Nuggets I picked up from my dog, No. 15

Posted on November 21, 2013 by PMcG

Being bits of wisdom gleaned from daily walks with my dog, Coffee. He left for stars unknown in 2010.

Bird, Bird, Bird, Bird is the Word

Strolling through the neighborhood with the hound provides an opportunity for meditating on the everyday mysteries of the universe. Some are profound, some not so much.

For instance, a couple of weeks ago the guy across the street set out in his trash a carton for a 52-inch flat screen TV. Today, the guy next door set out a 72-inch carton. I rushed inside and measured our 10-year-old fat screen TV. Imagine the stab of fear I felt when it turned out to be only 23 inches. And I still think of it as “our new TV.”

The universal mystery at play here is simple: Why isn’t there a place where you can just buy a flat screen TV box that says 82 inches? As usual with mysteries engineered by Father Nature, the principle here is not so philosophical. Not when you consider the stuff laid out like clean underwear on your bed by Mother Nature.

Take the dark-eyed junko, for example, frolicking in yon trees. What is a dark-eyed junko? It’s a bird known as a junko and it has dark eyes. How do I know this? Almost everything I know about birds I learned from Katherine

She knows the names of all things in nature: trees, insects, vegetables, wiggling forms of tofu. She is most impressive, however, when it comes to birds. It was she who first noticed the red tailed hawk living in a tree out in the back yard. Or, she will hear a knocking sound and while I’m rushing for the front door she’ll say softly “That’s a red-headed woodpecker.”

When Coffee and I go walking in the neighborhood I see only crows. Or robins. But anybody can recognize famous birds. To appreciate the really good stuff out there you have to stop and focus, while silently posing epistemological questions: What is that bird? How can I be sure that’s what it is? Is our family room big enough for an 82-incher?

The exercise has thus far paid great dividends. The other day, while in such a pose, I heard the strange cry of a bird. I looked around but couldn’t see anything. Yet again, I heard its odd call. It went like this:

Derek? Derek Jeter. Derek? Derek? Derek Jeter.

I must emphasize that it didn’t sound something like Derek Jeter. It sounded exactly like Derek Jeter. At first I kept this to myself. I didn’t want to be mocked as someone who would think a bird knew enough about baseball to call Derek Jeter’s name. As if it were trying to get Derek Jeter’s attention. For an autograph?  My suspicion: free tickets.

I went several days with this secret knowledge until one morning Katherine said  “You know who Derek Jeter is, right?”

It took all of my willpower not to answer “Derek? Derek Jeter?”

Instead, I asked her why she wanted to know.

“This will sound strange,” she said, “but there’s a bird out there who keeps saying something that sounds like Derek Jeter.”

I nodded knowingly, a difficult move to perfect unless practiced regularly in front of a mirror.

“You’ve heard it?”

“Sure,” I said in the precise tone called for after nodding knowingly.

“Well, what kind of bird is it?”

I chuckled knowingly. (A subtly different move than nodding knowingly, but still a member of the knowingly family.)

“It’s a Derek Jeter bird.”

She stared at me, unconvinced.

“It’s probably where the real Derek Jeter got his name,” I said.

Katherine replied with piercing logic: “You mean his parents didn’t have a last name until he was born?”

“I don’t know,” I said defensively. The thing you learn after studying mysteries of the universe is that they don’t always have an answer. Like the impossibility of knowing how to use a corkscrew. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be called mysteries.

“Maybe Derek is his first name and Jeter is his middle name,” I said. “There are lots of famous people who go around with first names and middle names but no last name. Like Ann Margaret. Or Jimmie John. Or 50 cent.

“The rapper? Shouldn’t his name be 50 cents?”

“I think the s is silent,” I replied. “And also invisible. I mean, that’s my educated guess.”

But, then again, it may be just another one of those mysteries of the universe. He said knowingly.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved

Posted in Dogs I Have Known | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Musical fruit

Posted on November 19, 2013 by PMcG

This is about green beans, but first a slight digression. Stick with it and an important green bean point will appear. Trust me. I once taught a tone-deaf guy to play the banjo.

So. You’re driving along and the red light on the dashboard flashes: service engine immediately. You pull over to the side of the road, worried that the engine is about to blow up. Terms like “valve job” and “throwing a rod” and “$6,000” flit across your mind.

