Marble the wiener dog: Love food, will eat.

Photographs with Leanne's dog, Marble.

We got our first dachshund, Kiesha, when the kids were five and seven years old.  My daughter, Leanne, decided she wanted a dog of her own, and saved vehemently until she could buy one.  The family that sold us Kiesha had another litter, and Leanne was the first one there to make a choice.  She picked a pretty dappled dog and we appropriately named him Marble.

Leanne had quite a lot of fun with him.  He was driven to chase toys and balls of all sorts and sizes.  She would sit on the wooden floor with one hand holding his collar and the other hand embracing a toy just out of reach.  His attempts to obtain said item resulted in her spinning around in circles as he padded his way toward it.  Think donkey in a mill works with a harness and a carrot just out of reach.

Marble's greatest legacy was his love of food.  Someone had left a half-eaten sandwich wrapped in cellophane on the stairs.  It wasn't there for long.  He grabbed it and scoffed it down in record time, plastic wrap and all.  We took him to the vet where he soon returned the wrap, sans sandwich.

We kept his food in a 5-gallon pail that was normally not accessible to him.  When the pantry door was left open, it was a call to the terminally famished, and he would dive into the bucket.  All you could see was a pair of hind legs dangling over the ledge with a tail sticking straight up into the air.  All attention was directed into cramming whatever he could down his throat before his presence was discovered.

And then there were the Costco sausages.  How a ten-inch-high dog can get onto a four-foot-high island is beyond me, but he did it.  I had just finished cooking a package of Costco sausages and had them sitting atop the kitchen island.  Nine of them, nicely barbequed, awaiting our dinner plates.  And then there were eight.  He managed to do this and not get caught; the evidence arrived shortly later as his system couldn't process that much meat.

We all loved Marble, in spite of his keen appetite, and were greatly saddened by his departure.  He developed cataracts and then glaucoma and went blind.  Still though, in spite of his lack of sight, he was a friendly, good-natured dog that we miss dearly.  He was thirteen years old.

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