Last week gave us cause for great jubilation. Walter celebrated his fifth birthday! Perhaps I should rephrase that. The humans around Walter made a big deal of it, but Walter, being a dog, has yet to figure out the concept of calendars and dates and their importance. I know this because we must have told him at least 30 times, “Today’s your birthday,” “Yay, Walter, it’s your birthday,” accompanied by big hugs and belly rubs to reinforce just how much we, the humans, were loving his birthday. I didn’t get any sense that he cottoned on to the significance of our antics.
I’m sure he was thinking, “Is there food associated with any of this?” Walter would have loved my mother. When it was her dog’s birthday, she would bake a cake, and we all got a piece, including the dog. With ice cream.
But Walter has nothing to complain about in the food department. He is living his good years. For three years now, he’s had unfettered access to a child in a high chair come meal time. The current occupant, my one-year-old grandson, has plenty of food disposal tricks over and above putting it in his mouth. They all involve Walter.
My favorite is when he leans back and looks for all the world like he’s doing his zone-out Zen thing, with his arm dangling off to the side, the side where Walter sits patiently. At the end of the arm is a peanut butter toast finger (you remember toast fingers when you were a kid, right?). I try to catch it before Walter does. Nine times out of 10, grandson drops it before I can get there, and once on the floor, Walter knows the food is fair game. Because with grandma, it’s 50-50 whether she bends down to pick it up before he scarfs it down.
His second trick goes something like this: He picks up a morsel from his tray and holds it out an inch away from Walter’s nose. The trick is whether grandma can lunge for it faster than Walter. If grandma wins, she puts the morsel back on the tray in the mistaken notion the child will eat it given a second chance. Because that actually happened once. I constantly hold out hope it will happen again. It never does. Instead, he picks up the morsel and quickly hands it to Walter before I can lunge. Walter never says no.
Grandson’s most effective trick is swiping his hand back and forth across the tray in front of him, which sends his food flying in every direction onto the floor. This is Walter’s favorite trick, because there is no way grandma is going to bend down to clean it up. Walter is happy to bend, and when he does, a lot of that food ends up on his back. That’s OK with Walter. He’ll just eat it later when it falls off. It’s a dog’s life.
It certainly is for Walter — best dog ever. Happy birthday, Walter!
My favorite dog song comes from Neil Young …
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