Double Dog Dare

Like a fool, I patched Swirl’s bed with Gorilla duct tape which he peeled off and ate while I was in a virtual meeting about Milwaukee County’s aging advocacy goals. It was likely when I was suggesting a more ambitious set of goals – a countywide network of advocates based in senior centers – that Swirl found the first loose edge of the tape. Prescient.

He probably entertained himself for, oh, two or three minutes and, in so doing, erased my efficiency and cleverness. I would stop the white stuffing from coming out of his bed and littering our bedroom, I thought as I gathered up the scissors and duct tape, or, in this case, Gorilla duct tape which is extra thick and sticky. It can hold cement blocks up in the air, don’t you know? A dog’s bed should be no match for Gorilla tape.

Talk is cheap.

Not knowing he’d chewed up much of the tape on his bed upstairs, I gave him a toy filled with peanut butter when he trotted into the kitchen, essentially rewarding him for what he’d done. Normalizing it, as they say, first the tape and then the peanut butter, and making sure that the sticky tape in his gut would solidify into a single, indigestible block.

We await tomorrow.