Advice From the Dog

You wake up on the 21,536th day of your life looking for reassurance from the roaring surf of the Atlantic Ocean at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Instead you gaze out from your balcony into a Dickensian fog bank so thick you can hardly find the end of the dunes. Is this the famous disorientation of old age that I have been warned about by friend and foe alike? I will leave this to the reader to decide.

My sister gave me something for my birthday that I truly love...

I have always believed in the wisdom of dogs, always considered their instincts more reliable than most humans. My dearly beloved second Golden Retreiver, Molly, possessed the most incorruptible spirit of any living thing I have ever known. She had a working vocabulary of more words than your average Congressman, and a heart as packed full of love and devotion as Mother Theresa’s. My present Golden, Lucy, isn’t nearly as linguistically fluent, and comes with more personality quirks and emotional scar tissue than Donald Trump’s therapist, but still has the power to warm my heart with a thousand daily graces that only dog lovers would understand.

So, this coffee mug seems like a perfect suggestion for the second 60 years of my life:

Ask for what you want—loudly if necessary.

Go after what you want.

Unleash your talents. 

Learn new tricks often.

But, the best “Advice From the Dog” found on this mug is on the back...

I plan on doing a lot of this...