| FOOD FOR THOUGHT, CLEAN THOUGHT |
| Sailor here. I watch my Mom all the time. If she goes into the computer room, I accompany her. If she goes downstairs into the laundry room, so do I. I even escort her into the bathroom to make sure she stays safe and doesn�t fall into the human water bowl. I make some amazing discoveries this way, especially when I follow her into the laundry room on laundry days and into the kitchen at mealtimes. In the laundry room, I have observed the evolution of the towel. Now, Mom says that the milestones in the life of the towel are usually made in a linear direction proceeding from step one through step two, three, and so forth until the last step is reached. No so, our particular towels. They go from step two to step one to step three and then out the door into the great unknown. The exalted first step is the Dog Towel, the towel, large or small, which Mom uses to either dry me myself or my floor drool after drinking. She also uses the Dog Towels to dry my feet after a walk in the rain or a gallop through the latest Zoe disaster. Step two is logically the next step in the towel�s lifetime, which is to live upstairs with Mom in her bathing room and to dry Mom herself after a shower. Step three is the RagBag, which is really a bucket in the laundry room into which the Cleaner of the House reaches for appropriately sized rags to perform the Waving Miracle on all available indoor and some outdoor surfaces. Step last is still an unknown destination; the rags from step three just disappear, occasionally to reappear in the back of the Dog Car for purposes yet to be revealed. Perhaps the last step is a trip to Sock Heaven, the ascendancy to which has its start, I am told, in our very own laundry room. In our house, however, these steps are out of sync. The towel goes from being a Mom towel to being a Dog towel before finally finding its proper place in the scheme of things in the RagBag and from there to the Great Unknown. This puzzles me. Why, I ask you, would the towel be instantly demoted to step two before being promoted to Dog Towel status? My Mom moves (and dries) in mysterious ways. In the kitchen, also, I have made important discoveries. Mom and I eat much the same diet, meat and veggies, eggs and yogurt, salad and no dessert. Well, sometimes Mom has dessert and sometimes I have a fruit smoothie. The main difference is that Mom always cooks her meat and often cooks her veggies; mine are raw, all of them. We both eat salad dressing, but mine is made of apple cider vinegar and flax oil; Mom�s is something else entirely. Another difference is that Mom eats her meat course with her veggie course and her salad course in separated piles on her plate. On my plate I will find meat and veggies and salad all ground up together and called Breakfast. In the evening I am fed raw meaty bones called Dinner, a great improvement over kibble. A fourth difference is that Mom eschews my dog cookies and this means all the more for me! I like this difference the best. Occasionally Mom will give me a taste of her cooked food for a special treat when I have been really good at standing in a certain spot on the kitchen floor with just the right look of pleading and anticipation in my eye. I have decided that pasta is my favorite and last night my second foray into spaghetti again resulted in quite a few red stigmata all over my white ruff. �Sailor, are you sucking up the spaghetti out of the bowl and splashing the sauce all over your ruff?� Mom asked, bending over my stainless steel pasta bowl in consternation. As I have said before, Mom sometimes overstates the obvious. �Fwip, fweep, kiss, well, yeah,� I replied scattering red blotches over Mom�s nose. �How else does one eat spaghetti?� Lacking an opposable thumb, forks and spoons are out of the question. �Gee, thanks for that,� Mom replied, blinking rapidly. �Now I�ve got marinara freckles.� She quickly transferred her freckles onto the dog towel, which hangs over my water bowl for quick swipes of the floor after I�ve been drinking and dunking. �Ack, wrong towel,� I heard her mutter as she climbed the stairs in search of a clean towel and cleaner tee shirt. Mom came back to the kitchen just in time to see the last strand of spaghetti flip its way past my lips. �Now for a quick wash,� she said, and she didn�t mean herself, either. She reached into the dog cupboard for the distinguished dog towel and dog cleaner. �Ooh, this smells like pina coladas!� she exclaimed as she squirted the blemishes on my white collar. �Yummy!� She rubbed my ruff with this liquid refreshment and the dog towel, releasing me from the stigma of spaghetti sauce and restoring me to my former beautiful self. While Mom performed the waving miracle on my ruff, I kicked back onto my haunches and daydreamed about the beach, salt spray, tiny paper umbrellas, large clean beach towels, and sunglasses. How I love summer! Saint Sailor the pure |
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