ALL OVER THE MAP

I’m getting out of the dog writing racket. It’s gotten sinister.

It began when Gumbo came home from the dog park with a yellow rubber racquetball-sized dog ball, equipped with an inner squeaker and mounted atop two large, rubber feet. He brought this thing into the house, placed it on the ground between his two front feet, and spent five minutes staring at it.

It was out of character. Gumbo doesn’t fetch, although he enjoys taking tennis balls and Frisbees away from other dogs, just to see what will happen. Usually, he manages to start a fight without participating in it himself. I don’t know how he does that. Unfortunately, his IQ is higher than mine, and it really screws up the master/dog dynamic.

I wondered why Gumbo was now supervising a ball, indeed, why he now spent every waking hour with it, sometimes taking it for walks, sometimes lying on his back, squeaking it and adoring it, and sometimes just scrutinizing it.
It was kind of cute, at first. There’s Gumbo with his Yellow, we’d say. Maybe he’s capable of love?
One night, he dropped it onto my pillow, sliming up my bedlinens in a desperate attempt to create a kind of safe deposit box no other dog could crack. He was a wreck–his eyes bloodshot, his coat dull. Now he fell to the floor on his side, overcome by caregiver’s fatigue.

But the next morning he picked up the Yellow and returned to his nanny job, because, as an Australian Shepherd mutt, he needs to work. That’s what I told myself, but there was something addictive about that Yellow. So that night, as Gumbo slept, Gus hid it in a closed file cabinet.

Soon after, Gumbo returned to normal, if that’s what you want to call him. Until last week at the dog park, when he met a slow-moving Lab carrying a Purple. A snarling fight broke out.

“It’s nobody’s fault,” said the owner of the once-typical happy-Lab. “I blame the Squeaky Toy. It’s an obsession. Sometimes Barney gives me this look, like he’s saying Jesus, I need sleep, I gotta eat something.”

“Plus, the Squeaky Toy squeaks all day and all night,” another woman added. “I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

“If you wait long enough, they chew the squeak right out of it,” yet another dog owner observed, “but what difference does it make?”

“I think the squeaky toy is made out of crack,” said the Lab’s owner.

And, like crack, it is readily available.

I think I’ll write a book about cute kitties.