This year we’ve got the New York Giants playing the New England Patriots, and I’ve got two dishes for you that are guaranteed to please.  Bacon-Wrapped Italian Meatballs in honor of the Giants and Clam Dip in honor of the Patriots.

photo by Carrie E. Cox

Bacon-Wrapped Italian Meatballs
This is an amazing dish that is easy to make.  You can use either store bought Italian-style meatballs or you can make your own.  The recipe below includes everything you need to make them yourself, but if you choose to use store bought simply allow them to thaw and skip to step four.

Ingredients:
2 lbs ground beef
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 eggs
1 ½ cups breadcumbs
2 – 3 TB. Parsley
2 – 3 TB. Olive Oil
2 packages sliced bacon
1 twelve ounce bottle of dark beer, like a stout
2 cups brewed coffee
1 bottle bbq sauce
1/4 cup brown sugar

1. Prepare your meatballs first by mixing the first five ingredients together in a bowl.  If you really want your meatballs to stand out, grate the Parmesan cheese yourself by hand as it makes a world of difference in taste. 
2. Once everything is blended nicely, begin making your meatballs.  To give you an idea on how big the meatballs should be, we’ll be wrapping them with half a strip of bacon, so you don’t want to make them too big. 
3. Heat your olive oil in a frying pan on medium heat.  Place formed meatballs in the frying pan, leaving enough room that they can be rolled about a bit to ensure even cooking.  Using a slotted spoon will help a lot here, as you can easily roll them in the pan as well as lift them out when they’re done.  Each meatball should take approximately four minutes to cook.  When they’re done cooking transfer them to a plate and allow to cool.
4. Make your sauce.  In a large bowl whisk together the beer, coffee, BBQ sauce (I used Sticky Finger’s Carolina Classic), and brown sugar.
5. Cut the strips of bacon in half.  This can be easily done using a clean pair of kitchen scissors.  Wrap each meatball with a half-strip of bacon, securing with a toothpick. 
6. After wrapping the meatballs with bacon, place them in the bowl of sauce. 
7. Load the bacon-wrapped meatballs on your grill, to be cooked over indirect heat for about one and a half hours at 275-300F.  You can use the grill grate as well as the warming rack of the grill.  If, for some reason, you don’t have access to a grill you can also return them to the frying pan.  The main thing in this step is cooking the bacon to desired crispness.
8. Serve on a large plate or platter and be ready for them to disappear before your eyes.

photo by Carrie E. Cox

Clam Dip
When thinking of the Patriots everyone is quick to think of serving clam chowder but, really, who wants to eat soup while watching football.  Occasionally you want something different, but nine times out of ten, the best foods for football are those that don’t require a lot of attention while you eat.  After-all, if you’re focusing on your food you’re more likely to miss part of the game .. or the commercials!

Ingredients:
8oz package cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup sour cream
1 (6.5 ounce) can minced clams
2 – 3 dashes Worcestershire sauce
2 – 3 dashes Frank’s hot sauce
1/4 – 1/2 tsp. chipotle seasoning
a pinch of ground black pepper

1. This one is very easy to make.  Simply blend all the ingredients listed above together.  You can tweak it to your preferences by adjusting how much Worcestershire and hot sauce you use.  Serve with crackers.

Next week in Mama Taney’s Kitchen we’ll be cooking up recipes for Valentine’s Day, so make sure to check it out.  If you have any questions about the recipes listed, or if you have a recipe you think should be tried out, you can contact Carrie at carrie@mainstreetnewspapers.com

Mama Taney’s Kitchen is written by Carrie E. Cox

“I’m late leaving for the Salem Lions Club meeting because I had a situation here at home.” Uh-oh.

“The dogs got out of the fence and wound up at somebody’s house on Bear Creek and I had to go get them,” Bill said.

I figured our giant puppy, Catawba, and smaller friend, Skippy, had gotten out in the few minutes between Bill getting home from the tax office where he works in Roanoke, and when he called me.

