“What do you mean that’s what you do?”
“I mean, I get up in the morning, walk and feed Ms. Jenny, write haikus until five PM—keeping my thoughts concentrated and pure—walk and feed Ms. Jenny, read the haikus of other more talented poetry masters at night—keeping my thoughts pure and concentrated—and then I go to bed at eight PM.”
“Every day?”
“Yes.”
“No bull?”
“It’s what I do. Not very interesting, I’m afraid.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s the most interesting hooey I’ve heard in—like weeks.”
PJ smiled at that one, but in a confused sorta way—like he maybe had to pass gas. “You’re teasing me.”
“No way. I really dig haikus. Five. Seven. Five. Seventeen syllables. That’s the bomb.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“Why would I make fun of you?” I asked PJ.
“I’m not used to taking walks with people.”
“Neither am I.”
“We’re here,” PJ said to me, and when I looked up and around, I realized that we were on the town baseball field. She runs the diamond. “Watch this. It’s beautiful. The opposite of a door slammed in your face.”
When he let Ms. Jenny off the leash, the little thing started sprinting around the baseball diamond. She ran really fast and hard, but her legs were so little that it took her quite a long time to make it all the way around, which was so frickin’ cute that I had to follow her on her second lap, which made her bark and start to run circles around me as we made our way around the bases. When I hit home plate, I looked over at Private Jackson and he was smiling at me in this very strange and almost eerie way, so I picked up his dog and held her to my face, giving her a kiss, before we walked back to PJ.
“So do you forgive me for slamming the door in your face? Are we even now?” he asked me.
“You bet. That was great!”
He kinda smiled in this really sad way, and then I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
On the walk back to his house, Ms. Jenny peed on a tree and pooped by a bush, but neither of us said anything.
When we arrived at his house, I said, “If you ever feel like writing me another haiku, I’d love to read more of your work.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” he said.
“I’m not. Can I send you some of my haikus? Maybe you could critique one or two for me,” I said, even though I hadn’t written a haiku since third grade. True.
“I just wanted to make up for slamming the door in your face, and now that I have erased the bad karma, I’d like you to leave me alone. Please. It’s what I most want.”
That bit muted me.
He turned and started walking toward his door, and I kept waiting for him to look back over his shoulder and say something nice, or give me some sorta sign that he really wanted to see me again and be my friend, but he didn’t look back or anything, which made me feel sorta mad at first, but then that madness turned into a sadness that stuck with me for many days, until I got this crazy idea: I would send Private Jackson a hopeful haiku every day, and every one of the haikus would be about dogs, because that was the only thing I knew he liked.
I washed and waxed Donna’s Mercedes for twenty bucks—she lets me do that sometimes—and then I used the money to buy a box of envelopes and two books of stamps.
I started sending Private Jackson one doggie haiku a day.
According to Private Jackson, here are my all-time top three doggie haikus (out of more than a crapload):
Pooping anywhere
You like outside, anytime
A dog’s life rocks hard
A pup will never
Forget to kiss you goodnight
Even when you smell
Dogs have lots of fur
Does that count as wearing clothes
Or are they naked?
Okay, I suck at writing haikus, but I was faithful and wrote Private Jackson every day for more than a month.
He never wrote back even once.
Then one day I found this little wet furry thing in a Nike box, who I named Bobby Big Boy and nursed back to health, as you know.
I found a doggie
In a designer shoebox
He was very sad
(I actually sent that haiku to Private Jackson but got no response.)
What you don’t know is that BBB was all traumatized from his stint on the streets, living in a bright designer shoebox, and after I rescued him from the clutches of starvation, B Thrice was very sad for a time, even after we got him back up to his fighting weight.