For some time, my wife and I were wondering why so many little bits of dog food were winding up scattered on the floor near our dog’s bowl. Our dog, who, just like many a desirable female, is beautiful, elegant, and somewhat crazy, has always been neat in all her habits, so why were there now little beige bone-shaped bits on the floor seemingly at all hours? For a brief period we thought it was the fault of our five-year-old boy, whose chore it is to give the dog food and water. But no, he too is neat. It was a puzzle.

Then one morning I came down and looked in the dog’s bowl and realized the solution. The dark-brown dog-food bits were all gone, as were the medium-brown dog-food bits, leaving only, again, the beige dog-food bits. They were neatly piled into one corner of the bowl. I concluded that the dog doesn’t like them and won’t eat them and after weeks of separating them out with her muzzle and plucking them up with her mouth and dropping them onto the floor all to no avail because we just weren’t understanding, she had now chosen to make an even greater display of it, something akin to the mashed-potato mountain in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Now we understood: She doesn’t like the beige bits and she won’t eat them. And, by the way, might we consider buying a different kind of dog food. Points taken.

Then two days ago, the five-year-old pushed some button in error on one of the three remotes that control various kinds of activation related to video viewing and suddenly nothing would come up on our flatscreen television downstairs. I tried pushing buttons related to the satellite on the one remote, and then buttons related to the television on the other remote, and then lots of buttons the purpose of which I’m unaware. I also had the idea that if I just shut off the power strip providing electricity to the television, the DVD player, and the satellite box, that it might all reset; I tested my theory but that didn’t work either. Then I decided I’d just leave it all alone because I don’t watch television anyway. On his Nintendo DS, Dietrich, the five-year-old, was happily engaged in squashing reptilians beneath Mario’s go-kart. His sister was generally cross about the television situation because this meant missing any number of shows involving young girls with horses, but gradually she slipped back to reading the collected hardback edition of “Planet Hulk.” Hours passed. I went outside and lit a cigar and worked on my play. The day drew to a close. When my wife got up and learned about the televisionless downstairs, she found a bill from the satellite company and taped it up with the command for someone to call them and get it sorted out and then she left for work. I dutifully handed that dictum over to my 16-year-old as an assignment for him. (It will be hard for me when he goes off to college, but even harder for his sister — who will find herself next in line for this buck-passing.) He glumly took the bill, then decided to take one last look at fixing the problem himself. He wondered aloud whether simply switching the power off then on might reset whatever wasn’t working.

“I tried that,” I said.

I left him to our devices and went digging through the refrigerator in fruitless search of a beer. Suddenly I heard him call out, “TV’s back on!”

I ran downstairs. “What’d you do?” I asked.

“I turned off the power strip, then turned it back on.”

“I tried that!” I said. And then I showed him.

He looked at me. “That’s the wrong power strip.”

The dog arched an eyebrow at me and then turned away.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.