The Irish Milkmen of the Dog World

I’m afraid this diary may insult both dog lovers and Irishmen but hey, that’s never stopped me yet!

Our son was a handsome boy and Whitley and I are, well, a bit challenged in that department, although I’m a lot less so now that I’ve lost 100 pounds. During one summer, two different people (who didn’t know each other) said the exact same words to us when they saw us with our son: “How did a couple like you ever have a child like Andrew?” They were just trying to start a conversation, but I knew darn well what they meant.

Around that time, I went to my doctor for a minor problem. We were chatting during the exam, and since he deals with physical bodies, I thought he would be amused if I told him this story. He laughed, wiggled his eyebrows and said, “Is that due to the Irish milkman?”

I suppose I could have been insulted, but I actually thought it was funny. He was referring to the fact that, around a hundred and fifty years ago, a large number of Irish immigrated to the US, due to the potato blight in their country, with the result that almost everyone here whose family goes back several generations here has some Irish in them.

The Irish are charming, and suddenly you had a large number of strong, handsome, lads, with that musical way of talking, doing menial jobs like delivering milk to lonely housewives and, well, things happened.

These thoughts were sparked by the fact that I received an email advertisement for a “Dog DNA Kit.” Presumably, you swab your dog’s mouth, send the swab to this company (along with some money) and receive a report telling you which breeds make up your mutt (you wouldn’t need to do this with a pedigreed dog).

I bet I can guess ONE of the breeds that will be in every one of these reports: The Dachshund.

Whitley and I have often remarked that almost every mixed- breed dog we see seems to be long. I got to thinking about the logistics of this one day and realized they would be pretty complex: A Dachshund would have to get up on a stool in order to impregnate most other breeds of dogs. And yet, somehow, they seem to have done it, time and time again.

That’s why I call them the Irish milkmen of the dog world.

I had a Dachshund once and found him a charming fellow, but he would dash across the street, regardless of traffic, in order to greet a child. Our son was away at school at the time, so I realized I needed to give our dog to a family with young children in it, and I found one for him.

I have an Irishman in my life too, and he’s a charming fellow as well, with the typical golden tongue of that breed. Whitley may have a German last name, but he’s a typical American mutt with lots of Irish genes. Nobody in his family had an Irish brogue (they’d been in Texas too long for that), but he remembers his grandfather singing the Irish ballad “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,” to his grandmother (whose name was Kathleen).

Interestingly enough, when we looked through the last names of the hundreds of thousands of letters we received from contactees and abductees, after Whitley wrote “Communion,” we found that they were predominantly Irish!

From reading all those letters, I learned that UFO contact runs in family, but maybe it also runs in our DNA. It’s an interesting thought, anyway.

UPDATE: Most of us HUMANS are “mutts” as well. Few of us are “purebred.” President Obama calls himself a “mutt.” I just learned that the Hawaiian term for a human mutt who was born in Hawaii (as Obama was) is “poi dog.”

NOTE: This Diary entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.