BeeBee and the Exercise Ball

This morning as part of my morning ritual I draped myself upside down on my exercise ball on my yoga mat next to the woodstove with my head touching the floor and my eyes closed. Frica and BeeBee were doing their usual post-breakfast carousing while Watson napped on the dog couch and Whitman, the cat, tried to convince me to let him out. Normally I would have let Whit out before I started my yoga routine, but it’s cold and rainy and I knew what would happen when I opened the door for him. He would stand there peering out, calculate the number, size, and rate of raindrop falling per square inch, then compare that to the number he would deign to touch his fur. When the former proved larger than the latter as it surely would this morning, he would give me a disdainful look–me, the unfurred one standing shivering in the open doorway–and refuse to go out.

Hence, the idea of getting off my ball to let him out did not compute.

In all honesty, though, nothing was computing at that moment. My mind was completely empty. I’d like to say this was because I’d achieved some elevated plain of enlightenment, but I suspect it was more a case of my brain not being able to summon the wherewithal to produce any coherent thoughts…

Which is why I missed the fact that Fric and BeeBee had tired themselves out and that BeeBee was heading my way. Like most dogs, and especially puppies, she’s very scent-oriented and may even be more so because of her deafness and visual problems. And like all mammals except humans seeking scent data from others, she zeros in on moist body areas where those scents are the most potent.

Aside from the surprise of being subjected to such exploration when one is upside down on a ball with one’s eyes closed and one’s brain turned off, BeeBee brings two other elements to the process. The first is her overbite and pointy nose: her lower jaw is a good 1/2″ shorter than her upper one. The net result of this is that her attempt to smell my upside down nose resulted in her pointy nose in my right nostril while lower jaw and her new adult upper incisors rested on my nose proper.

The second element BeeBee brought to this interaction was her breath. I’m assuming because she’s in the throes of teething and chewing, her breath smells like the inside of a menstrual hut.

Add her only partially controlled tongue simultaneously attempting to lick me–a curious circular process akin to being scrubbed with a saliva-covered loofa–and BeeBee once again inspired me to be more than I could be.

First, this sudden explosion of canine-created stimuli caused me to instantly trade on a state of lethargic mental nothingness for a shock-precipitated void. Granted nothing times nothing is still nothing, but in the metaphysical realm, surely such a transition should be worth at least a few points on the enlightenment or altered mental states scale.

Second, I did not fall off the ball.

Even when I started laughing as I pried BeeBee’s nose out of my nostril.

After a start like that, what could the day possibly bring that I can’t handle?