Point of View: Keep on Sailing

When Rob Balnis asked if I were coming to work out Saturday morning, I immediately said yes, inasmuch as the football game would be Friday night, at Mercy.

“We’re 0-6,” I said, “and so are they.”

“Really? I thought we’d won a couple.”

“That’s probably because of the way I’ve been writing things up. Losses become wins in my vernacular. You always want to look on the bright side,” I said, by way of explanation, before humming a few bars from the Monty Python song. 

Then he stuck the knife in. “What happened to the Steelers?!”

“A friend of mine is a Dolphins fan and he asked me over to watch the game,” I said. “I was so sure they’d win I told him I’d take a Xanax before I came — I didn’t want to annoy the hell out of him. Ultimately I didn’t go — a blessing in retrospect — and went to puppy kindergarten instead, which, in contrast to the game, was pure joy.”

Frankly, as a pick-me-up I know of nothing, nothing really, that can beat puppy kindergarten. They’re all so happy to see each other, having apparently absented themselves from felicity for a week. Unleash them and the party’s on — at play in ARF’s backyard.

I would recommend attendance to anyone, especially to anyone beset at times by depression. You will come away saying, like Florentino in “Love in the Time of Cholera,” keep on sailing.

Henry, I’d thought, would be our last dog, but, as my brother-in-law reminds from time to time, if you have love to give, give it.

“I’m the one being trained,” I said in the newsroom the other day when asked how O’en’s training was going. 

Trained to give my heart to someone else, which, for me, at least, isn’t easy. 

So I’m determined to do my best when it comes to that. It will be, I’m quite sure, my last chance.