Nope. They had been gone all day, visiting neighbors one and two roads away and who-knows-where else.

The first message on our answering machine was from Gale on Zana Drive shortly before 11 a.m. “There was a big yellow dog and a smaller black-and-white one. Maybe they’re your dogs?…I don’t see them now.”

Other messages sprinkled throughout afternoon reported dog sightings, from people who evidently got close enough to read Catawba’s tag that has his name, our last name and our phone number.

Skippy the terrier-Shihtzu mix slipped his new Georgia Bulldog collar off, of course, and lost it somewhere in the back yard. Maybe Catawba, the Golden-Great Pyrenees who could be mistaken for a pony, ate it.

At any rate, I don’t know if our wandering pair ran down Lawyer Drive and then over to Zana, or through the woods and over the hill.

We know for certain they crossed Wildwood Road, a Virginia Secondary Highway, to get to Bear Creek Subdivision.

One of the messages was from an unnamed jogger who, bless her, took the time to read Catawba’s tag and call.

When I telephoned another of the neighbors who had spotted the pups, she mentioned they had been near two dogs known to be territorial, and when those went after Skippy (through the fence? I didn’t think to ask), Catawba “whipped their butts.”

That’s our gentle giant for you, defending his little friend. He meets dozens of dogs of all sizes, breeds and temperaments on Saturday mornings at the Salem Farmers’ Market and when we take the pups to the Salem Rotary Dog Park. I’ve never heard him even growl menacingly at another dog, much less go for one who appeared threatening.

Bill got home in time to catch the phone when Ashley called, and got directions to her house where her family was holding onto our dogs.

“I drove up and opened the car door. Skippy came running to me and Catawba jumped into the car,” Bill reported.

The gate is bungeed now so that even if the wind blows it open – or Catawba figures out how to lift the latch like that black bear who opened my car door to get to the homemade cookies – it shouldn’t open.

We’ve gotten to meet by phone, at least, a couple of sets of neighbors within a mile or so that we didn’t know before. Thank you to all the people who either live or travel along Wildwood, Zana, Bear Creek and anywhere else you might have seen a big yellow dog and a smaller black-and-white one running free.

I wish I’d had a doggy cam view of their Great Adventure.

I did. My mother and daddy’s yard in South Georgia – Albany, to be exact (pronounced All-benny by those in the know) – had a couple of aging trees that bore just about enough pecans for them.

My cousin Jack Futch holds some of the cracked and partially shelled pecans. Photo by Meg Hibbert

Compared to that, my cousins Margaret Ellen and Jack near Adel, Ga., have tons of pecans. Well, thousands of nuts, more than I’d want to count or pick up.

Over the Christmas holidays, Cousin Jack and I taught my Bill how to pick up pecans. I’m happy to say that backyard pecan harvesting and picking out nuts from the shell have advanced from the way we used to do them. Now to make picking up pecans easier there are “rollers,” which remind me of hamster cages on broom handles. They’re actually small cages of sturdy wire tines with enough space in between for pecans to go in.

The idea is to roll the tool with a motion I thought was like painting a floor with a paint roller. Bill compared it to the motions of vacuuming. (Yes, he vacuums. He also mops but he doesn’t usually do windows.)

At any rate, you push the roller across the ground, gather nuts until the cage is full, then open the tines against a wire bail on the edge of a 5-gallon bucket. Thirty or so pecans make a pound, depending on the size of the nuts.

Husband Bill learns how to roll pecans.

Because Jack only had two rollers, I left the roller-ing to him and Bill. I returned to my usual bending from the waist and pitching pecans into the bucket. In taller grass where rollers don’t work well, I resorted to crawling on my overalled knees. It was like hunting Easter eggs, only pecans hide much better.

Pecans usually fall off the trees starting around October and going through about now. My cousins had been overwhelmed with a huge crop, and hindered by Margaret Ellen’s bad back and Jack’s job fixing people’s air conditioners. She was fretting about not getting the nuts picked up and sold, so I sent word we would come down and help a little.

