Canine Capers 12

Summer well and truly made its presence felt today. We heard on the radio that the warm weather was expected to continue “until otherwise advised”. Gotta love that!

Nice and warm for you to come home to, Mom!

M and I were busy most of the day doing nothing much — until the early evening when all hell broke loose.

We had eaten our tea, and Jenny and Leon had eaten theirs. They settled down to watch TV, and M and I stretched out on the cool kitchen floor to watch the inside of our eyelids. Everyone was happy. It was all very homey, comfy and quiet.

Suddenly, the phone rang. Jenny answered and then became immersed in a discussion about football, power, and ice cream.

“Hello? ... Oh, hi Miriam! ... We’re watching the football ... Bombers are ahead ... Yeah, better than last week, that’s for sure ... The what? ... You’re kidding! ... (to Leon) The power’s out at Miriam’s ... (to Miriam) Yeah, that’d be great ... (to Leon) She’s coming over ... And she’s got ice cream! ... (to Miriam) Okay, see you in a few. Bye!”

“Who’s Miriam?” I asked M.

“Don’t know, but I think we’re about to find out.”

Next thing we knew, Leon raced upstairs and started vacuuming. Jenny took out the stuff for recycling, cleaned off the table, put some other things away, and generally tidied up.

A veritable hive of activity — and pure hell for those of us who had already packed it in for the night!

Then, when Miriam arrived and came into the back room, a curious thing happened. Instead of running away as he usually does when meeting a stranger, M walked right up to her. Kissed her foot and sniffed her ankle. I’d never seen such a thing before in my life!

“M, what are you doing?!”

He turned to me with a puzzled look on his face.

“I’m saying hi. What do you think I’m doing?!”

Clearly, small miracles do happen.

In the course of the evening, we discovered that the power had indeed gone off at Miriam’s building and she couldn’t get upstairs to her apartment. Unfortunately for her — fortunately for us, or them, at least — she had ice cream that she wanted to share, or rather had to share because it was melting.

And so for the next few hours, they ate ice cream, watched some television, and talked and talked.

Ice cream for everyone, except us. Bugger!

You might think that Dog Gone It! did not play any role in the events of this evening, but you would be wrong. We made ourselves available on call to help with the ice cream, if required. And M absolutely did his part by being nice and polite and making a really big effort to say hi. I was so very surprised ... er, I mean, proud.

And I’m thinking it might finally be time to reintroduce M to Mike and see if they can finally — FINALLY! — get along.

After all, what are neighbours for if not to all get along ....

T