His Dogness

The other day, some people – all adults and not a solitary child for Sparkle Girl to play with – were coming over.

“Is everyone just going to sit around and talk until it’s time to go home?” Sparkle Girl asked.

“Pretty much,” I said.

Sparkle Girl said that she just didn’t understand why adults like to sit around talking when doing things is so much more fun. With that in mind, I try to keep things moving when Sparkle Girl and Doobins come over to visit His Dogness and me.

One day not too long ago, the action at my house hit a distinct lull. We had already pretty much worked our way our way through the list of the usual amusements. Casting about for the next source of entertainment, I remembered that I had a bag of Sunnyside ice in my freezer. “Want to throw ice in the street?” I asked.

Oh, yes!

So we stood on the curb and threw ice into the street. If you wanted it to smash, you had to throw it straight down on the pavement. Much of an angle and it skipped across the street like a flat rock across a pond. That was fun, too, though. Sometimes, the ice would hit the curb just right and fly into the Perrrymans’ yard.

It was fun to watch it melt, too, and to listen to the crunch it made when the cars driving up and down the street crushed it under their tires.

The next time, all we had was the ice from the six trays that I keep in the freezer. I emptied them into a stainless-steel bowl, and we went at it. The ice ran out before the fun did, so we took the bowl over to R.L. and Pearl Whitfield’s. We stood in the kitchen while Pearl filled the bowl out of the icemaker.

We went back out and continued ice smashing.

The sport assumed a place of honor on the list of things to do at my house. That’s how it stood until the day I had the croquet set out in the front yard when we decided to play the ice game. Before long, someone – it was probably Doobins but I cannot say for sure – came up with an exciting innovation – putting ice on the sidewalk and smashing it with a croquet mallet.

If you hit the cube just right – which didn’t happen all that often – it disintegrated. More often, it broke into smaller pieces that had to be smashed individually. And, with all the whacking and missing, our supply of ice lasted much longer.

I gave up ice smashing in order to take on the job of standing there with the bowl of ice and tossing a fresh cube to the players whenever the cube they were working on disappeared into oblivion. Watching from the porch one day, Sparkle Girl and Doobins’ mother said I looked like the guy at the zoo tossing fish to the seals.

We keep inviting Mr. Whitfield over to play but, so far, he has chosen to sit on his porch and laugh at the spectacle.