By the time we arrived at their house Dec. 28, Margaret Ellen and Jack had gotten a young couple who are both out of work to pick up pecans and sell them, going halves with my cousins.

Pecans are selling for the best price in years, Jack said.

It seems the Chinese have discovered what Georgians and other Southerners have known for centuries: how good pecans are, and about 65 percent of Georgia’s pecan crop goes to China and other countries overseas. The buying price for pecans in Georgia right now is $1.50 to $4.25 a pound, according to the agricultural price index I checked.

A full roller of pecans ready to be emptied into a 5-gallon bucket.

They’re so valuable that people are stealing pecans more than usual. A Dec. 20 report in The New York Times says scores of people in several counties have been caught and prosecuted for stealing nuts from back yards and along highways.

Commercial growers use machines with big boom extensions to shake trees to make the nuts fall out of their dried black husks on the trees. The rest of us pick pecans up after they fall, or, like some of the people we saw along U.S. 41 and in Adel, toss branches or hunks of wood to knock down the last of the nuts.

We paid Jack for getting somebody to crack and remove the shells from the 34 pounds of pecans Bill and I – and Jack – had picked up in about two hours. But he wouldn’t let us pay him for the nuts. “Those pecans aren’t for sale to you,” he said. I love cousins.

It’s not that we need a table like that because we have our own family treasure. I just hope Joanne’s table found as appreciative a home as the one my mother bought for Bill and me when we were about to get married 42 years ago.

Even when I was right out of college and single, I had long wanted a claw-footed round oak dining room. For years, I had been collecting beat-up Victorian-era oak chairs, usually with pressed cane seats, to go around my someday table. And there the table was in a used furniture store in Macon, Ga., a day before the moving van was to come for my future husband and my respective belongings in his house and my apartment.

The table made the move to our first house together in Kensington, Md., where the pocket-size dining alcove was barely large enough for it and the chairs.

We hosted small dinner parties for our friends and our bosses around that table in Maryland as young newlyweds: cheese fondue and cold duck, the sparkling wine popular in the 1960s. We thought we were so classy.

Three-and-a-half-years later the table made the move to Madison Heights, Va., where our brick ranch didn’t have a dining room so it was our kitchen table. We raised three babies in high chairs and booster seats around the table and I looked forward to the days when they would spread out to do their homework there.

Sometimes, they did.

We celebrated numerous birthdays around the table, Thanksgiving dinners, countless daily meals and at times, it served as a place to cut out patterns for Halloween costumes and other projects. It seemed every family get-together at our house was captured in pictures around that table as we were about to eat.

After 26 years in Madison Heights, the table made the move to Salem. Once again, the dining room was an afterthought room and I longed for the day we could have a bigger space, with lots of windows, for the table.

About seven years ago we hired Mark Henrickson and his talented crew to push out the front of the house and add another 10 feet of living space all across the front, with space for not only the round oak table but also the china cabinets we inherited from our mothers.

The table continued to be our gathering place. Bill cooks breakfast for me and we eat together, just the two of us, watching the birds at the suet feeder. I remember that terrible day in February 2006 when I got up from the breakfast table to answer the phone, hearing Virginia Beach Police Homicide Detective tell me our son, Rex, had been found dead in the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

The table continues to produce happy memories: we introduced daughter Meredith’s South African fiancé to such favorite Virginia foods as country ham and 7-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola. At that table we tried to entice daughter Haley’s husband Greg to like grits made with garlic and cheese. He still doesn’t care for grits.

And after this year’s Thanksgiving turkey, the round oak table will once again be a staging area to construct a gingerbread creation for Salem-Roanoke County Chamber of Commerce’s Gingerbread Competition. Life goes on, around the dining room table.

Daughter Meredith called a couple of weeks ago to tell us she had decided it was time to say goodbye to Baby Kitty.