You know nothing about cars, but what you always see on the sides of roads are people lifting their hoods and staring into the darkness of all those belts and bearings as if they know exactly what they are doing.

But short of finding a dead grizzly bear under the hood, I have no idea what I’m looking at. Still, I always get out and lift the hood because I can just hear the smug sarcasm of a tow truck driver saying “Pal, you gotta dead grizzly under there. You didn’t know that?”

The thing is, once you open the hood on the side of the road and find no grizzly you have committed yourself. If the world authority on valve jobs drives past, he won’t stop because you look like you know what you’re doing.

Okay, the green bean connection should be appearing at any moment. Last week as I am heading out to do the groceries, Katherine says “Make sure the green beans look okay.”

Sure. Not a problem. In the store, in the vegetable section sits a crate full of green beans. The challenge—and I bet you can see where I’m going with this—is deciding if these beans look okay.

I pick one out of the box and give it the green bean squint. I hold it up to the light, why I don’t know. I look around for a green beanist. I see a kid nearby unpacking apples and oranges. I’m thinking what could a kid know about green beans except that he hates them?

“Excuse me,” I say. I hold out the green bean. “Does this look okay?”

He looks carefully at the bean. He nods slightly. Yes he’s seen these before. That’s a good sign. He sets down an orange. He peeps the bean again and frowns.

“Compared to what?”

Compared to what! What a mind-boggling point. This kid could be a doctor.

“Compared to um, a bad green bean,” I say.

“Ya know,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bad green bean.”

And, of course, neither have I. So I fill a bag with green beans.

Just to be sure, I ask the lady at checkout if the green beans look okay. She says yes. I say how can you tell. She says “Because they’re green. If they weren’t green, then I’d say you have a problem.”

Which, if you think about it—but not too hard—it’s the exact equivalent of looking like you know what you’re doing when you lift the hood of your car and find a dead grizzly bear. Because, if the bear isn’t dead, then I’d say you have a problem.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved

Posted in News You Can Use (Sort of), The human comedy | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Nuggets I picked up from my dog, No. 14

Posted on November 14, 2013 by PMcG

Being bits of wisdom gleaned from daily walks with my dog, Coffee. He left for stars unknown in 2010.

The Last Meatball

So I said to the dog “Today is the thirteenth. Do you know what that means?”

I gave him a minute. Briefly we made eye contact. His are brown, mine are green. He looked away, unrolled about four feet of dripping tongue and went into his heavy breathing routine. Not what I would call responsive.

“It means tomorrow is the fourteenth.”

Sha-boom!

No reaction. As always, my humor is lost on him. I sighed. But I translated his disdain into English.

“What?” he seemed to be saying, noticing my scowl. “Were you talking to me just then?”

“Oh no,” I said, hoping my sarcasm was thick enough to make my point. “I was talking to myself.”

“You know, you do that a lot,” he might have replied. If he spoke English.

When it’s just you and the hound all day long and you come up from your basement office for a mid-morning break, you feel like making contact with the outside world. If you were in an office it would be like getting a drink at the water fountain down the hall just as your colleague Bob was coming out of his cubicle to do the same.

“Bob,” you’d say, sociably.

Bob, not your most social being, would nod silently and start to fill his water bottle, the one with Darth Vader on it that his mother gave him for Christmas.  Along with a plaid speedo she thought he could wear while jogging on his lunch hour. Which he wore only the one time and afterward found an unsigned and untraceable email on his machine: “Some friendly advice,” it said. “Either lose 40 pounds or the Braveheart underpants.”

Lacking a Bob in your kitchen, you are faced with the choice of remaining silent during your break from reality, or actually talking to the dog. If you’re Bob, you probably don’t say anything because you know dogs can’t talk. If you’re a little less tightly wrapped, you have a choice of two conversational pathways. You could, for instance, descend into baby talk.

“How’s my itty bitty, goofy woofy, puppy wuppy?” (This, even though the 50 pound bag of dog food in the garage reminds you daily that his butt aint itty bitty at all and he hasn’t qualified for puppy status in fourteen years.) “You’re such a cute little hairbag and your snout is so fuzzy. Soooo fuzzy.  Yes it is, silly willy. Do you need hugs? How ‘bout a tummy rub? Oh, silly willy likes his tummy rubs, doesn’t he? Would you like a num num?”

