too many words by laura lemay

friday george story (a little early)

A terrible picture. But there’s a story that goes with it.

George has progressed from obsessing over his feather toy to obsessing over rubber bands. It took me a long time to figure out why rubber bands were vanishing off of the kitchen counter and out of the little dish on the desk where I keep them; now I have to keep rubber bands in a drawer to keep him from stealing them. Woe betide you if you bring a bag of pretzels onto the couch. He’s not the least bit interested in the pretzels, but he knows snack bags are closed up with rubber bands. All he has to do is keep flinging things off the coffee table until he finds it.

At first we took the rubber bands away from him for fear he would eat them. But after watching him for a while our fears are allayed; he doesn’t eat them. He picks them up and dangles them from his front teeth and trots around the house proudly; he sits and flips at the rubber band in his mouth with his paw; he shoots the rubber band across the room and then chases after it (I have yet to see how he actually does this, but he has done it repeatedly so I don’t think its an accident).

Tonight George decided that the rubber band would be better wet, so he trotted it over to his water dish and dropped it in. Why? Why? Why? He does this on and off with his feather toy; some toys are just more fun when wet, I guess. The problem is that once the rubber band went into the water bowl it sank to the bottom and he couldn’t get it back out again. Oh! The angst! The worry! The struggle! He stuck his paws in, recoiled in horror from the wet, tried bobbing his nose in, even worse, looked up at me and and grumbled as I took pictures and mocked him. Oh! To have opposable thumbs!

He finally managed to pick the rubber band out of the water bowl and went back to flipping it about the room. And just now, as I lounged on the couch and wrote this, he hopped up behind me and dropped it, cold and still wet, down the back of my shirt.