I was home alone with the dogs recently when I heard Cleo whining and tracked her down in the living, lying on her belly and gazing longingly underneath the couch. As Cleo has a tendency to lose her tennis balls under any piece of furniture big enough to fit one this is not an uncommon occurrence at my house. I dutifully got down on the floor and rooted around under the couch to unearth the four or five balls she had lost under there. As usual Jack, who normally shows no interest in the tennis balls whatsoever and only decides they’re worth playing with when I’m trying to extract one from under the furniture, trotted over and began tackling me to get the balls as soon as I pulled them out.
After fending off the fuzzy white monster, sating him with other tennis balls while trying to keep one on hand for the dog who will play with them for more than five seconds, I looked up only to find Cleo nowhere in sight. I searched the house and found her chewing on one of Jack’s favorite stuffed animals, the tennis ball forgotten. As soon as she saw me she dropped the stuffed toy and started begging for the tennis ball. So I headed to the door, ready for a game of fetch. Jack followed me outside and I threw the ball at the fence…only there was no Cleo to chase it.
Cleo, as it turned out, had decided she was hungry and stopped to eat. Abandoning the game I came inside and sat down to read. Not a paragraph into my book, what should hear? Whining. From where? The backdoor.
I got up and went to the backyard again to play. Only it so happened that in the brief time I’d been inside, not one but two neighbors had let their dogs out and Cleo raced to the fence to commence their “run along the fence and bark at each other” ritual.
Eventually we did manage to get a game of fetch in once all the distractions were either sated or ignored, but I couldn’t help thinking that if Cleo had just taken a minute to eat before she went o the couch to beg for tennis balls, the whole thing would have gone much smoother for her. Admittedly though, I do this all the time when I sit down to write and then suddenly realize that I’ve forgotten to have breakfast and am simply too hungry to focus. Sometimes canine writing lessons are pretty simple.
Canine Writing Lesson #3: He who eats before taking his ball to the human is wise, and shall play the most fetch.
Human Translation: Take care of simple distractions, like eating, before you sit down to write.