Of course, you’d never talk like that to Bob. Not unless you wanted to have an anonymous email show up on your screen speculating on your past criminal/psych ward record.

The other alternative is to keep the dog conversation on a higher plane. You bring him up to you rather than dumbing it down to the num num level.

A typical conversation at the 10:30 a.m. snack break might sound like this.

“Dude,” you say in greeting, coming into the kitchen. “Zappening?”

“Is there any food in the house?” you say in a whimpery, half-dead tone on his behalf.  “I haven’t eaten in three very long minutes.”

You chuckle, but you ignore him. You open the fridge, looking for that leftover meatball from last night’s supper. You back out with a container wrapped in plastic.

“What?” you say, looking from dog to container to dog. “This? Oh, no, this is bad for Mr. Dog.”

“What are you a doctor?” you say he says in the tone you know he’d use if only he could. “And if you are, what doctor in his right mind would suggest someone eat a meatball at 10:30 in the morning?”

“These are turkey meatballs,” you say. “How about a num num instead?”

“You think I’d eat a num num when there’s meatball in the air?”

“You like num nums.”

“I like turkey, too. And by the way, that’s a huge meatball. You eat the whole thing, you’re gonna regret it.”

You launch into song: “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.”

“Right, Mr. ‘My Way’ Sinatra. And I’m Rin Tin Tin. Now, are you gonna share that thing or am I gonna have to bark?”

Of course, all along the dog is just sitting there watching you, unaware of what a splendid conversationalist he is. What he is aware of is your meatball.

Later, when Katherine comes home she asks how you and your best friend got along today.

“He was a bad dog,” you tell her. “He barked at me.”

She’s rummaging in the fridge.“What happened to the leftover meatball?”

Normally, Katherine, a vegetarian, wouldn’t care about a missing meatball, even a turkey meatball. Tonight, however, she’s volunteered to make me dinner.

“Um, he ate it.”

“The dog?” she says, looking back at the two of us. “How did he open the refrigerator?”

“Well,” I say, “he was pretty clear in his barking that if I didn’t open the door, and give him the meatball, he’d have me for lunch. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.” I give the hound a conspirator’s wink. “Would you, Dude?”

“Leave me out of this, num num.” Katherine is speaking now, but she is using words he would surely use if only he’d paid attention in canine school. “She knows a meatball hog when she sees one. And oh, by the way, is that spaghetti sauce on your collar?”

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved.

Posted in Dogs I Have Known, The human comedy | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The man who invented thinking

Posted on November 12, 2013 by PMcG

By Rene “Buzz” Descartes,

I have been asked to say a few words about how I thought up my most famous line “I think, therefore I am.”  I get more questions on that than any of my other thinking lines–including my favorite “I think I’ll take a nap.”

So. One day in Holland I found myself broke and hungry. My friends were all in Italy, sucking up to a pious putz named Galileo, whose tee shirts said “Father of Science.”

In those days if you weren’t the Father of something or other, you were nobody—although there was a guy who made a nice living as the Father of Nobody.  Anyway, Galileo liked to joke that the world revolved around the sun. I knew I could think up better stuff than that.

I’d always wanted to be known as the man who invented thinking.  But apparently some wizard in the Fifth century grabbed it first.  Seriously, if that’s when thinking was invented, would anyone have thought that the thousand-year Dark Ages to follow was a good idea? I think not.

So, I was out on the road holding up a sign: “Will think for food.” A stranger stopped. He said “I’ll give you a ham and Swiss on rye if you think of an easy way for me to make a million ducats.”

I replied “Make it pumpernickel and you’re on.”

He came back with a sandwich and a dill pickle, which I seldom eat. Whenever I bite into a dill I get chills down my back and I go all wiggly and silly and jump up and down squealing “Holy Snot!”

I unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite. Delicious.

“Well?” he said. “How do I make an easy million?”

Around a mouthful of ham and cheese I said “I think…”

“You think what?”

“I think.” I took another bite. “Therefore…”

“Therefore what?” Such an impatient sandwich man.

 “Therefore I…”  Suddenly a piece of food lodged in my throat. I began choking to death.

“What’s happening?” he said.

I pointed to my mouth and I  gagged. I started losing consciousness. I began to panic. I was going to die. But I was so young and I had so much left to do in my life.  I had overdue library books. My shirts were ready at the cleaners. I’d just put a new stack of corn cobs in the outhouse.