Baby Kitty, aka "Miss Baby"

Miss Baby had been her furry companion for more than 14 years since Mere was in college at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and the long-haired tabby kitten made her way across the street to take up residence in their off-campus house.

Baby had adapted on moves from Wilmington to Salem to Lexington to Danville, Pa., and to her final home in Charleston, S.C.

And then it was time for her final car ride. Baby had kidney failure. She had been on different types of antibiotics for a couple of years to keep her going. Meredith was weighing what to do.

She wrote, “On my way home last night I stopped by the vet’s office and spoke with her. I was just inquiring about the cost of testing for antibiotics vs. cost of euthanasia… She didn’t try to convince me of spending more dollars to keep Baby going. That’s what I needed. She said, ‘We could do all of the testing available and you could spend all of the money in the world, but there’s no guarantee it will work.’

“And I think what helped the most was ‘Even though she doesn’t look sick, she is… If you look close enough, you can probably see it.’ ”

Our daughter admitted she cried herself to sleep while Baby curled up next to her for two nights. She reported her husband, Frederick, had been really good about it. “Read some pages to me from the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective books. Did the dishes without being asked…I’ve been saying all along that I wanted to get another kitty afterwards… He’s said all along ‘No, one – 3-year-old Katjie – is enough.’ But when I mentioned it yesterday, he said ‘How soon do you want to get it?’ ”

Meredith had the weekend to rub Baby Kitty’s belly while she slept and feed her tuna (for people, the only canned food she would eat) and treats.

On Monday, Baby didn’t go easily into that next world. She fought the anesthesia, showing one more time what a determined kitty she was.

“It still tears me up to think she was so resistant until the last moment and so mad that she couldn’t get outside,” Meredith wroite afterwards. “That little tip of her tail flicked out of irritation/frustration, even when the rest of her was groggy and unable to move.

“When I think about all the things that upset me about her (annoying meow so early in the morning, peeing on my lap – how many times?) not being able to have carpet in the house, the expensive vet bills to find out why she was doing all of that, it’s a relief.

“But when I think about all the great things (her fluffy softer-than-cotton-never-dirty-always-pristine-belly, her beautiful green eyes, her little skip when she saw me coming, head-butts when she was lovey, her quiet purr, our games of hide and seek, the silly trick I taught her to do, her upside-down-look-at-me-I’m-so-cute pose…) then I feel just awful.”

Bill and I had been able to see all of Baby’s best qualities one more time when we visited two weeks before that last ride. We knew it might be our final time together.

Baby Kitty had been the subject for several of my pet portraits over the years. She was such a beautiful cat, and so much personality. Most of all, she was family.

To adapt a line from the book and movie “Charlotte’s Web,” “Baby was some cat.”

On mornings like Monday when I found only a few crushed egg shells as ghosts of the 14 fresh eggs he ate – yes, more than a dozen! – I look back in my mind at the cute, little blonde teddy bear we adopted.

Six-month-old Catawba with Salem High School JV football player friend Kirkland.

It was a May afternoon at the Catawba Valley Farmers’ Market, and a little boy from New Castle came walking across the grass hugging a fluffy pup of a breed I couldn’t identify. Golden doodle? Chow?

By the time the two reached me, I had locked eyes with the puppy and I was a goner.

“He’s a Golden Retriever-Great Pyrenees, with maybe a little English shepherd,” the young man said. And then the clincher: “Mom says if we don’t find homes for them today, we’ll have to take them to the SPCA.”

“Well, I could do that if he doesn’t fit into our family,” I told myself.

Of course, I named him Catawba. And you know how it is once you name something. You’re bonded, probably forever.

When we arrived home to my unsuspecting husband, Bill, I announced, “I’ve brought a friend for Skippy,” our still-new Shihtzu-Cairn Terrier mix. My husband responded, “Is he here to stay?”

He was.

So far, the score is giant puppy 25, humans 2. In the wee hours of the morning so far, Catawba has snatched-and-chewed a library book, three of my late mother-in-law’s clutch bags that were wrapped in plastic and stored (in an open shelf), a couple of magazines, the obligatory tasting of various of (my) leather sandals, my favorite half-cup measuring cup, and more.

