Welcome and if you haven’t all ready met Sammi, this is our $1300 thief. Sammi would like us to believe she stole Bob’s partial plate because the Tooth Fairy told her too. We aren’t buying it!
Here is the sad story of deception and guile. . .
On the 4th of July, Bob went out into the backyard to watch the fireworks. The fireworks are held at our local Fairgrounds which is approximately a mile from the house. Tired of standing, he grabbed one of the plastic white chairs to sit on. When he sat down the chair arm broke in two and he fell not too gracefully to the ground. Not paying much attention, he grabbed another chair and went on viewing the magnificent aerial show. Later in the evening, he realized his lower dentures were missing. Bob like many others, has difficulty with his lowers after eating so he often takes them out and wraps them in a napkin which as we all know, is risky business.
I was already in bed and asleep when Bob decided to catch a few winks. It was at that time he realized he didn’t have his lower denture. He grabbed a flashlight and with Annie and Sammi tagging along went out into the night to see if the dentures had flown out of his mouth with the jolt that landed him on the ground during his unfortunate bout with the plastic chair. Both dogs diligently helped him with the search.
Not finding the teeth, he began systematically going through the evening’s garbage in the off chance that he had folded them into a napkin and I had mistakenly dumped them in the kitchen trash while cleaning plates and loading the dishwasher. Again both dogs were willing and able helpers. They are fascinated with garbage and would not have missed this opportunity to be involved in digging through it. Bob came to bed a defeated man. I am sure both dogs slept well.
In the morning, I woke up to find a tired husband, coffee in hand, and a woeful tale of missing teeth. He had gone to bed after an exhausting search and then had gotten up early to continue looking. Sympathetically, I started asking the aggravating questions that wives are known to ask “Where did you last have them?” and “Do you remember where you set them down?” I joined the search and we literally turned the house upside down. I know we both looked carefully at the dogs’ beds on the off-chance that we had a thief, but nothing turned up.
To make a long story short, we looked and looked and even rummaging through the large outdoor trash barrel which was filled with a weeks worth of garbage. It was a disgusting enterprise that did not turn up the missing partial. Finally, we gave up. Our last beam of hope lay in the knowledge that our gardener would be doing the yard in a day or two. We kept hoping that he would find it with the leaf blower. We even relished the laugh we would all have when he brought them to the door. He came and left and there was no knock on the door and no laugh about the missing teeth.
With all hope lost, Bob called his dentist and made arrangements for a new plate. Do you think we would have a dentist here in our own little town? No our dentist is in Torrance which is at least three hours away. We made an appointment, endured the dental lecture on responsible care and nodded respectively through a gentle chiding about the importance of little plastic boxes designed for dentures. We wrote out the check for thirteen hundred dollars and privately thanked the powers to be that we could do so without over-stretching the budget. We made three trips back and forth for a total of 18 hours on the road and finally, there was the new and shiny partial plate and a return to normal life.
Fast forward to this morning which happens to be 51 days after the initial disappearance of the teeth. I was rearranging dog beds, because Sammi recently let us know that she does not like to be crated at night. She joined Annie in her crusade against dog crates. Annie for the past year has refused to be crated. So as a result of Sammi’s annoying whining, our sense of fair play, and Annie’s stubbornness, we decided to put the crate away and move a second small dog bed into our bedroom.
In moving dog beds around from room to room, I heard a plastic on plastic sound coming from under the blanket in one of the beds. I picked the blanket up and you guessed it, there were Bob’s teeth smiling (I swear) at me. Both of us are convinced that they were not there that first day when we searched so diligently. We both had looked at least twice in all the dog beds. It is our belief that slippery little Sammi first hid them outside in a flower bed and then, like a snake in the grass, sneaked them in when she thought it was safe to do so.
How do we know it wasn’t Annie? Annie is not terribly crafty. If she steals something, it is usually from Sammi and she immediately brings it to us to show off what a great coup she has pulled off and how she has once again used her Yorkie ingenuity to outsmarted a Doxie.
I guess as the great Shakespeare would say, “All’s well that ends well.” And if Bob loses the new dentures he always has the old ones on which to fall back. And yes, nothing is as important as the love of this devious Dachshund. who has cost us a bunch of money, loads of time, and much aggravation.
