His Dogness

If you wondered how many hairs I had on the top of my head, you could start counting during a commercial break of your favorite show and be done before it came back on.

I say this so you will know what Doobins meant when he said, “Kim, your hair is broken” as he rubbed the top of my head the other day.

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“Are you going to fix it?” he asked.

“I would if I could.”

I enjoy the fresh ways that Doobins and Sparkle Girl have of looking at the world.

After a light burned out in their bathroom, it was noticeably dim in there for the couple of days that it took me to remember to bring over a new 60-watt bulb. After I put it in, Sparkle Girl stuck her head in the living room and commented on how bright it was in there.

“It’s just like the mall,” she said.

Another day, we were making a gift for her mother. The project called for Super Glue, which Sparkle Girl had never used. I had heard somewhere that it had been invented to glue together the skin of soldiers wounded in battle. So I threw that in when I was explaining that Super Glue was less forgiving than Elmer’s.

In retrospect, I may not have been showing the best judgment in bringing up war wounds to a 7-year-old. At the time, I just saw it as a handy fact to bolster my point.

Later, knowing that my head is chock full of “facts” that even the most cursory research reveals as untrue, I did a little cursory research and found that, once again, I had it wrong.

On that particular day, though, I was operating in good – if delusional – faith.

After we were done with the present, Sparkle Girl returned to the subject of the origins of Super Glue. She was under the impression that all people who are wounded die. So she didn’t understand why anyone would bother gluing wounded people’s skin together.

In fact, I said, most wounded soldiers don’t die. What else happens to them? she asked. I listed possibilities that included losing an arm.

Without missing a beat, she said, if there was a party and someone asked you to get the punch bowl and carry it outside, it would be really hard to do if you only had one arm.

I could have spent two days and not come up with a better example of something that would be hard to do with one arm.

Her gift for coming up with apt images stems from her gifts as an artist. (At least that’s what I think.) Sometimes, we sit and draw pictures at the same time. It’s a given that hers will be far superior to mine.

Mostly, we leave that fact unspoken. One day, though, I said, “Yours is a lot better than mine.”

“That’s OK, Kim,” she said.