This morning I woke up about 6:30, which is when Peewee normally yaps to let someone, ANYONE with arms know that it's time to carry his warm, furry, increasingly heavier little body downstairs (he can't do all twenty steps yet, he tends to roll and then crash at the bottom), open the door, and let him outside to do what he does in the grass and I'm just saying it that way because everyone's heard enough about his bodily functions lately.
So this we did.
But when we were walking back in through the drizzle, he in this season's most adorable fur coat and I in my bathrobe and cold rubber clogs, I noticed that, strangely, there was already a pair of wet footprints walking back to our stoop and up the stairs! And those little wet pawprints were the same size as Peewee's!
I didn't realize right away that our door was locked, I thought maybe the strike plate that Jack had just replaced had somehow come loose and was jamming the door shut. With Peewee and me on the wrong side of it. In the rain. When everyone else was asleep.
So I rattled the door REALLY LOUDLY FOR A REALLY LONG TIME.
I'd been in bed dreaming about three minutes earlier so forgive me if the first thing I thought when I stopped trying to force open the door was, "Well, isn't this a funny old-fashioned problem that I can't solve with a laptop!"
The next confusingly plausible notion my brain conjured up was that perhaps I was following myself in some sort of gentle, early morning Mobius strip of time travel.
Either that or I'd taken Peewee out, come back in, gotten back in bed, pre-medicated with fifteen Advil so I wouldn't feel it later when I hit myself over the head with an empty wine bottle, come to five minutes later, and repeated the whole dog-stairs-pee-bed process under the influence of a headache-free, short-term amnesia.
And yet there we were. I tried not to think of how far I'd have to haul twenty-five pounds of Peewee around the neighborhood in my arms (because of course I had no leash! and even if I did, putting a collar and leash on Peewee is a hilarious and charming way to make him freeze for a full two minutes before he tries to scoot backward out of the burning tire you've just put around his neck) before I'd find a neighbor with a sense of humor whose phone I could borrow to call our house and have Jack not answer because he'd turned off our phone's ringer (because it's nice to have a phone, just not one that actually rings to alert you that a tipsy relative is calling to chat in the middle of dinner).
So instead I rang our doorbell five or seven thousand times.
Jack couldn't have looked more shocked to see us standing on the stoop.
"I thought the door had blown open so I locked it. What are you doing? I just took Peewee out five minutes ago!"