually in one of my shoes.
Well, on Saturday I had to perform a marriage ceremony and put on a suit I hadn’t worn in a long time - surprisingly, the pants which I couldn’t button for some time buttoned fine on Saturday. Since I was wearing a suit, I also pulled out and dusted off an old pair of dress shoes I hadn’t worn in a long time either. When I attempted to put one of them on, I found a doggy biscuit hidden up toward the toe of the shoe. I don’t think I’d eat anything that had been in one of my shoes, but my dog wanted it back and I gave it to her.
She walked around looking for a safe place to bury it. First, it was behind some floor-length curtainsin our bedroom. But it wasn’t long and she must have worried herself to the point of needing to move it again - this time to the living room. Since someone might have found it there, she retrieved it and took it to the dining room and buried it in one of Mrs. Griz’ flower pots. She accidentally pawed a little dirt out of the pot onto the floor and that tipped off Mrs. Griz.
When my dog wasn’t looking, I put the somewhat-smelly and nowsoiled dog biscuit into the waste basket and took it out to the larger container for the trash man.
I’m not sure if my dog knows what I did or if sheis still worrying and wondering where it is she last hid her old dog biscuit. But the moral of the story is the same: When you have more than you need, you tend to worry about where and how you are going to keep that abundance so that no one finds it and takes it away from you.
Rather than hiding and storing up those extra possessions, “be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Heb. 13:5).
Randy Moll is the managing editor of the Westside Eagle Observer. He may be reached by e-mail at rmoll@nwaonline .com.
Opinion, Pages 6 on 06/15/2011