Who said that an Old woman couldn't be trained….

     Just when you think that you've gotten into the golden years of being past being told what to do, someone or something comes along and shows you that you’re wrong.

     My current homelife has been teaching me a thing or two. I’ve been Grand Pup sitting. In comparison to me, Tater Bug is about nine to ten pounds of persistence. Me, on the other hand, am about ???? to ???? pounds of procrastination.

Now when persistence and procrastination meet, guess who wins? I pride myself on having reached the age that there are a few things that I no longer should be told what to do. Tater doesn’t seem to see it that way. He’s convinced in his little mind that if he simply sits just within eye-range of me, unflinching, staring with dead-eye determination that I’ll grow uneasy and ask, “What? What do you want?”

At first when he came to visit, I was glad that no other human being was within earshot of me asking him a question as if I was expecting him to answer me. Then the magic happened. Tater talks. Yes, I know, amazing isn’t it? Of course, to the untrained ear it might just sound like a lot of “urphs, umphs, and norphs” uttered lowly and repetitively. But, believe me, it will get one’s attention.

At first, I thought it was his inability to communicate that was the problem, not so. It was me all along. He knows exactly what he's talking about and has had me on a daily training schedule. I now can recognize the following commands. Potty time, playtime, and make room in the chair time.

He seems very pleased with my progress and on occasion rewards me with “wet kisses”. I’m not fond of them, but as I said earlier, he is persistent. So try as I might he manages to land one or two on me.

There is, however, one command that he hasn’t gotten me trained in yet – bedtime. His, not mine. We have heated discussions about this starting around ten p.m. in the evening. It can be a little unnerving being an older person living by one’s self while sitting in a room with nothing but the light of the TV feeling as though someone is watching you.

     I might need to add that Tater is black; quite black, nighttime black. So, catching notice of his eyes in the light of the TV is the only way to realize that he is staring at me –quietly, stealth like.  

He knows that I know what he is saying with his silent watching, “it’s time for bed, let’s go.”

I’ve tried the “talk to the hand” approach, the “no, I’m not tired yet and you go to bed if you want, I’m not ready” approach. To which he continues to stare over the top of the toy in his mouth refusing to budge.

He doesn’t seem to care how long it may take to train me, he has time. I think it’s my own fault though, his persistence, because I learned all the other commands so quickly that he knows he’ll accomplish his goal with this one at last.

     Somewhere in my years of learning a little about many things, I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.  I thought we were the superior beings and did the training…Tater must have missed that class.

For now, he seems quite content to give me the benefit of the doubt that I am completely trainable because, he’s been huffing at me for the last ten minutes and has now gone into stealth mode.

Sorry, for ending this post so abruptly, I have to go to bed now.