Prayer Letter Extras

The "another story" ...

... that is, the noisy dogs.  I used to really, really be a dog person.  The kind that just loved dogs.  I even made excuses for the golden retriever who bit my wife while we were on vacation in Austria.

But now, there are some times when I just don't like dogs.  OK, it's not too often, and I am still a "dog person", but I understand why some mailmen dislike dogs so much. 

Lots of people keep dogs here.  Thankfully, they are usually confined within the wall around their house, but they can still make life a bit miserable when I do distribution.  Let me just let fly with a few random observations ...

Have you even noticed the "domino" effect with dogs.  One dog starts barking and soon the whole neighborhood gets going.  It can be deafening.  It almost makes me feel guilty for disturbing the peace.  But at least my passage though the neighborhood does not go un-noticed.

Then there are the "heart attack" dogs.  The ones who sneakily sit there quietly, or creep up to the fence with an almost cat-like silence, only to let fly with a deafening series of barks the moment I touch the mailbox.  If I drop dead of a heart attack sometime while doing distribution, you can have a pretty good idea what happened.

But the sneaky dogs are worst at the houses where I have to go inside a closed gate to get to the mailbox.  When I get to a house like that I always do a quick scan for "beware of dog" signs. (side note - Did you know the oldest "beware of dog" sign in the world is found in Italy?   It's tiled onto the floor of an entry way in the city of Pompeii.)  But getting back to the story.  I also scan for dog bowls, toys or other evidence.  Then I sorta rattle the gate to see if I can draw a bark.  Finally, with great caution I open the gate, dart in and drop off the tract.

But I didn't do that the other day - and really almost had a heart attack!  There was a house without a gate in the wall (just an opening).  So I assumed (silly me) that there would not be a dog there.  I walked across the lawn and headed towards the door where the mailbox was.  As I came around the corner of the house, I came face to face with a very loud dog - or I suppose I should say elbow to mouth - quite literally!  Whoa!  Time to back out quietly.  Thankfully I survived with all body parts intact.

But two can play at the sneaky game.  Sometimes I see a "sleeping dog" and in the truest sense of the proverb, I very much want to let it lie.  So I creep by the house, quietly open the door to the mailbox, drop in the tract, and try to sneak off.  Unfortunately, the dogs have not usually heard the proverb or just don't want to lie quietly.  So rarely do I succeed at this.  And when I do I ask myself if perhaps the dog was just dead.

But most dogs don't scare me as much as annoy me.  The constant chorus of barks can get old after a few hours.  But there are the kind of dogs that look like they could happily take off my head with one bite.  And generally they look like they might just come through the gate to have a try at it.  It's at times like those I've become adept at getting a tract into a mailbox from a distance of two feet. 

But there was the time that one of these big mean dogs got up on top of the wall above the gate.  Right above the mail slot.  No fence between us - just him up there and me down here.  The mail slot was only about 18 inches below his drooling, snarling, tooth-filled snout.  "Hmm.  I think I'll just let these folks hear the Gospel from their neighbors." I thought.  That family found a sure way to keep unwanted ads out of their mailbox!

But my "best" dog story comes from one of those small villages up in the mountains.  These small towns don't have many roads - just paths.  Obviously built before cars were taken into consideration.  But this town had a small courtyard in the center of town, paved with stones, and surrounded almost completely with houses.  As I worked my way around the square, I came to a house with one of those little yappy dogs on the porch.  As I dropped the tract into the mailbox, he predictably began to bark his little yappy (annoying) bark.  But then another little identical dog raced around a corner and ran up to me - also barking his little head off.  Then another, and another and another!  They just kept coming from everywhere.  All identical, all barking at full volume.  There must have been a dozen dogs there within a minute.  I'm guessing someone made a living breeding little yappers.  But I was completely surrounded - and in the closed courtyard the volume was deafening!  I laugh at it now, but at the time I think I was calculating how many yappers I could take out with each swing of my heavy bag full of tracts.  Finally, someone came and yelled at the dogs (how they heard I'll never know), and they all raced off to their hiding places to wait for the next unsuspecting victim.  I'll bet they all (people and dogs) had a good laugh at my adventure.