Tragedy Strikes the West Household! (or, My Dog Peed on CS Lewis)

For several days my son had been saying he smelled something bad in the living room, but no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t. I think my sense of smell has been desensitized due to being exposed to a lot of strong smelling chemicals at various places where I’ve worked. But, then one day, I was walking past my book case when I finally did unmistakably smell something bad—and to my horror, it smelled like urine, and on closer inspection, it was coming from the carpet directly in front of my bookcase. On even closer inspection, it was also coming from the bottom shelf of the bookcase itself. Nooooooooo!

The obvious suspect was (insert “Dragnet” theme song here) THE DOG! I can’t prove he did it, but the rest of the family doesn’t tend to relive themselves anywhere other than the bathroom. Now, our dog Petey is 100% potty trained, but does have the occasional accident (the time when we switched dog food brands on him was the worst!). I stood there in horror as my eyes zeroed in on my beautiful large hardback volume of The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. Oye… that one was the biggest casualty and a total loss.

"I'm sorry. I just really had to go!"

A few of the books lost were inconsequential as they were just garage sale fodder, but the next biggest losses were the majority of my WWII biographies by some of the veterans portrayed the HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific. With a huge sigh of relief I realized my autographed copy of (the now deceased) Buck Compton’s autobiography, Call of Duty: My Life Before, During and After the Band of Brothers, survived unscathed.

All in all, the money originally spent on the books that were ruined was in the 100s of dollars. Fortunately, I was able to replace most of them with relatively inexpensive used copies via Amazon third party sellers, but unfortunately, in my zeal to replace them I over extended our family budget quite a bit (helloooo Ramen noodles), but we’ll be okay. Sadly, though, I could not find the same edition of the CS Lewis book I had at a reasonable price so I had to settle for a much cheaper paperback version. Oh, well.

I have to admit that I was pretty darn mad at Petey for a few days, but in my anger I was reminded at how much worse were (are) my offenses against God and how quick he is in his mercy and grace to forgive me for them—and most of my offenses are (were) not as accidental or unintentional as Petey’s was, so needless to say, Petey is forgiven. Now, if I could just get him to quit eating my socks!

What are some of your “pet horror stories”? Feel free to share in the comments below…