Because I’ve never crate-trained a dog, I never thought how much angst that could have saved us. I also had no idea how rapidly a fluff ball would grow legs and turn into a coffee table, then a dining room table with hair, and now he’s working on being a counter.

And because of his rapid height growth, Catawba can easily nose things off the counter for pre-dawn snacks. This week it was the eggs. A few weeks ago it was two sticks of butter, still in their wrappers, I had set out in a mixing bowl to soften so I could make cookies the next morning.

I am so thankful Catawba left the mixing bowl intact.

I’m sure Skippy, who can easily walk underneath his huge friend, gets some of the spoils, too. Catawba usually defers to him when it comes to chew bones, despite the size difference.

We went as far as to locate and borrow an enormous crate a month ago to confine Catawba during the night. It’s still sitting empty, except for his cusion. I’m a wimp.

And once I learned to give the two dogs rawhide bones right before we go to bed, life did get more peaceful.

Sunday night I forgot the bones, and hence, the omelet without the pan. At least Catawba cleaned up after himself.

And it was fitting for the crowd in Thomas Road Baptist Church to do that as they said goodbye to W. Calvin Falwell. He was the immediate past-president of the Lynchburg Baseball Corp., and widely acknowledged as the man who saved baseball in the Hill City.

It was also fitting that when Calvin, who was 90, had a “spell” just before he had a final heart attack Aug. 20, he was in the car on his way to see the Lynchburg Hillcats baseball team play.

Watching the Hillcats play their final game of this season on Labor Day at Calvin Falwell Field at Lynchburg City Stadium just didn’t seem right, knowing that Calvin wasn’t up in the family sky box. Doris, his widow, was there, along with son Terry and other family members.

I’m sure Calvin knew and was cheering right along with the more-than 1,200 fans on Labor Day when Hillcats player Joey Terdoslavich smacked his 52nd double, breaking a Carolina League record that had stood for 65 years. That’s right, since 1946.

The Hillcats went on to win their final game, beating the Winston-Salem Dash 4-3, just before the rain started coming down hard.

My husband, Bill, and I have known Calvin and Doris Falwell since about 1973, shortly after we moved to the Lynchburg area. I don’t remember when I met Calvin. He was always there, sitting on the end of that first row on the third base side in those days. Later he and Doris moved up into the grandstand, where she didn’t have to hold a porch cushion over her head as protection from foul balls.

In my memory, Calvin always wore dress pants, a white dress shirt and a tie, even at baseball games. One of the first things Calvin would do when he got to their seats was plug in a portable phone. That was before the days of widely available cell phones. If that phone rang, it usually meant someone’s life was at stake.

The call would be from somebody at Falwell Airport, saying there was a heart or other organ that needed to be flown somewhere for a transplant recipient.

A few weeks ago, Bill and I went up to Calvin and Doris’ box to see them. His mind had been somewhere else for awhile, but he was always happy to see visitors, and he was always a gentleman. “Honey, don’t you want to take that chair over there? It’s comfortable,” after I gave him a kiss on the cheek.

Doris told me Calvin had given her a scare a few weeks before, when he had gotten up while the family and caregiver thought he was napping, used his walker to get quietly out of the house, and drove to his office a couple of miles away, “because he had dreamed I was in trouble and needed him,” she said.

In order to do what is easy for most of us, he had to find a screwdriver, unscrew the back license plate, get the key out of the magnetic key box, then put the screws back in. Of course, the family removed all the hidden keys later.

At the time Doris told me about Calvin’s trip, I thought, “That was Calvin’s last, great adventure.” It was, as usual, something he did for the love of Doris, with whom he celebrated their 69th wedding anniversary two days before he died. There was a love story we can all cherish.

These aren’t just any mushrooms, but morels, also called miracles or more locally, “merkles.”

