After disappearing months ago, the yellow alien made a surprise appearance during my New Dog Dawning Seminar here last weekend. I had taken the big puffy dog bed from upstairs down to the living room and placed it on the floor beside the chair where I would be sitting. Rather than get into the gory details here, Ollie and Bee were NOT on their good behavior which we know can be marginally good at best. And benign neglect periodically lost out to the cute factor or, when it wore thin, the pain-in-the-butt one.
Anyhow, somewhere along the line, we discovered that the alien was on the bed! I don’t remember who first noticed him–Does anyone remember why I think of the alien as a he? I don’t.– but none of us had any idea how he got there. Below is a quasi-re-creation of this Great Event. I didn’t take this picture until the bed was back up in the office and Bee was determined to have her rear end in every shot, but you get the idea. It was pretty hard to miss him there.
Since then the alien also showed up on my yoga mat which I only unroll for the 45-minutes or so that I use it each morning.
You would think that, given the shortness of the interval and that I’m rarely off the mat during this time, I would know how he got there. But I don’t. Maybe he was attracted by the mat’s bright colors or sticky surface. Maybe he thinks he needs more exercise…
Currently he’s in the middle of the kitchen rug and I have no idea how he got there, either. When I went downstairs yesterday morning, he was there.
My Ms Clean Gene tells me I really ought to wash the little grub-ball if he’s going to make appearances when when I have company. But then I remember something Maria Callas supposedly said to photographer Richard Avedon when he mentioned softening the wrinkles in his portrait of her. She told him not to because she’d earned every one of them. So it seems with the alien’s layer of grubbiness. I don’t know where in his travels he earned it, but I’m sure he did.