I don’t remember why I was thinking of this today, but I was. When I was in high school, my parents had a black Standard Poodle named Sammy. She was a funny dog with TONS of personality and she adored my dad.

I need to back up a bit and then we’ll come back to Sammy. The house I grew up in was a rambler style house. It had a fully finished basement, and the basement was where we had the family room and the TV. When we watched a movie, we watched it in the basement. In high school, my brother and I would often bring dates over to the house to watch a movie or just hang out. It was pretty convenient that the family room was in the basement, as my parents often went to bed around 10 o’clock, and so we’d have the basement to ourselves.

One evening my girlfriend and I were sitting in the basement family room watching a movie and I heard my dad say, as he got up to head to bed, “Sammy — go downstairs and see what those kids are doing.” A moment later I heard Sammy pad down the stairs and her big fluffy head appeared in front of me as she checked out what we were doing. Fortunately — we were just watching a movie! She then climbed up onto the couch and sat down directly between me and my girlfriend. That’s right. She sat BETWEEN US. As she sat there, she looked back and forth between the two of us, her big, pink tongue hanging out. She sat there the rest of the evening.

I told my parents about it the next day. She was henceforth referred to as “The Chaperone Dog”. My dad always made it a point to send her downstairs to see what we were doing whenever I had a date over to watch a movie. Figures.

–Pete