Discovery Channel

Sailor here.

I watch my Mom all the time. If she goes into the computer room, I go with 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 watched what Mom calls the evolution of the towel. Mom says that the milestones in the life of the towel are 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.

According to me, the first step is the Dog Towel which Mom uses to either dry me or the floor after I drink water. She also uses the Dog Towel to dry my feet after a walk in the rain or a gallop through the latest Zoe disaster. Step two is to live upstairs with Mom in her bathing room and to dry Mom after a shower.

Mom says that 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, according to Mom, in our very own laundry room.

Mom really talks like this. What I mean to say is that the towels should go from being Dog Towels to Mom Towels to Rag Towels to Somewhere Else Towels.

In our house, though, these steps are out of order. The towel goes from being a Mom towel to 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 start out at 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 salmon 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 last year’s diet of kibble. A fourth difference is that Mom doesn’t like 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 in my eye. I have decided that pasta is my favorite, and last night my snack of spaghetti gave me quite a few red splotches 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. 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 do you eat spaghetti?” Without opposable thumbs, 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 towel which hangs over my water bowl . She uses it 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. See? Even she is confused about dog towels and people towels.

Mom came back to the kitchen just in time to see the last strand of spaghetti flip its way past my lips.

“Now let’s wash away all that stigmata,” she said. She reached into the dog cupboard for a new 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 concoction and the dog towel. I was clean and beautiful again.

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. And pina coladas.

How I love summer!