Bogie

Hello my Foodie Friends! We had a great Thanksgiving this year at the Reardon household and we hope you did too. While we sat around the kitchen table my wife Paula brought up a story about our time together before we had the kids. That is when our one baby was our Dog, Bogie. He was named after Humphrey Bogart and he loved to roam between our house and our next door neighbor. This was before invisible fences and we didn’t have the money for a regular fence. Bogie was a German Sheppard/black lab mix puppy when we rescued him. His color was pure black and he grew very fast to 100 pounds of muscle. He was the happiest dog in the world, loved by both our family and our friends next door, Ron and Deede whose children were now grown. Bogie could make anyone feel like they were his favorite person in the world! He would go over to visit Ron and Deede, who were passionate foodies, every day. He always came back carrying leftovers which were usually a big steak or ham bone. They loved him as much as we did. However, Bogie would test your love from time to time by taking food that wasn’t offered to him. There was the Halloween party that stopped dead in its tracks, as all of our guests watched as Bogie took an entire pizza down the hallway and quickly devour it. His thievery reached legendary status but he never took from Ron and DeeDe until Thanksgiving 1989. There was a knock on our door and it was Ron. He had his head down and in a sad voice he said; “John, Bogie stole two of the Pies I had baked for thanksgiving”. I responded to Ron with a mixture denial and embarrassment: are you sure, how do you know? Ron said he put his pie on the roof of his Lincoln Continental in the garage to cool. When he came back there were no pies but there were paw prints on the hood of his beloved Lincoln. Those prints headed in the direction of our house. Ron and I then found the empty, perfectly cleaned, pie tins. I apologized and offered to pay for the pies but Ron laughed and told me not to worry. He said he would have to think of a new place to cool his pies and remember to close the door next time. Now it’s been 24 years but Ron could tell this story like it happened yesterday. We still love to go over their house and have a cup of coffee and talk about Bogie. Where did we find the dog after his caper? He was curled up by Paula’s legs in the kitchen sleeping it off. Remember my friends: Life Happens in the Kitchen!” Take Care, John and Paula