You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About by Dave Barry Page A

again play “Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn.”
XI. PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
     
XII. CANDY TOSS
     
XIII. ORGAN POSTLUDE: “Let a Man Come In and Do the Popcorn”
     
    Of course my funeral could be a ways off. As I write these words, I’m looking at the newspaper and this happens to be a pretty good day—the People section is noting the birthdays of
four
celebrities who are older than I am and yet, incredibly, not dead. Granted, they don’t all
look
so great; vultures are clearly visible in their publicity shots.
    But the point is, they’re still around. And, for now, so am I. I’ve been granted another day of life and I intend to live it to the fullest. But first I’m going to go outside and get the newspaper.



E very morning my wife and I take our dog, Lucy, on a two-mile run.
    OK, “two-mile run” is inaccurate. A better way to describe it would be “several hundred closely spaced urination stops.”
    Urination is a major component of Lucy’s lifestyle. Think about the most wonderful thing you’ve ever experienced—falling in love, seeing your child being born, going an entire day without hearing the name “Kardashian.” Remember the joy you felt? That’s the kind of joy Lucy feels
every time she smells another dog’s urine
. And since we live in a dog-intensive neighborhood, Lucy is in a state of near-constant rapture.
    Each morning we leave the house and trot perhaps four steps when, suddenly,
YANK
, Lucy—a big, strong dog who has the ability to create her own planet-level gravitational field—stops and makes herself roughly as mobile as a convenience store, causing my leash arm to come halfway out of its socket. Lucy’s nose hoovers the ground and her tail whips around like a snake on amphetamines, which is her way of signa Ne bdtfwayling the fantastic news:
You will never guess what I have found here: DOG
WEEWEE!! Can you BELIEVE it??
Then she squats to squirt some of her own weewee—she has a 275-gallon bladder—on top of the other dog’s weewee. To humans, this behavior may seem pointless, even stupid, but it serves an important biological function: It is how one dog signals to another dog the vital information that both of them contain weewee.
    When she’s done squirting, Lucy permits us to trot a few more steps, whereupon, incredibly, she discovers
another
place where a dog has urinated and,
YANK
, we must stop again. And so on, for two miles. It is slow going. We make about the same rate of progress as Bill Clinton passing through a roomful of women. If the early American pioneers had taken Lucy along on their wagon trains, everything west of Cleveland would still be untamed wilderness.
    So our morning “run” takes quite a while, and during this time Michelle and I have a chance to talk. And when I say “Michelle and I,” I mean “Michelle.” She does the vast majority of the talking. I’d
like
to contribute to the conversation, but I can never think of anything to say. At that point, Michelle and I have been together for at least twelve straight hours. We had dinner together the night before, watched TV together, slept in the same bed together, woke up together, went through the morning routine together and drove our daughter to school together. If I had anything to say to Michelle, I’d have said it by then. So when we’re running, the only potential conversational topics that pop up in my mind are the same ones popping up in Lucy’s (
Squirrel!
).
    Whereas Michelle, who is a woman, always has many new topics she wants to talk about, and every one of these topics reminds her of
other
things she wants to talk about, and those other things remind her of still
more
things she wants to talk about. She is a nuclear reactor of words. But I’m not complaining and I’ll tell you why: I don’t want to sleep in the driveway.
    No, seriously, I enjoy hearing Michelle talk. She’s like my own personal talk radio station, Radio Michelle, always full of interesting news, such as