I recently returned from a trip to Maine I had taken with my girlfriend and our two dogs. We went up to Bar Harbor to do some hiking in Acadia National Park. It’s a trip we’ve taken before, twice before to be exact. Our first time was just the two of us and then, after discovering how “dog friendly” Bar Harbor is, the second time we took the dogs. Now dog friendly, for those of you who don’t know, means that the town not only welcomes people with their dogs as they walk down the street, but many of the establishments allow the dogs in the stores themselves. Even some of the restaurants in town, as long as they have outdoor seating, welcome the dogs to come on in and enjoy a respite. As we strolled one day, an employee in one of those stores that sell the t-shirts that change color when you go out in the sun actually got on the ground, put a dog treat between his teeth and tempted the dogs to take it from him. Now this is a dangerous task with my girlfriend’s dog. You see, Murphy is without a doubt a food hound. He will eat anything, anytime and anywhere. Basically, that employee is lucky that he still has lips. Now my dog is a different story. Tink could not care less about food. To tell you the truth, she’s a bit of a priss. She will not even drink water out of a bowl that another dog has taken a drink from. This is an animal that will lick her own privates and eat poop, but she draws the line at a hint of saliva in a large amount of water. She even ate a slug one day, granted she didn’t like it and it took quite sometime to get all that slime out of her mouth, but the slightest lingering aroma of another canine floating around a ceramic bowl on the ground puts her off. One hot summer day, at an event at a local estate where there were scores of dogs all around, our dogs were baking in the sun, so we brought them over to a community water bowl. Tink, with as hot as she was and as long as she had been in the sun, refused to take a drink. Murphy on the other hand walked over to the bowl, sniffed it, and in an attempt to claim it as his own, began to lift his leg and pee right in the water. Embarrassed does not even begin to describe my feeling. Mortified comes close, but even that leaves room to believe I had a bit if dignity left.
Now I will admit that Tink probably got her OCD tendencies from me. I tend to be very picky about my food. Not just in the fact that I have a limited palette, which my girlfriend claims is that of a 7-year-old, but because I do not eat food that other random people have had the opportunity to touch. It is like when a store has chips and dip on the counter to taste, or those warehouse stores have sample food they are microwaving and giving away; why in the world would anyone take any of that? With all the odd, filthy and/or downright skeevy people that go around, sticking their hands who knows where and touching who knows what, I may as well excuse myself to the public restroom and take a bite of the urinal cake. You can literally see the ebola growing on that food as it sits.
However this isn’t about my, or my dog’s, anal retentive eating habits. No, this is about my summer vacation. (Ugh, it sounds like I’m writing an essay on the first day of school.) But to tell you the truth, it’s not really about my vacation either. It is about a question my girlfriend asked me regarding our vacation. The question was, “What was your favorite part of the trip?” Now, as any warm-blooded man knows, questions like this are loaded. You cannot just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. You need to roll the question around in your mind for a while and come up with a happy medium between what will please her and what will sound like something you would actually say. You need to go through a slideshow of every moment from the trip, highlight a few of the high points, and pick the proper one that will make everyone (note: she) happy. And you have to do all of this in about 3 seconds so it doesn’t seem like you’re thinking about it.
So after doing all this, my options boiled down to hiking with the dogs around Jordon Pond, watching the dogs run free and swim in Little Long Pond – leeches and all, walking through the downtown streets, sitting by the water on a beautiful evening, or “I can’t pick just one moment because it was all so special.” (Always the fallback choice but not the most sincere – they can see right through that one.)
What was my answer? It doesn’t matter, because what is more important than what I said is what I thought. What did I truthfully think was the best part of the trip? Some of the previously mentioned times were great, and any one of them could be an actual answer if there was not one thing that was monumentally larger than any of them. In all honesty, the absolute best part of the trip was the fact that the hotel room that my girlfriend had booked had a television. This was a bigger deal than you can imagine. You see, when we went away to Shenandoah National Park earlier this summer my girlfriend booked three different rooms at three different resorts, as we were hiking from lodge to lodge along the Appalachian Trail. While they were very nice places to stay, with nice rooms and restaurants, not one of the rooms had a television. I am not trying to be shallow about this or seem like someone who cannot live without frying my brain in front of the idiot box for hours a day. What you have to understand is that I don’t care about what is on the tv as much as I just need it for background noise. And really I only need it a couple of times a day. You see… how do I put it… I only want the television for those times when I need a little relief. Yes, I am referring to the fact that I want the television on when I have to use the bathroom. My eating habits are not the only thing that I am a bit OCD about. I need the tv to, at least in my mind, drown out any sounds that may emanate from the bathroom while I am in there. When we stayed at the places without a television, I would make my girlfriend go outside and enjoy the scenery or maybe go to the giftshop or I would run the water in the tub while I did my business. At least when there is a tv I can imagine that Judge Judy’s tantrums will overcome any natural reverberations that may be overheard otherwise. Now I know that it may not be true and I may be fooling myself, but I don’t want someone to tell me that the television is not doing the job I believe it is. In my demented mind, my body shuts down if I even have the thought that someone may be able to hear the slightest biological noise. But I am not just one sided in this: I also have no desire to hear anyone else. I don’t care how well I know someone, or what I share with them otherwise, or the fact that it is a natural thing that everyone does and everyone knows everyone does, there are just some things I don’t want to share.
Paddy Chayevsky, regarding television, once said, “It's the menace that everyone loves to hate but can't seem to live without.” I say that I could live without it, but only if I had the need for a colostomy bag.
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