THUNDER

Neither of the pictures are mine.


Thunder was a cute, rather devilish Dachshund owned by our district supervisor Matt. Matt was a very long time employee with a lovely sense of humor and was a delightful storyteller.

One day he held us spell bound with a tale about Thunder that I am not sure was true but he swore was.

Matt and Thunder lived in an apartment complex. Because Matt had bad lungs from years of smoking, he tended to let Thunder walk him self around the apartment complex for his morning toilet. Thunder would tour the lovely oak covered grounds, make his deposits and often would returned with a prize of a dead rat or mole to offer his master.

One Sunday morning, Thunder returned with a rather strange looking rat in his mouth. As he picked up the rodent to dispose of it, Matt noticed it only had a stub of a tail. Half sick, Matt realized that it was his neighbor's pet hamster.




He looked on his neighbor's patio and saw a hamster cage with the door open.

"Oh good grief Thunder, what have you done now?" he moaned.

Thunder did not have the best of reputations (those unattended toilet runs were partial cause) and Matt thought this surely would bring him up before the apartment board and he might be forced to move. The poor dead creature was covered in sand and slobber so Matt carefully shampooed the little rodent and blow dried him till he was respectable again.

Now would be a good time to describe Matt. This man was about 6'5", his insistence that he was 185 pounds was wishful exaggeration for he was one narrow man. He had hands that could palm a basketball with ease. His deep, slow southern drawl somehow fit his Ichabod frame. Envisioning this scrawny giant shampooing and blow drying a tiny hamster brought grins from all of us in the break room. He could have stopped there for a good story but there was more.

Making sure his neighbor was still at church, Matt sneaked over to her patio, slipped the fluffed up hamster back into the cage, shut the door and hurried home. He was hoping that the people would think the creature died of natural causes keeping Thunder off the Most Wanted list.

He was trying to think of how he could make it up to the people for Thunder's crime when he heard an awful scream. He looked out to see his neighbor standing over the cage in horror. Guilt was killing him as he approached the lady and asked what was wrong.

"Impossible." she repeated over and over a bit wild eyed. "Just impossible. Last night my hamster died and I buried him by the roses this morning, yet here he is, right back in his cage. Just impossible."

Thunder had evidently "unburied" the creature. Matt's cover up made confession impossible so some where today, that former neighbor continues to tell a story about a small hamster, that no one believes.




"May you have the hindsight to know where you've been, the foresight to know where you're going and the insight to know when you've gone too far."

HAPPY ST PATRICK'S DAY EVERY ONE