I Have a Magic Dog

It has come to my attention that my border collie mix, Barley, is endowed with magical powers. Specifically, he can make any sports team win, as long as someone dresses him in a shirt with the team logo during a game. Now, I realize that you are probably dubious. Believe me, so was I at first. I am the last person to believe in anything supernatural. This is why I give the Jehovah’s Witnesses an earful every time they show up. In fact, I have caused at least three of them to give up the door-to-door approach in favor of telemarketing.

Okay, I suppose you want proof that my dog really is magical, and not just a fecal matter-producing financial drain, akin to Congress. It all started the weekend before Thanksgiving. I was visiting my mom and sister in Florida, where, incidentally, half of my old neighborhood has moved, even some of the goyim. My friend George is always nice enough to take care of Barley whenever I go out of town. He (George) is a Redskins fan, and he usually dresses his own dogs in Redskins attire – shirts, sweaters, jockstraps – during games. Well, since he had my dog that weekend, he thought it couldn’t hurt to put a jersey on him, inasmuch as the “Skins” had already lost 6 of their first 9 games and there is no law against canine pagan rituals as long as the amount of blood is kept below half a pint.

As you might have guessed, the Redskins won. When I returned from vacation, George told me that Barley had helped the Skins win, and he wanted to borrow him for the team’s next game. Being a man of science I saw no cause-and-effect relationship between my dog and the athletic performance of a bunch of oversized apes, but one of the things that define a friendship is the willingness of each person to indulge the superstitions of the other. George is a religious man, so I already knew that he believed in magic, and I wasn’t going to pop his bubble with my decades of reason, logic and personal experience, especially since he had stood by me in recent years during my 43-woman dating spree wherein, despite encountering a parade of psychos, liars, wet blankets, egomaniacs, and individuals built like tenement housing, I actually believed that someone existed who was honest, sane, respectful and fun, and also looked like a supermodel. So my casting aspersions on his beliefs would have been like Newt Gingrich criticizing Mitt Romney for occasionally saying something questionable.

The Skins won their next game with Barley in George’s care, and of course George asked to borrow him again. This continued week after week throughout the late fall and early winter until the Redskins had won 7 games in a row, culminating with a win last night against their archrivals, the Dallas Cowboys, which earned them the NFC East title. As I mentioned, I am a man of science, and my logic tells me that my dog can’t possibly have anything to do with any sports team’s success, but look at the results. The Skins have won every game that Barley has attended in George’s den, while Barack Obama has failed to fix the economy even with hundreds of billions of your tax dollars, so I have to conclude that either my dog is a magical being, or Barack Obama is a frigging idiot.

This got me thinking: Why did God choose to give Barley this magical power, but not others?  For example, why didn’t He give him the power to cure the sick?  Or feed the hungry?  Or refrain from pooping in my basement?