Morels are good eating, and those lucky enough to spot them – or to have their own hunting grounds for them – guard their locations like family treasures.

Wild morel mushrooms, also known as "miracles" or "merkles," are prized for their flavor.

They’re funny-looking mushrooms, sort of like a pine cone or old sponge. Picture something a kid might draw if he or she ran out of pretty colors, dark brown or tan-and-brown, on a stalk, about 6 inches tall, poking out of the leaves.

A Craig County morel lover, who insists on absolute anonymity so don’t even ask, sent a photograph the other day.

The person wanted to give newcomers an idea of what a merkle looks like. People who are new to Craig County are always asking where merkles grow, how you hunt them and so on, the anonymous mushroom-lover said.

That person’s family hunts merkles underneath old apple trees and sometimes, tulip poplar trees, right after a big rain. “The ground temperature should be 58 degrees,” the person said, “so use a soil thermometer.”

Their favorite way to fix merkles is to “slice them, dip in egg, then seasoned flour, and fry in butter.” Sometimes they sauté with onions in butter.

I’ve read merkles – morels – can be frozen by rinsing quickly in water and placing in a freezer bag in the freezer so that the water forms an ice coating to protect the delicate mushroom flesh.

The only time I had as many morels as I could eat was years ago when a new friend invited me to hunt the mushrooms in an old apple orchard where her subdivision had been built. Luckily, I wasn’t allergic to poison ivy, because there was plenty of that, too.

About five years ago, a little boy from Craig County brought in what had to be one of the largest morels in captivity. He called the almost-grapefruit size fungus a merkle, my first experience with that name.

And no, he didn’t eat it, just wanted to show it off.

WARNING: Almost nothing else looks like morels, but if you’ve never gathered them, be sure to go out with someone who can teach you what these mushrooms look like. If you eat something that only looks like a morel but isn’t you could get deathly ill.

To see what real morels look like, go to www.morelmushroom.info.

I remember her not for her movies so much, or her diamonds or her perfume. I remember her for holding Meredith

Elizabeth Taylor, then married to John Warner, holds our No. 1 daughter, Meredith, when she was 6 months old in 1977. Photo by Meg Hibbert

Our daughter was 6 months old when she and I met Elizabeth Taylor. She had recently married John Warner, her sixth husband, and Warner was about to announce his run for the United States Senate. Ultimately, he became the second-longest-serving U.S. Senator from Virginia after Harry F. Byrd Sr.

He and Elizabeth were the featured guests at a fundraiser for local Republican candidate Flo Traywick, who was running for the Virginia House of Delegates to represent part of Lynchburg and Amherst County, where our family lived.

Warner had family ties to the county: his great-grandfather and great-uncle are buried at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in the community of Clifford, and the Tinsley family gave memorial windows to Ascension Episcopal Church in the Town of Amherst.

I, of course, wanted to interview him – and Elizabeth Taylor, if possible – for the Amherst New Era-Progress when he came to Lynchburg on June 23, 1977 for the Traywick Campaign Committee fundraiser at Marsan, a historic home near Virginia Episcopal School.

When I asked in advance, Warner’s publicity director, Harry Covert, said if the hand-shaking event ran late I would have to interview Warner afterwards, on his way to their next stop. That was by plane to Williamsburg, and I would have to find my own way back.

I was game. The only complication was I had a nursing baby, No. 1 daughter Meredith, who would not take a bottle, and therefore I needed to take her, too.

I never did get a one-on-one interview with Warner. I got something better.

So I and Meredith, all dressed up in her little yellow-checked dress and embroidered pinafore, were at the fundraiser where I was taking photographs of Amherst County people there to meet the Warners. An older lady I did not know asked to hold Meredith, and took her out on the patio.

In a few minutes she came rushing back, as fast as she could teeter on her high heels, saying, “Quick, Miss Taylor is holding your baby.”

I and every other photographer raced outside, cameras ready, to capture the moment. As you can see from the accompany picture, Elizabeth Taylor smiles happily at the camera, with Meredith contentedly sucking her two middle fingers.

