Friends were coming for dinner — friends who wanted to meet Angus. The thought threw me into a panic. Oh, the barking.
"Can we bring anything?" one of the women asked in an e-mail.
"Just endless patience," I said.
Angus tries to be good, I am sure of it, but he gets overly excited when visitors come, and he barks at them — a deep and menacing bark that, for all I know, means, "Hi! Nice to meet you!" but sounds like it means, "I am going to kill you as soon as I can get near you."
So Doug and I do not let Angus anywhere near visitors until he has stopped barking. The duration is less than a minute (a vast improvement from the five or so minutes of a year ago) but even one minute is a long, long time to be barked at by a 60-pound dog.
On the May evening when my friends were due, Doug was still at work. I wasn't sure how to manage opening the door, greeting the guests, and introducing them to Rosie, all while hanging onto a barking Angus. So I hit on the brilliant idea of putting the dogs outside.
Perhaps, I thought, Angus will just bark himself out while he's still in the yard.
The women came into the house and out onto the back porch. Rosie and Angus looked up from where they were snuffling in the dirt. Rosie ran up the steps and barked at the screen door. Hers wasn't a menacing bark, it was more of a "I want to join the party!" bark, so I let her in. She trotted onto the porch and allowed herself to be petted.