|
Once upon a time, there lived two boys named Felix and Lester. Felix was 9 years old, pretty atheletic, and had a lot of friends. Lester was only 6 and not as atheletic as his older brother, but still got along well with the rest of the children in the area.
One day, Felix and Lester were playing by themselves in the front yard of their house. Their front yard was actually quite large, since they were several miles outside of the nearest town. An old highway ran adjacent to their yard, but since the area was semi-mountainous (and the road quite curvey), traffic was never that heavy or fast. After kicking a ball back and forth for a while, they decided to go play in the treehouse they had built (with the help of their father) the previous spring. It consisted of a few ladder-like steps up to the main crotch of the tree (a term that always caused them to giggle uncontrollably), where three boards and some leftover plywood formed a platform of sorts.
The two boys climbed up the steps (Felix first, then Lester) and looked out over the surrounding area. Felix continued climbing higher up into the tree, until he was level with the roof of their two-story house. Lester, meanwhile, was still gazing out over the surrounding area.
The boys played in this fashion for some time before their father called them in for dinner. Tonight was Wednesday, Pizza Night, so the boys ran inside excitedly. They ate their pizza and got permission to go back outside for 30 minutes, after which it would be too dark.
Felix and Lester went back outside and began kicking the ball around again. After a particularly hard kick by Lester, the ball went sailing over Felix's head. Felix ran to fetch it when he noticed some motion in the tall grass behind the garage.
Felix called Lester over and together the two investigated the cause of the motion. After approaching the rustling grass hesitantly, the boys were delighted when a small (but extremely shaggy) puppy came bounding out of the grass.
Both boys were delighted, of course, to discover this shaggy puppy, but Felix was a little concerned. Surely this puppy couldn't be healthy! It was easily the shaggiest thing that he had ever seen, and a creature that shaggy couldn't occur naturally. He cautioned Lester to stay back.
Lester, however, would hear none of it. He, too, was unnerved by the extreme shagginess of the small dog, but the animal was clearly very friendly and, besides the freakish shagginess, seemed perfectly healthy. After seeing Lester pet the shaggy puppy for a few moments, Felix overcame his fear and began to tentatively pat the puppy on its extremely shaggy head.
The two boys ran back toward the house, with the shaggy puppy following close behind. "Mom! Mom!" they yelled with one voice, "Look what we found! Can we keep him? Can we?"
The boys' mother stepped out onto the side porch. "My God! Is that thing a puppy? It's the shaggiest thing I've ever seen!"
Felix said, "Yeah! Isn't it cool! Can we keep him? I promise we'll take care of him, and we were talking about getting a dog pretty soon anyway!"
The boys' father was called out and the brief caucaus was continued. The boys' father pointed out that he, too, had never seen a creature as shaggy as this, so maybe it was some sort of AKC Champion whose line had been bred since time immemorial to result in this, the shaggiest possible dog. He suggested that the boys make a few signs, asking if anyone was missing a very shaggy puppy, and if they had received no response in two weeks, they could keep the shaggy puppy for themselves.
When their mother concurred,the boys were delighted. They quickly made several signs as the shaggy puppy frolicked in the basement. The first several signs were sent back for revision, however, since the boys had purposefully ommitted any mention of the puppy's extreme shagginess in their zeal to claim the puppy as their own. Their mother reminded them that there could very well be two little boys somewhere who were worried sick about their missing shaggy puppy and decieving them would be wrong. Thus chided, the boys made a new series of signs that appropriately noted the extreme shagginess of the puppy they had found.
The next morning on their way to school the boys hung several of the signs around their area - a few on electrical poles near road intersections, one on the bulletin board at the local Von's Supermarket, and one at the closest Circle K convenience store. They could hardly sit still that day at school. As soon as the final bell rang, the boys raced to the bike rack and hurried home as fast as they could to play with the shaggy puppy.
This continued for the next several days. The boys became more and more attached to the shaggy puppy, and their fears that someone would claim him grew each day. Finally, two full weeks had passed, and on the second Pizza Day after they found him, the shaggy puppy was oficially theirs to keep. They celebrated by officially naming the puppy. Several names were put forward, but names like "Zeke" and "Prince" didn't seem to convey the extreme shagginess of the animal, which was certainly its most salient feature. The boys decided to name the puppy "Shaggy", which may not seem too original, but is actually the most appropriate name for a creature as shaggy as this one.
The boys loved Shaggy, and actually kept their promise and took quite good care of him as he grew from a shaggy puppy into a shaggy dog. The only problem was the fact that, as he grew from a three-pound puppy to a 30 pound dog, his shagginess seemed to increase exponentially. The boys had what seemed like an endless parade of visitors who came by just to see Shaggy for themselves. The local newspaper even did a feature on Shaggy, in which he was photographed with Felix and Lester. Everybody agreed that the poor quality of the black and white photograph failed to truly capture the extreme shagginess of Shaggy, who only seemed to be getting shaggier with each passing day.
|