His Dogness

This column first appeared in the December 2013 issue of Forsyth Family magazine.

The other day, my brother and sister-in-law dropped by with four giant cupcakes that they didn’t want tempting them at their house. After they left, I retired to the kitchen to taste test one. I was a couple of bites away from polishing it off when Doobins called for me from the living room.

“Give me a minute,” I said. “I’ve finished the first three cupcakes and I’m just about done with the last one.”

I expected him to dismiss the comment as a feeble attempt at humor not worth his attention. Instead, he rushed into the kitchen only to find me still working on the first cupcake and the other three sitting untouched on the kitchen table.

“I can’t believe I fell for that,” he said. He turned and headed back into the living room.

Doobins likes to get me, too. When he wakes up in the morning, his usually heads to the couch in the living room where he quietly makes the transition to being fully awake. When I hear him stir, I will go in to check on him. From time to time, I find an empty couch. Oh, no! I begin my search. Often a shard of noise will give away his location. Sometimes, though, I truly can’t find him and he is able to jump out and startle me.

Sparkle Girl and I have other games that we enjoy. When we walk around the block with Faye, we sometimes play word games. In one, one person picks a category and a word from that category. The other person has to come up with a word that begins with the letter that ends the first person’s word. With the category of “food,” for instance, “tomato” may lead to “orange.” We try to keep in mind that lots of words ending in “e” can soon make the game challenging no matter what the category.

On a recent walk, Sparkle Girl asked me to start. Without thinking about a category, I said, “Star.”

“What’s the category?”

“Celestial bodies,” I said.

“That’s no good,” she said.

“Things you can touch,” I said.

“You can’t touch a star,” Sparkle Girl said. “That’s stupid.”

She smiled her smile. We were in new territory. As far as I could remember, it was the first time she had ever called one of my ideas stupid. At the same time, I liked seeing that she was comfortable enough to play at that level. When we got back home, she told Garnet all about my mental missteps.

Garnet can be wildly funny. As a sideline, she makes up words. Faye doesn’t have a snout, she has a “snoober.”

When I asked Garnet how she came up with that word, she said “That’s what it is.” “Derbis” is another word she introduced to me. Dust bunnies and other scattered bits of this and that fall into the “derbis” category. Ever since I have known her, I presumed that it was a word she made up by rearranging the letters in “debris.” I just learned that her grandmother – who Garnet knew as Debo – used it. So making up words may be a gift that came to her through her grandmother.

I like living a life filled with enjoyable made-up words and people comfortable enough with each other to play. Years ago, His Dogness and I were walking in Old Salem one day – we were heading up Church Street toward God’s Acre – when I realized that happiness comes not in packages that last for a week or a day but in moments that may be gone in an instant so you had best be alert enough to savor them when they arrive

I have the good fortune to come upon many such moments in my life.