Every night, the last thing I do before climbing in bed to read the rest of the evening away is call to my aging dog to go out one more time before we close down for the night. This tends to be a difficult chore since she goes to sleep earlier now that she’s getting older. In fact, she now goes to bed approximately 12 seconds after taking the last bite of dinner and making a quick trip to the yard at about 6 PM. Uninterrupted by humans, she could stay that way for hours. And every night I call her and call her until she wakes up to go out one last time. And every night she raises her head from the couch and looks at me as though maybe this time it was all a bad dream and I wasn’t really asking her to get up and go out. And she thinks if she stays really, really still, maybe I’ll forget she’s there staring at me and go away without making her heave her achy old body off the couch and down the stairs and into the yard.
No matter how many nights we do this, she still wakes up and looks at me with that small glimmer of hope that this time, I won’t really make her move.