Never name your dog "Doofus"

Well, it's early here on a sunny Saturday morn and the house is quiet except for the cat who keeps poking around my legs wanting me to pick her up. I love summer mornings, especially when the house is quiet and all seems right with the world outside. It's on mornings like this that I can sit on the porch and reflect upon my life while Doug clips his toe nails.............(long pause while I am distracted by the clipping noise). As I sit here on the porch and look out, my memory wanders back through the years. Our porch faces the community park and as I sit here I see a few early birds out walking on the track across the street. They are mostly older people, the one's who have the good sense to start their day with a happy stroll. The park will get busier as the day goes on and there will be people out walking or running the track well past nightfall. This thought is what reminds me of Toole, our huge yellow lab that died not quite two years ago.
We had Toole for nine years and he was a great dog, the kind of dog that lived in the house with us and thought of himself as just one of the kids. The problem was that he kept getting picked up by the pound because he would wander over to the park whenever he got the chance, and sniff people's butts. You know, nobody really likes their butt sniffed. This is probably what caused some people to call animal control. Toole never really understood the idea that we people don't sniff each other's butt's and that if he really desired to be counted as human, he needed to stop doing that. This is what caused Doug to give Toole the nickname "Doofus".
Now, we were hyper-aware of Doofus' whereabouts after about the fifth or sixth time we bailed him out of jail. We put the Doof on house arrest and only let him out with supervision. This had been working out quite well for a while and he managed to stay out of trouble as long as I was around to remind the kids to watch him if they let him out, but I wasn't always there to remind them. In fact, one evening as I was driving home from somewhere, I spotted Doofus (or at least I thought It was Doofus) trailing behind a little old man as he shuffled slowly around the track. It was a warm night, but it was dark so I couldn't see all that well. When I saw this dog that looked just like Doof in every way, I got mad. I wasn't about to bail him out of the pound and spend another hundred bucks or more while being reprimanded by animal control again. I pulled the car over across from the track and rolled down my window. "Hey Doofus!" I yelled in the direction of the dog who was right behind the little old man (I thought he was sniffing the old guy's butt) "What are you doing?! Who let you OUT!? Your gonna get picked up by the cops and I don't CARE! I'll call them myself You stupid DOOFUS!!!!" The old man stopped walking and stared at me from across the street. "Hey Doofus!" I called. The old man looked around for a minute and then back at me. "I'm talking to the dog."  I tried to explain to him. The man looked behind him at the dog, "My dog?" He asked timidly. I felt my face flush as I realized that I'd been yelling at the wrong dog. " Oh! I'm so sorry! I thought that was my dog!" I said to the poor old guy. He laughed a little and then said "Well I guess that's good, 'cause I thought you were talking to me."
The real Doofus (other than myself) was at home, asleep.