Being trained in public relations in Washington, D.C., I printed an 8-by-10-inch copy, enclosed it in a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and sent it to Miss Taylor asking if she would sign it for Meredith.

She wrote in flourishing script, “To Meredith, Best wishes Elizabeth Taylor Warner.” That photo hangs on the wall in our home.

A few minutes later, the actress with the violet eyes – yes, they really were violet – came inside to take a break and sat down next to me and Meredith. We just talked, like two mothers.

She mentioned how a fortune teller told her she would have seven children, which she knew wasn’t possible because she had an early hysterectomy after she had four children from three of her marriages. Then she and John Warner married. He had three children, and hence, the fortune teller’s prediction came true.

About then, John Warner, who was former Secretary of the Navy and a very take-charge man, came in and said something like, “Elizabeth, these people have paid $25 each to shake your hand. You simply must come back out.” And so she did.

Savannah was our last one. After she disappeared in a blowing snow on her final adventure Jan. 8 and we never located her, we began looking for a shaggy, small dog to adopt as a companion for our 12-year-old Lhasa Apso, Hairy Dawg, who is blind.

Puppy Skippy, right, lies next to 12-year-old Hairy Dawg.

Skippy came home with us two weeks ago. He’s a black-and-white “Goodview terrier,” whose daddy was a Shihtzu and whose mother was a Cairn terrier. Think “Toto,” Dorothy’s dog in “The Wizard of Oz.” He came from Goodview in Bedford County, and he’s 3 months old.

We weren’t looking for a puppy. Even though we had checked into adopting a small, shaggy adult dog at just about every shelter, rescue group, pet adoption website and Craigslist posting within a 100-mile radius, almost all of the dogs available in January and early February were big, were hounds or had a healthy “re-homing fee.”

Skippy – whose original name was Billy – was the last of four puppies and Delores, his human mama, just wanted a good home for him. We set off with Hairy in the car one Sunday afternoon for a meet-and-sniff. (The dogs did the sniffing, not us.)

My husband wanted to name the pup Skippy after his first dog, a Spitz mix. Billy-Skippy doesn’t seem to mind the change. He was ecstatic to have a friend to lie next to on the dog pillow in the back of the car, to sleep with in the crate for the first two nights, and to roll all over in general.

Skippy didn’t know about walking on a leash, housebreaking or stairs. But he didn’t whimper when we put him to bed as his mama told us to do, “every night at 9 when I give him a hug and kiss him on the nose.”

That worked the first night, once I put Hairy in with him, and might have after that if Hairy, who isn’t used to being crated, hadn’t decided enough was enough. Hairy started barking in the wee hours of the morning and wouldn’t stop voicing his discontent over being confined with a youngun who thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

No more crates. OK, so I’m a wimp. After that, we turned the two of them loose in the kitchen with a puppy gate confining them, and plenty of puppy pee pads, food, water and toys.

Hairy didn’t think much of that, either. He’s used to sleeping on carpet next to our bed.

His domain upstairs was puppy proof for a brief while. But Skippy, who’s definitely not an alpha dog and isn’t used to being alone, started barking in the middle of the night in the kitchen.

He solved that himself. Over the weekend Skippy taught himself to climb stairs and scamper down again. No more crates, no more puppy gates. Still plenty of pee pads, but it’s a lot easier to open the upstairs door and let the dogs outside in the fenced yard in the dark instead of trying to walk the pair of them in the middle of the night. The full moon was gorgeous, though.

Our devilishly clever plan is working. Skippy plays with Hairy’s toys, lies close to him on the dog bed, and gives him somebody to follow up the stairs and out the door. The three cats have adjusted much easier than I expected, and tolerate the newcomer.

Hairy is moving around better. Maybe it’s having a youngster in the house. Maybe it’s the glucosamine sulfate-chondroitin I grind up and put in his food.

I think Savannah would approve of Skippy. She would be licking him.