First published in the Tri Town Transcript Oct 4, 2018
By Esther C. Baird
Things are beginning to settle into a semi-pattern of stops and starts and rides and canceled practices and last minute forgotten homework or cleats or insurance forms or doctor visits. OK, it’s not a pattern; it’s the chaos of fall but if you’ve watched enough Jurassic Park movies you know that, “living systems are inherently unstable.” The Chaos Theory always wins out. So basically we are winning this fall as we proceed with our unstable living system, and while we don’t have any dinosaurs, we do have two Bernese mountain dogs.
Our older dog, Blue, is calm and reserved and sleeps a lot unless he has to put the smack down on our younger dog, Moose, who is now almost 2. I’m happy to report that he has stopped eating things that could kill him like blankets and thermometers and porcelain baby Jesus figures. Mostly. He chewed a pair of my shoes yesterday, but he didn’t consume them, so we’ll take that as an inherently unstable win.
These days Moose likes to snatch our dish towels and play with them like they are captured squirrels that need to be flung into the air and violently shaken. I secretly think it’s funny when I see my dish towels fly through the air the next room over. And since I’m the one at home the most, I just pick them up, fold them and hang them back in our kitchen.
This gives our youngest daughter the dry heaves. “You let me wipe my hands on a towel Moose spit on!?”
“I mean, it’s more like fast contact with his teeth.” I shrug back.
Or she’ll exclaim, “I dried the dishes with a towel Moose was playing with!?”
But I ask you, what’s crazier in that sentence? That Moose grabbed a dish towel or that my daughter dried the dishes?
It’s possible I’m immune to it. You know how they say a behavior has gotten out of control when you begin to accommodate for it? What if the accommodation is an entire dog? Just asking…
Another thing Moose likes to eat is grass. Mostly he chews it up and that’s that. But when he drinks a lot of water on top of the grass, it sometimes makes a second appearance. Gross, I know, but see the aforementioned immunity point.
So recently we were on a walk and he grazed a bit. It was one of those days that started chilly but became an inferno while we were out. This meant the boys were extra thirsty when they got back. After Blue calmly lapped up his water, Moose drank his water the same way he does everything, which is to say with extreme gusto. This not surprisingly led him to throw up. I quickly wiped up the small grass and water mixture with a paper towel and forgot about it. It had a zero footprint in my memory.
Until dinner.
While we ate our super healthy, lovingly prepared, pasta and hot dogs, our youngest was talking about a complicated social situation having to do with desk arrangements and our eldest was taking about a complicated social situation involving squid dissections. I was focused on making sense of the stories, so as I brushed the grass off the edge of my bowl, I literally thought nothing of it. But then I found a piece of grass in my pasta and I wiped my face wondering if I had grass on my face. Finally, it occurred to me that grass was not normal on the dinner table, let alone in the dinner. Even a dinner I made.
What was going on?? By that point I’d totally tuned out the squid and desk drama. I had my own complicated social situation which was that… NO!!
I spit out my pasta. “AGH! I’m using the paper towel I used to clean up Moose’s grass throw up, I must not have thrown it away!”
Our youngest dry heaved. My eldest started laughing. I flung the paper towel, and the grass, and my pasta, into the trash and reached for a dish towel. Cue the ironic music of your choice.
That night Moose curled up on my lap, like the small dog he is not. Regular Readers will recall that this is our standard routine. I like to think it’s his way of saying he’s sorry for the almost infinite list of things that went wrong that day. Another accommodation? I’m not answering that.
He’s predictable and consistent as he hurls his giant body onto my lap knocking my laptop and drink out of the way. You could set your watch to his arrival. And in our world of inherently unstable conditions, something regular and predictable is worth its weight… in fur.