Divination

Last night, after dinner, while I was upstairs on the phone and Howard was outside watering the plants, our beloved dog Swirl ate a plateful of leftover barbecued chicken and three pieces of pizza that had been tucked away on the far reaches of the stove.

This was distressing in myriad ways. First, there was the simple loss of the perfectly grilled chicken, beautifully sauced with a hard char in places, it was lovely. The pizza I don’t mourn since it was out of a box and tasted like a giant cracker with melted cheese anyway. Second, there is the embarrassing, possibly revealing, folly of my having draped a kitchen towel over the chicken, thinking in some twisted, comic book way, that if Swirl couldn’t see the chicken he wouldn’t go after it. Third, there is the open question about why no one, read me, put the chicken in the refrigerator. I don’t have an answer, it just seemed like a chore for later. And, then maybe last but probably not, there is the matter of our dog now being full of chicken bones.

In other times, this would cause me to worry. But I have other things to worry about, the worry drawer is full, as they say, crammed with screwdrivers and matches and those fancy corks for unfinished bottles of wine, one of them a pair of red stilettos and the other a Star of David, both barely used for obvious reasons. Together with the receipts and instructions for small appliances, there’s not a whisper of space for more worrying.

Last week, Swirl ate half of a thick red oven mitt. He threw up the especially tough parts of the mitt and digested the rest, leaving red piles in three different dog parks. Maybe he will digest all the chicken and then throw up the bones on the carpet and we can read the future in the thrown bones like people in other times and cultures have.

I could believe in thrown bones. They’re better than nothing.

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash