CLUNY'S CORNER Cluny@ClarionIsh.Com

"GETTIN’ BLESSED”

One of my favorite holidays in the Church year is the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. St Francis is the patron saint of animals, which of course includes doggies. My master always takes me to get blessed on this important feast day.

Gettin’ blessed is really quite easy. To get blessed, you stand in line with a lot of pets. There are doggies, cats, and even a lot of varmints like Guinea pigs, hamsters, goldfish, and even snakes. All you do is stand there while the priest says the blessing of St. Francis, and then you get a St. Francis medal to wear on your collar so people, like the dogcatcher, will know you’ve been blessed. The doggies that have been blessed and later got picked up by the dogcatcher said that if you are wearing your St. Francis medal, you get put in a separate part of the pound until your Master can come pick you up. I guess that is sorta like going to purgatory- you pay for you crime of being caught out of the fold and then the Master lets you back to the good life.

Next comes the feast. The feast includes the best doggie food and treats. I mean real canned doggie food and only the best snacks like Liva Snaps and Scooby Snacks. The kitties get canned chicken and liver from a name brand pet food company, not the cheap stuff my master serves Heidi, our kitty. The snakes get real live mice. I wonder if the mice were blessed before they were fed to the snakes?

One thing I really like about the feast is you get to meet a lot of doggies from all over the county. Our county has a military base and there are doggies from all over the world “gettin’ blessed.” On the last feast day I met a nice doggie from Hawaii named Poopoo Lotta Poi. Poopoo Lotta Poi was a Kai-Shiba Inu mixed breed. (What we usually call a Kai-Shi.) I asked the usual doggie get acquainted questions, and of course we smelled each other’s butts. After these formalities, we moved on to make new friends. I told Poopoo I’d e-mail him at his e-mail address and gave him mine. It’s Cluny@ClarionIsh.com for those of you who do not know it.

After making a few more friends my Master and I headed home feelin’ like we really had a blessed day.

So now I really feel like my Master. I wear my St. Francis medal each morning while he spends about fifteen minutes deciding which Saint’s medal he needs to wear to protect himself during the day. Sometimes he wears his St. Christopher, St. George, or St. Mary’s medal, and sometimes he just can’t decide which one to wear. I think he should always wear his St. Jude. After all, St. Jude is the patron Saint of lost causes.

Email me:Cluny@ClarionIsh.com