This is a greyhound named Skippy, usually identified by his Winnie the Pooh toy.

Think I’m kidding? All the neighbors know Skippy because he never goes anywhere without Pooh.

Life consists of what one can bear. And no more.

But there are times when Skippy confronts the world naked. Meaning, there are times when he forgets Pooh in the car. (Greyhounds occasionally lose focus.) and then, even in his own neighborhood, odd things begin to happen. From the blog journal of Skippy’s most interesting life:

Skippy on a walk in downtown Mt. Dora. Today someone asked if he was an Afghan hound??? One day we were asked if he was a Great Dane, another day, a Dalmation, then a German Shepherd, then whippet, the list just goes on. He is a red fawn brindle, 70 lbs., how can he be anything but a GREYHOUND???? smile emoticon

Well, I can understand some of this. We had a black greyhound who looked to us like a small Doberman — yeah she weighed 65 pounds but we had a 100 pound deerhound which kind of spoils the intimidation factor — and she would never have attacked you for anything but your custard cone. (Truthfully, we did give delivery men a glimpse of her from time to time, our approach to home security. They seemed impressed.) The rest of these wild guess canine observers are hard to figure, except that people know nothing whatever about dogs.

Or any other mammal apparently. We were no sooner done exclaiming over the post above when we came across another greyhound owner who claimed that someone in the park asked her why she was walking a… What?

I was walking my Sasha and some workers asked me “why are you walking a deer?” I am not kidding. My husband was walking behind me with our afghan.

A deer? A DEER? Where do people get such absurd ideas?

Our greyhound Rikki heard the deer rumor. He’s gullible. He actually went looking.

We kindly corrected his misapprehension. He’s new here. We don’t expect the same calculus from him we’ve come to expect from Raebert.

He was dubious. You know, he was intrigued. Raebert just scoffed.

There’s no substitute for experience. Raebert’s lived in the country long enough to know where the deer are. Rikki just got here from Brooklyn. No wonder he can’t stop looking. Call it a greyhound thing.

“I think I see one. I really think I do.”

So we gave him another stuffed toy and a cookie, and everything was fine again.