“What are you saying?” the stranger hollered.  “So far all I’ve heard is ‘I think, therefore I…’  Therefore you what?”

A large woman attempted to get past us on the roadside. I realized she was my only hope.  I reached out to grab her arm, but accidentally I ended up with a handful of end. She  punched me hard in the stomach.

And out flew a hunk of sandwich.

She recoiled in horror. “What is that thing?”

“Ham,” I wheezed, gulping for air.

“Ham?” shouted the stranger. “I think, therefore I ham?” He repeated it a few times, staring at me the way a turtle stares at just about everything. “I don’t get it.”

Just then a newspaper reporter happened by doing a Man in the Street interview. He was asking people what they liked to do when not hunting or gathering. (News hadn’t yet been invented.) I told him everything that had transpired. In the next morning’s paper the headline read

“PHILOSOPHER THINKS UP REALLY GOOD ONE.”

But the sub-hed said: ‘ I think, therefore I am.’

Holy misquote. I mean, the ham line at least makes sense–if you change the second “I” to “the” and simply presume the speaker is telling a judge whether he wants 50 lashes or a ham dinner.

To this day I still have no idea what “I think, therefore I am” means. To me, it’s obviously unfinished, begging the question:  “You am what?”

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved

Posted in News You Can Use (Sort of) | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Nuggets I picked up from my dog, No. 13

Posted on November 7, 2013 by PMcG

Being bits of wisdom gleaned from daily walks with my dog, Coffee. He left for stars unknown in 2010.

The roaring whoosh

Last night I dreamed that Coffee got glasses. Thick, black framed glasses like I had as a kid. He sat in the optometrist’s chair and when the doctor moved that gigantic gizmo over his snout with all the lens variations, Coffee woofed out the teeny letters at the bottom of the eye chart. I stood nearby singing the Beatles song “Ticket to Ride.”

This morning I ran it past Katherine, who knows everything about dreams. She reminded me that we’d recently gotten a sales notice from a bookstore in a mall in Syracuse, my home town.

“What does that have to do with my dream?”

Well, says Katherine, directly across from the bookstore in that mall is an eyeglasses place, correct?

 A jarring memory reached up from the depths.

“Remember what happened the last time you were there?”

How could I forget? In the bookstore I bought a Fred Vargas policier about Paris Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg of the 5th arrondissement. Then I went looking for the mall’s restroom.

“Never a smart thing to do in a mall,” Katherine remarked.

Yeah, but sometimes you have no choice. So there I was, seated, holding my new book.  I glanced down at it and, without provocation, invocation or cation of any kind, the right lens of my glasses popped out of my frames. Popped and dropped like a dead bird in Kansas. Down past Commissaire Adamsberg, through my hands and into the depths with a splunk.

I may have screamed, it’s all fuzzy now. I jumped up, turned quickly toward the abyss, but not quickly enough. Some Einstein thought it a great idea that terlets flush automatically as soon as the perpetrator has de-canned. The roaring whoosh of a mini Niagara Falls—essentially sucking away my right eyeball—elicited another moan of pain. I stood with one eye behind glass, the other staring stupidly from an empty frame.

It took me half an hour to feel my way back to the eyeglasses store. The good news: they built me a new pair of glasses in an hour. The bad news: half-blind, I selected a pair of $35 frames that turned out to be $350.

 “But what about the Beatles song?”

Katherine pointed to the board game we’d played the night before. It’s title: “Ticket To Ride.”

 “Your dreams are easy,” she said. “You’re so literal-minded.”

“What about Coffee? Why was he wearing glasses?”

“Very simple,” she said. “Our pets are us when we’re at our most vulnerable.”

Sometimes Katherine’s explanations come in words or concepts too large for me to understand. I have only a bachelor’s degree. I asked “What the heck does that mean?”

“It means Coffee is you,” she said. “And you are Coffee.”

 I don’t know if this is important, but later, when a roofing salesman rang the doorbell, I barked and was shushed by Katherine. I retreated with my tail between my legs to the man cave where I found Coffee playing my banjo. I curled up on the rug and took a nap until dinner.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved

Posted in Dogs I Have Known, The human comedy | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Frequently Asked Questions: Dystopia

Posted on November 5, 2013 by PMcG

Q. I’ve heard the word dystopia used a lot lately. Is it contagious?

A.  Just to clarify, you want to know about dystopia, not dattopia, right? Some people get them mixed up.

Q. What the heck is dattopia?

A.  And, see, that’s why I wanted to clarify. Because I am the dystopia guy. I know dystopia like zealots know zel. The dattopia guy is someone else. In fact it’s a woman. I’ve heard she’s mean and wears leather pants.

