Let jumping dogs lie

WE’RE reminded, again and again, that a good life is a lot of little things stacked one after the other. Cold milk. A safe bed. Laughter from the kitchen.

We haven’t heard referees’ whistles in a while, and now they are back. Blueberries are in season. That sort of thing.

“The dog wants up,” my wife explains, as he leaps against the bed.

Speaking of little things. The dog’s bladder is tiny, roughly the capacity of a shot glass. If I don’t walk him every hour, he scratches at the front door I painted just two years ago. If I recall, I used the good latex, 20 bucks a bucket. I wonder sometimes why I bothered painting the place at all.

Yep, the beagle’s bladder is small and his brain is smaller, which isn’t his fault. We can’t pick our parents. Just ask my kids. If our kids could’ve picked their parents, they would’ve picked Bruce and Susan, who vacation in France, or Don and Kate, who bought a summer place on the beach. Those are the parents they’d pick, handsome folks with healthy stock portfolios. Us, they were born with.

“The Youngs got a new car,” one of the kids reported at dinner the other night.

“Yeah, well the Rhymers bought a beach house,” countered another, as if envy were a contest.

We’re still looking for our beach place. In the meantime, the little dog seems content with the life he has: grateful for his constant walks; happy to lick the salt from my ankle while I read the sports page.

The dog is dim but loyal. My only concern is that he isn’t very athletic. All I ask of my wards, other than keeping a pathway through their bedrooms so they don’t step all over stuff, is that they develop their brains or a healthy athleticism, preferably both. The beagle appears to have neither.

“Can you help him up?” my wife says as the little beagle lunges at the bed. I try to ignore him, but it’s as if he’s trying to reach his spawning grounds upriver.

“Please help him,” my wife pleads, afraid he’ll wake the baby.

At some point, while caring for the kids or caring for ourselves, which gets increasingly harder with every meal out -- you should’ve seen us trying to read the restaurant menu at the dark little restaurant the other night with four other couples, hunched over the blurry print as if trying to make out an eye chart, promising each other that “Yes, that says rigatoni,” or, “Yes, I think that says sand dabs” -- at some point the dogs took over the house.

Suddenly, the dogs are in bed with us, two of them. One, the aging cocker spaniel, seems able to leap atop the high bed in one attempt, at which point he begins to spoon with me, head against the pillow. In his mind, we have been married nine years now.

The other dog, a beagle barely a year old, can’t seem to reach the bed. He will hurl himself at the side of the bed until I surrender, at which point I throw off the covers and lift him up with us. He belongs to the college girl but sleeps with us. Judging by his nails, he’s metrosexual. I think he hopes to work in TV.

“He can’t even jump,” I tell my wife.

Then we have a five-minute conversation about why a year-old pup can’t jump better -- is it a lack of protein in his diet or a poor exercise routine?

He is ripped, this dog, like a Da Vinci statue. You can see the muscles in his shanks when he trots around the kitchen. In jeans, I look increasingly like actor William Shatner, yet I’m the one helping him into the bed. Like much of life lately, it makes no sense.

My wife and I conclude that he’s just spoiled, that’s all. Can you imagine being raised by a college girl? Imagine the late nights and the lack of discipline and all the things a puppy would need to learn for himself.

For two months, he’s been living with us, peeing every hour on the half-hour -- like a traffic report -- and passing most of his long days by watching me eat organic fruit or towel off after showers.

It’s a full life, but probably not the exciting life he led back at the state university. He probably wonders where we keep all our bongs. They don’t seem to be on the counters. It’s a weird place he lives now. In two months, he has yet to see any sign of rum.

“You think he’s happy here?” I asked my daughter one night as the puppy snoozed on my lap.

“Who would be?” she answered without looking up from her magazine.

I am. Life is little things.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.