The Hot Seat

It didn’t take long in Andy’s first summer with us for his quirks and idiosyncrasies to appear. He has so many hang-ups that it would be hard to list in one place. In some ways, his odd behaviors were sad while in a way it was cute and endearing. One day in mid-afternoon, Andy was rolling around on the lounge chair barking and fidgeting around. I had no idea what he was doing there. He didn’t appear to be playing and he didn’t appear to be happy either. He was mad, but at what I didn’t know. After a few minutes of this, he would finally settle into a position as comfortably as he could and lay with his head on his paws. He wouldn’t or couldn’t sleep. He would lie there as still as he could closing his eyes, but not all the way. He would have his eyes slit open and would cut them at his surroundings. It was obvious he was irritated, but I couldn’t figure out what was bothering him.

My mom was able to find out why Andy was so mad at the chair, and yes, he was mad at the lounge chair. In the summer sun, these chairs could get very hot. Since I didn’t lay out on them, I didn’t put things together that the chairs would be so uncomfortable due to the heat. My mom on the other hand sunbathes on a regular basis, so she knows how painful those lounge chairs could be to the touch. Normally, we would douse the lounge chair with water to cool it down or we would put a towel down to buffer our bodies from the heat.

Andy didn’t have the luxury of doing these things to avoid the hot lounge chair. We could have watered down the lounge chairs to cool them off, but once we realized what was bothering Andy so much when he was rolling around in those chairs, we thought it was so cute to watch him fuss around on the hot seat and relished every moment we could to see him perform this routine. It got to the point that Andy, in anticipation of the hot seat, would sit beside the lounge chairs and start barking at them in a preemptive manner to show his displeasure at what he knew was going to be scalding hot patio furniture. To those unfamiliar with him, Andy’s barking at an empty chair must have seemed peculiar at best and crazy at worst. To us it was so damned cute and precious. Andy in his older age doesn’t bark at the hot chairs anymore, but he does fidget around in the chair and gets real quiet stewing in the heat and discomfort of the chair. It’s still cute and makes me smile to this day.