FOLLOWING THE LIGHT

Our dog Pekah Boo has an obsession. She loves the laser light. We keep it above the phone in a woven basket with other miscellaneous items. At least once a day she will go over and sit under the basket and repeatedly look up at the basket, and then over at me. She says, "You know." If you read my blog from last summer, you are aware that I really don't know what she is saying. Lin has to tell me her thoughts. I am well trained, so I obediently get the laser and we get started. If it is really wet outside, we stay in the house. There is a well traveled route from our living room, up the stairs, and back again. I keep watching for signs of wear in our 16 year-old carpet, but so far haven't seen any. If it is not too wet, we head out the patio door and she really gets up some speed, racing back and forth the full length of the back yard. After a few minutes, she begins to slow down. She never really stops, and I've never had the nerve to see how long she would chase it. Besides, I don't want to think about doing CPR on a boston terrier. I wouldn't mind the heart massage, but the mouth-to-mouth is a little much to get my brain around. If she does collapse, my plan is to immediately begin the massage, while frantically calling Lin to come over and begin the mouth-to-mouth, or in this case, mouth-to-nose. I used to be a certified CPR instructor, so Lin would not likely ask me to trade places, especially if I spoke with a voice that commanded authority. A few times I have made the mistake of taking Pekah outside when the ground is saturated. Have you ever seen mud caked up inside a dog's paws? She is an indoor dog, of course, so we have to clean her up before we can let her back in the house. It ruins a bath towel when you wipe between her toes, and her running is not very kind to the grass, either. We have huge ruts from her path, and when spring arrives I have to figure out how to smooth them out. I guess I could go out anytime and use my feet to reshape the grass. The ground is like putty. It squishes when you walk on it. I have a recurrent nightmare in which a 120,000 man army walks three abreast through our yard, and I go outside eight hours later to find a three foot deep trench, similiar to the buffalo migration trails that used to go through Kansas. When I wake up, I try to imagine the circumstances necessary for that to have happened. My mind has come up with some scary scenarios. You don't want to know.