I stay inside, mostly

In Rob’s house, all species are equals. There’s an easy camaraderie between him and his wife Jocelyn and the two cats, Santino and Heidi, and Peyton Manning the Dog II. Rob and Jocelyn are in charge to some degree, as they can open the back door and fill food bowls, but they don’t take an authoritarian, parental approach. The five are friends and they live like roommates who are close but not too demanding. Everybody does his or her own thing, and no one seems to have undue expectations.

Peyton Manning the Dog tends to dominate the home atmosphere, mostly because he is the youngest and most active, a frenetic creature who likes to play tug of war with pet toys, the torn remains of which are scattered about. Occasionally Peyton lunges at a passing cat, but this is more playful than threatening, though the cats don’t necessarily appreciate the attention. He enjoys licking my legs and feet, which I understand but still discourage. When I first arrived, he almost knocked me down, leaping up to bang chests as if we had just shared some moment of athletic victory. I wasn’t ready and staggered backwards; he tried again, but I just couldn’t quite manage.

Santino is the same color as the gray couch and unfortunately I’ve sat on him a couple times. Heidi wears a bell and is appealingly compact and short-haired. She is markedly smaller than Santino, but doesn’t hesitate to cuff him if he displeases her; this despite the fact (or maybe because) he’s her son.

I spent the day in the house with the cats, reluctant to go out into the 106 degree heat. Rob and Jocelyn had gone off to work, Peyton to his twice weekly dog daycare site, where for ten hours he can run around inside an air-conditioned facility with twenty or so other dogs. If it’s good for small children, and it is, why not for dogs? He comes home worn out with pleasure.

In the evening Rob and I went out to eat at El Taco Fresco, a small restaurant in a sandy-colored strip mall. I had a bean burrito and cheese enchilada combo with rice and beans. Why does too much food continue to seem a good idea, though always afterwards it’s clear it’s not?

We ate in a bar, The Money Place, connected to the restaurant by an interior door. We sat at the bar, on a side without video poker consoles, and watched Game 6 of the NBA Finals, a disappointingly one-sided game, though we both wanted the Celtics to win. Around the other side of the bar a baseball game was on, and a large blonde woman shouted, “Fuck the Padres?”

She had paused from playing tabletop shuffleboard. The long wooden playing surface stretched along one side of the room, and a bald-headed man kept shaking sand down its length before each of his turns.

Rob and I talked about the legal profession (particularly his own work), about politics, about basketball. . . . Someone yelled “the Lakers suck!” and soon after we watched the Celtics celebrate. Kevin Garnett seemed to have lost his mind.

Back at the house we watched a portion of a West Wing episode that Rob wanted me to see for a Hemingway quotation, something about how we are all broken but some become stronger where the broken places heal over. Hopefully, I suppose. Peyton Manning came over and lay down on my feet and exhaled a sigh so contented it could only have been uttered by a dog.