While sitting in the backyard on a sunny afternoon, Fleegle drops his slobber covered tennis ball in my lap for the umpteenth time. I pick up the ball with two fingers and toss it to him. “Fleegle, you know how you’ve been asking me about getting a puppy?”

He catches the ball but spits it out. “Oh boy, are we getting one today? Let’s go,” he says, his front paws bouncing on the ground.

“Well, I’ve decided it might be time to start to actually give the idea some real thought,” I say calmly.

He stops bouncing. “Huh? As opposed to the fake thought you already started giving it?”

“Um, yes.”

“So we’re not going today to get a puppy, but today you’re going to start thinking about getting a puppy? This is like when the guys on the car radio start talking about what they’re going to talk about. I thought you hated that.”

“I do. It drives me crazy. They spend more time talking about what they’re going to talk about than about it itself. It’s totally boring. Like they tell me all about the weather report they’re going to give at the top of the hour and in the time they take to tell me that, they could’ve just given me the weather report.”

Fleegle nose bumps the ball toward me. “So you want to start thinking about what you’re going to do instead of just doing it?”

“This is different.”

“Maybe to someone who is brainwashed by listening all day to people talk about what they’re going to talk about, but not to someone who does things when he wants to do them and doesn’t need to think about it first, let alone talk about it first.”

I pick up the ball and toss it. He catches it in the air. “This coming from a dog that would jump out a second story window after a ball.”

He spits the ball out in my lap. “I would not.”

“There’s a reason we live in a one story house, and that’s because I thought about it first.”

“But what if there was a swimming pool below that second story window. Think of all the fun to be had there.”

I toss the ball for Fleegle to catch, but he doesn’t move and it bounces on the ground behind him and rolls to a stop. “Raud, I think it’s time I give it some real thought about going and retrieving that tennis ball, but first let’s sit down and discuss it, let’s talk about what we’re going to say about the ball and the fetching of the ball.”

 

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