Dogs and Doors

The national championship game is tonight. I’m rooting for our neighbor, Oklahoma, but fear Florida will be too fast and too strong defensively to be beat. My goal is to make it to halftime. That’s about all I can do. My bedtime is 9:00.

We’re having to have a new back door put in. The old one is worn out and wasting away. The new door had to be custom made to fit. Expensive. Jake and Millie love to stand on their hind legs and paw on the back door. I asked Ruth if this custom would continue once we had the new expensive door put in. She said, “Of course not.” Wow. I didn’t know Jake and Millie understood the difference between an expensive door and the old worn out one.

Ruth is a wonder worker, able to do anything she puts her mind to. But for the life of me I could not figure out how she would convince Jake and Millie to leave her new expensive door alone. Curiosity finally overwhelmed me. This morning I asked how she planned to protect her new expensive door. She said she was going to put a gate at the top of the steps to keep Jake and Millie off the deck. What? No magic, no winning them over, no trying to convince them, no appeals to their better natures, no wooing them with extra treats? Just a gate. Two things about this sadden me. One, it demeans Jake and Millie. Two, I wish I had thought of it.