Enforced Secret Joy #22 – Agatha’s Big Fat Beagle

So here I am in Orlando visiting Agatha, her husband, and my four year old niece for Thanksgiving, and one of the things I love about coming here is her Big Fat Beagle. Her official name is Princess, though I call her Rolo, since she looks like a melted Rolo candy, and Princess is the name you give a cat, not a dog.

Princess Rolo and I didn’t used to get along. I was living and working in Orlando when Agatha first got Rolo (which was a gift, and though you don’t usually give dogs as gifts, this is the rare situation where it did work out.) Princess Rolo was a notoriously ill behaved puppy, driven stir crazy by the fact that she lived in a cramped two bedroom apartment (another reason why you don’t gift puppies) and the last straw was Princess Rolo eating one of my paychecks from Disney, resulting in a lot of Scotch tape and pleading with the bank teller to accept the mangled document.


But then I moved to Los Angeles. While I worked on my writing career, Princess Rolo worked on her waistline, resulting in the bovine shape you see here. She looks okay from certain angles, like, fifty yards away, ha ha ha.

I’ve never seen a fatter dog in my life. Agatha swears she’s not the fattest dog she knows, apparently there’s another beagle in the Orlando area who’s SO FAT that its belly drags the ground, and that’s the yardstick they use: as long as Princess Rolo’s belly doesn’t drag on the ground, she’s not that fat.

But she is. She looks like one of those cake logs from the Swiss Colony. She looks like a living breathing Ottoman. She looks like a prime candidate for a canine version of Celebrity Fit Club. She cracks me up and therefore is my Enforced Secret Joy for this week.

Dear God, thank you for the Big Fat Beagle Named Princess Rolo. Thank you that she’s still alive, thank you that she’s still happy as a Big Fat Clam. Please stave off those who would try to take me or sister Agatha to task for letting a dog get that fat, as she’s a beagle, can be very stubborn at times, and people who lecture other people on the internet without a complete understanding of the situation are silly freaks o’ nature. Yes, You made them, but they’re still freaks. But thank you for the simple joy of a Big Fat Beagle snuggling on the couch on my feet as I watch Survivor and Grey’s Anatomy. It’s better than a blanket, it is. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Amen.