Go on . . . . ask.
Excellent question. Well, it’s like this, see? Me and my two dogs, Daisy and Lebowski (shown below), take regular constitutionals up and down Hound's Ear Road.
Lebowski is the indignant-looking one, and Daisy is the pretty one who looks a little D-U-M.
So, I’m out with Daisy last Tuesday afternoon when she trots onto my neighbor’s lawn, sticks her nose deep into some hole, and drags a mystery item out of it. I am well familiar with such occurrences, so I ready myself for the worst. Is it a cat turd? Is it a dead vole? Is it one of those tiny, crunchy gray lobster-looking things that are sometimes for eating and sometimes for rolling in? Panic ensues as I envision myself having to fish a mouse carcass out of Daisy’s clenched teeth with my bare hands. “Drop! Drop!” I yell. As do this, I notice with dismay that I really do sound like a chihuahua when I shout, just like my good friend Jeff pointed out about fifteen years ago at the Los Lobos show, the bastard.
“Drop!” I yell again, while knocking on the top of Daisy’s bowling-pin-shaped head. Something rattles between her eyes, like a BB in a tin can. Having at last processed the command, her ears flatten grudgingly. Her jaw goes slack, and out falls . . .
toast.
It's a perfectly good piece of toast, too -- lightly golden brown with nary a hint of char. Why, I almost want to pick it up and eat it myself. But, since consistency is the key to dog training, I stand my ground and pull Daisy down the block while trying to ignore the “But. . . but . . .” look in her eyes and the growl of my own stomach.
A day passes and this time I’m out walking Lebowski. I’ve got some Randy Newman going on the iPod and I’m singing along, “We’re reeeeed-necks, we’re reeeeeed-necks . . . don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground . . . .” I suddenly remember that Storchy Street is located well below the Mason-Dixon Line, and make a mental note to avoid singing that song aloud anymore, at least not where anyone can hear me. Just then I turn around and see that Lebowski, with his back to me, is sticking his head into a hole in my neighbor’s lawn. Crap. Having forgotten about the toast incident, I truly think that he has found actual crap and I yell, “Drop! Drop!”
Lebowski never drops, though. He never chews, either; he swallows everything whole like a bulimic hyena, so I have to be quick. As I run up behind him his head swings around and I expect to see the dangling legs of a dead frog slapping him in the face. What I see instead, however, is toast -- a golden wheat-bread slice that has been uniformly browned to perfection.
“What the fuck?” I say, abandoning Southern etiquette entirely. I yank the toast out of Lebowski’s mouth and fling it far into the woods. Or at least I attempt to. Apparently there’s a good reason why the outer hulls of aeroplanes and rocketships are not fashioned of toast.
The rest of our walk is uneventful, but for the fact that I’ve begun to sing Todd Rundgren’s song “Slut,” replacing the word “slut” with “toast.”
“T-O-A-S-T! You may be some toast, but you look good to me . . . .”
Not a perfect fit, but it worked well in a pinch with a forced syllable squeezed in here and there. I defy you to get that song out of your head now.
Well, I surely thought I’d seen the end of the Lawn Toast at that point, but later that day Daisy pulled some more of the stuff out of that same damn hole. At this point, it became obvious that the Lawn Toast Hole was a modern day miracle -- a small rift in the space-time continuum that produced an endless supply of delightfully crispy, golden-brown toast.
After all, it certainly wasn’t the first time a miracle had presented itself in toasted form.
The more I think of it, the more obvious it seems that the Miraculous Lawn Toast Hole is Version 2.0 of the Miracle of the Virgin Mary Cheese Sandwich.
It’s just like that old saying: “If you give a man a Virgin Mary Cheese Sandwich, you'll feed him for a day. But if you guide a man to the Miraculous Lawn Toast Hole, you'll feed him for life.”
