By Beth Quinn

My dog Tom is scared of the hamper.

It’s one of those round hampers on wheels. I keep it in a closet until it’s time to do laundry. Then I roll it to the top of the basement stairs and throw the clothes down.

I generally forget about Tom’s fear of the hamper and rarely think to warn him that it’s laundry day and I’m about to take it out of the closet. If I leave the hamper near a doorway, Tom’s trapped. He can’t bring himself to pass it. He’d stay stuck in one spot all day if I didn’t eventually put the hamper back in the closet.

Tom is a very kind dog as most yellow Labs tend to be, but he should probably be in treatment for panic attacks. It’s not just the hamper. A lot of things give him a case of nerves, such as the wind chimes and the swing set in the back yard. If a bit of a breeze comes up and the chimes start chiming and the swings start swinging of their own volition, Tom comes flying into the house so fast he’s probably got a permanent concussion from slamming head-first into his dog door flap so often.

You can imagine what today’s wind is doing to him. Right now, he’s sitting in the bathtub where, presumably, he’s safe.

I don’t mean to pick on him, though. It’s true that Tom is perhaps the most cowardly of the many dogs I have known, but Riley, our dead-and-gone German shepherd, could have given him a run for his money in the sissy department.

Riley had a phobia about thunder, which is not so unusual for a dog, but Riley developed extreme safety measures to protect himself. One night, he climbed right into the clothes dryer, which was no easy trick considering he weighed 100 pounds. Another time, he squeezed himself behind the toilet and got stuck. We nearly had to get the plumber over to remove the toilet after the storm passed, but Riley eventually worked himself free.

Actually, all my dogs have had their own particular psychological quirks. In some cases, they’ve handled it themselves. In others, we’ve tried to work with them on their issues.

Take Mike, for example. When I was a kid, we had a Dalmatian named Mike who suffered from poor self-esteem, especially when he compared himself to a dog down the street named Boots Jones. Mike’s solution was to stalk Boots as though he were going to beat him up. I think it made him feel like a hot shot, but it was always a case of false bravado.

Boots generally ignored the stalking until Mike was nearly on Gramps Jones’ property. (Boots belonged to Gramps, or perhaps it was the other way around, I’m not sure. I never actually saw Gramps, so Boots might have owned the house himself.) In any case, Boots would wait until Mike was within biting distance, then he’d slowly stand up, flex his muscles, crack his knuckles, narrow his eyes, and then … he’d yawn.

Utter indifference was what I read in Boots’ demeanor, but Mike was always certain his time had come. That yawn was enough to send Mike hightailing it back home, where he’d claw frantically at the door to be let in. Then he’d stand inside the storm door and bark at Boots, who had already gone back to sleep. Still, Mike’s self-esteem improved after giving Boots a stern scolding from the relative safety of our house.

One by-product of Mike’s feud with Boots was a nervous stomach, and he passed a lot of gas. This affected everyone in the family because Mike slept in front of the hot-air vent in the kitchen. When the furnace came on, everyone’s eyes started watering what with the acrid, noxious odor that wafted all the way up into the second-floor bedrooms.

I don’t know why we put up with it. At the very least, it seems my parents should have made different sleeping arrangements for Mike.

Come to think of it, perhaps it’s not the dogs in our family who are the head cases.

Beth can be reached at beth@ZestofOrange.com.

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