Q.  Wow, I’d like to meet her sometime. But I do want to know more about dystopia.

A.  Okay. The first thing you need to know: all of your topias—your dyses and your dats—come from the word  Utopia.

Q.  Me-topia?

A. Utopia, not y-o-u topia. The U comes from the nickname for a character from Roman mythology called Ulysses Hoo. His friends called him U for short and today he is remembered as the father of the chocolate soda.

Q.  Are you making this up?

A.  Oh no. These are all hard facts straight from my mind. Anyway, topia is another word from ancient times, specifically when Greeks went around naked. Sometimes in the cool, cool, cool of the evening they developed a condition called topia—known today as goose bumps. The word topia became corrupted over the centuries into tapioca, a pudding with bumps in it. So, literally, utopia means “U Hoo! Tapioca!”

Q. And dystopia means…

A. It’s from the Greek word “Dys” which has two closely related meanings. The first is “Dys be wrong, Zorba.” The other is “We’ll have none of that bumpy pudding crap here.” Thus, dystopia essentially means “You can’t have your tapioca and eat it.”  Today, of course, it has come to mean a society where tapioca is a mortal sin.

Q. I don’t think they even make tapioca anymore.

A. Because it’s a mortal sin.

Q. So what you’re saying is that I am currently living in a dystopian society.

A.  What’s your zip code?

Q. 58006

A. Let’s see. That’s Arthur, North Dakota. Oh yes, dystopia up the yingo.

Q. What about 58008? I have a brother who lives there.

A. Hmm. Barney, North Dakota. No tapioca sightings there.

Q. Yeah, Barney is strictly a custard man. What about 58052? My uncle lives there.

A. That would be Leonard, North Dakota. They have an ordnance. Strangers, upon entering town, must check their tapioca with the blacksmith who flattens all bumps.

Q. So what you’re saying is North Dakota is a tapioca-free state and therefore a dystopian society.

A.  Not exactly. As you well know they really don’t have what you’d call society in North Dakota. They don’t even have a tuxedo rental shop and you can’t buy white gloves without a license. They have mostly farmers, car dealers and crop dusters.

Q. Don’t forget the Dakota wall industry.

A.  What’s a Dakota wall?

Q. It’s the same as a concrete Jersey wall only these come with wallpaper and crown molding.

A.  Gosh, look at the time.

Q. One more zip code. 58015. A girl I dated in high school lives there.

A. Uh oh. Christine, North Dakota.

Q. Christine! That’s her. Um, why uh oh?

A.  Christine not only boasts one of the largest tapioca eating populations in the country, it’s a hotbed of tapioca smuggling.  What Nogales, Arizona is to cocaine running, Christine, North Dakota is to tapioca.

Q.  Definitely not a dystopia.

A.  The exact opposite: it’s your classic dattopia.

Q. Is dat a Greek word?

A.  Dat is not a Greek word. Dat is believed to be part of da call sign between da smugglers and da dealers. If da smuggler doesn’t hear da correct response to his “Who dat?”  he drops his tapioca and runs.

Q. Who dat?

A. Who dat who say who dat?

Q. Dat be me.

A. And dat be dattopia.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved

Posted in F.A.Q., News You Can Use (Sort of) | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Nuggets I picked up from my dog, No. 12

Posted on October 31, 2013 by PMcG

Being bits of wisdom gleaned from daily walks with my dog, Coffee. He left for stars unknown in 2010.

The dog who lays down

Once a solid black hellhound of high speed, Coffee J. Dogg’s eyes and much of his 13-year-old snout have turned from gray to white, his speed from Mach-1 to mock turtle.

Some days during our walks he stops on every other lawn for a rest. At least once a day someone says “Hey, it looks like he’s taking a break! A Coffee break! Ho Ho!”

A six-year-old once told me “My Mom calls him the dog who lays down.”  There’s also an older woman who huffs by the house each morning in a gray sweat suit. “Oh,” she sighs at the sight of Coffee, “I wish I could lie down right now.”

