I Spy

My upstairs neighbor Jenny just got a puppy. She brought Lucy home last night, and this morning we decided to introduce her to Jin for the first time. The upstairs and the downstairs of the house are separate, but we often leave the doors to the shared laundry space open so that Jin can roam freely while we're both at work. We want both dogs to eventually be comfortable with this arrangement, and with each other, so we thought it would be best to expose them to each other early and often.

Neither the puppy nor Jin were sure what to think at first. We brought the puppy in through the front door, and Jin sniffed and whined a bit, and the puppy cowered up against the door and growled when Jin got too close. I had told Jenny beforehand that the best thing to do was for us to remain calm and not communicate any anxiety to the two dogs. So as they sniffed each other warily, we sat on the couch and tried to converse normally about non-dog-related subjects. I was facing away from the dogs, and when I glanced over the arm of the couch to check in, I was a little startled to find that the puppy had disappeared completely.

I was confused, but not worried. The most reasonable explanations I could think of for the puppy's sudden disappearance were a) alien abduction, b) time vortex, or c) being swallowed whole by Jin. This reassured me that the puppy hadn't actually disappeared, because I'm exactly 99.99999% certain that it is neither in Jin's nature nor his physiological capacity to swallow a five pound puppy whole, and I'm seriously dubious about alien abductions and time vortices. Jenny found her before I did. Maybe you already have.

This may be a "you had to be there" moment, but seeing her crouched among the shoes was awfully cute, and awfully funny.

And in case you're wondering (which maybe you're not if you ever visited my apartment in Ann Arbor and saw the pile of shoes by the door), I never really intended to keep all my shoes in the living room. They just all migrate out to the shelf from my closet and never return. They like it there too.