Coffee takes it all in stride, or lack of stride. Even squirrels can’t budge him. Once he would charge dutifully after a flickertail, sometimes smashing into the backyard fence as the squirrel snuck through.

Gradually he morphed into the phase where I would say “Look, Coffee, a squirrel!” He would turn and take a few obligatory running steps, pretty much to let me know he still could.

But after a brief trot, during which the squirrel often didn’t move at all, he’d also stop. He and the squirrel stared each other down and then went back to their business.

Nowadays, Coffee perks up at the sight of Mr. Squirrel, but just as quickly perks down. Rather than viewing this as the sad but inevitable decline toward mortality, I choose to think of it as the maturing of the beast.

Instead of acting like a forever two-year-old, it’s as if Coffee has finally reached that magic, statesman-like age of three.

I see this quite clearly in the mornings after our walk when I am seated at the kitchen table eating my cereal and reading the newspaper.

Directly ahead are the sliding doors to the back deck. Katherine sprinkles a cup of bird seed out there in the mornings, attracting chickadees, juncos, cardinals, the occasional tufted titmouse, and a squire of squirrels.

There are people who do not like squirrels. Entire shelves at the pet store boast the kind of bird seed that squirrels won’t or can’t eat. My thought is that squirrels are part of wild nature and they have to eat too. So we sprinkle one-size-fits-all seed.

After Katherine leaves the deck, the rank and file of the surrounding wild kingdom observe a discrete waiting period. As the branches of nearby trees fill with drooling birds, an intrepid volunteer invariably scouts ahead to make sure the coast is clear.

Ernie is the name I’ve given to this first bird to appear on the deck in the morning. Sometimes he’s a chickadee, sometimes a sparrow. Sometimes he’s a she. But always it’s an Ernie.

The Ernie bird drops down to the deck, takes a quick look around, then a peck or two at the seed. The rest of the birds watch carefully, expecting at any moment that Ernie will clutch his breast in agony and break into chirping soliloquy:

                    “Cowards die many times before their deaths;

                      The valiant never taste of death but once.”

But all he really does is take another peck at the seed as the flock swoops in with knives and forks and napkin rings.

“Look!” I say to the hound. “Ernie’s here!”

In days gone by Coffee’s routine was predictable. He would begin barking and scratching to be let out. Once the door was thrown open, he would launch a loud and fiery assault, chasing bird, beast and squirrel down the stairs into the back yard and beyond. He would return tail-waggingly triumphant, praised by me for being so brave and dogful.

Alas, no more. Today’s Coffee J. Dogg sits at the glass doors and calmly observes the action. It conjures the image of the Persian king Xerxes watching from a hill as his fleet engages in battle at Salamis. But maybe that’s just me.

Invariably fifteen or so small birds hop, flutter and peck across the deck, until the larger blue jays or cardinals drop in to flaunt their seniority.

Then come the squirrels. Maybe they are the same three or four squirrels every day, but it’s hard to tell. Maybe each back yard in America is assigned one handful of squirrels who work that territory their whole lives before retiring to Knott’s Berry Farm. Whatever.

Coffee sits for a half hour each morning, his nose inches from the glass, watching every move on the deck. While watching, he ignores all around him, even the loading of food into his bowl. Katherine says it’s his equivalent to watching a reality show.

Often a squirrel or a bird or two will hop up to the glass door and stare back at the old nemesis. Coffee will lean closer and sniff the pane.

No barking, no bird fluttering, no squirrel squirrelyness. I can’t help thinking that something passes between them during these tentative closeups. Perhaps not the kind of thought we humans are used to. Maybe just the sensation of kinship, the kind of melding of souls that the double-paned window allows.

Are they wondering out on the deck why the big guy doesn’t jump at them? Is Coffee thinking gosh these guys are okay, why was I chasing them all those years?

But civilization is such a fragile enterprise. If the door is suddenly thrown open, creatures revert without thinking to their basic programming.

You get your stumbling, limping charge, your barking, your scrambling, your squealing, your panic, your posturing, your sword-rattling, your flying feathers, hurt feelings, damaged pride, oaths of vengeance and unending enmity.

  It’s why I never open the door until Ernie goes home.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved.

Posted in Dogs I Have Known, The human comedy | Tagged , | Leave a comment