CHAPTER 4
“You’re falling in love,” Stripes told me.
“Falling in love?” I said, perplexed.
“Yes, falling in love. ‘Twitterpated,’ as Friend Owl called it.”
“Twitterpated? Friend Owl”? I asked, cocking my head to the side and scratching my left ear with my right paw.
“Yes, haven’t you seen Bambi?” Stripes asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Bambi? You mean George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth, who was nicknamed ‘The Bambino’?”
(That was my reaction when I heard the name “Bambi” because I was a big baseball fan back then—I loved to see those people chasing balls: running after them and scooping them up, plucking them out of the air . . . even hitting them with a long stick and giving the other guys a chance to chase the ball for a change.)
“No! I’m talking about the nature show about the Deer and his forest friends,” Stripes said.
“Never heard of it,” I replied.
“Never heard of it?!?” said Tubthumper, raising her trunk straight out in front of her in an involuntary display of shock. “I find that hard to believe! I thought everyone had seen Bambi.”
“I haven’t seen it, either,” Drako said, quickly bobbing her head up and down. “Nor heard of it.”
“I’ve seen it, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Marmalade. “Too sad!”
“Well, that goes to show you,” said Stripes, “We always assume that other people’s experiences are the same as ours. Why, back in India, all of us used to watch documentaries and nature shows at the Jungle Bijou every Friday night. I would sit on a bough halfway up a tree to have a good view, eating popcorn that Brigitte the Monkey made for all of us. Good times! Bambi was a classic.”
I was bemused by this speech; I had never heard the normally laconic Stripes talk so long or animatedly on any subject before.
Anyway, I told my friends that I was still confused about all of this, and sat down—I have noticed that I can concentrate better when I’m sitting down. “Here I am, with all of you; how can I be falling?” I asked, perplexed.
“You’re not literally falling,” Tubthumper said.
That was a relief. “So what is it?” I asked. “What have I done wrong, to be falling in this . . . twitter-painted thingy?”
“Don’t worry, Taterskin. It could happen to anybody,” Drako explained to me. “You could be out for a walk on a spring day, minding your own beeswax, and all of a sudden: Wham! It hits you!”
Drako sounded confident about this possibility, but she didn’t know what she was talking about from personal experience; she was merely passing on what she had heard others say.
“Hits you?!?” I asked, looking all around for any approaching assailants, tensing my muscles to go on the counter-attack, but seeing no one.
“Hits me?!?” I continued, “First you tell me I’m falling, now you say I’m going to get hit! How can I prepare myself for this, or prevent it from happening?”
“You can’t, and you probably wouldn’t want to, anyway,” Tubthumper said.
I told my friends that it seemed to me they were all talking in riddles. I said, “Stripes, you are the one that said I was falling in twitterpation. What is that, anyway?”
“You described it yourself already, Taterskin,” the Tiger told me, with a leisurely flick of his tail. “And they are right,” he added, gesturing toward Drako and Tubthumper, “It is not something that can be—or even should be—avoided, necessarily. As Tennyson said, ‘It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’”
I didn’t know who this ‘Tennis-On’ was, and didn’t care much at the moment—although I do like tennis, almost as much as baseball. Rather than pursue that thought path, I said, “Lost? I’m still a little lost, myself. What in the dogpound do you mean?”
“Wait a minute!” Drako interrupted me. “Do you mean to tell us that you have never experienced Puppy Love, Taterskin?”
“Not that I know of. I don’t think so,” I replied. “But remember, I wasn’t a Puppy for long; I was quite the young whelpersnapper when I took my first trip in the Arodnap and got transmogrified into a regular-sized, full-grown dog. So I guess I missed out on some normal puppy experiences. In other words, I didn’t have much of a puppyhood.”
“Let me put it this way,” Tubthumper said, “What made you think of Rovette, and then go all mooney-eyed?”
I couldn’t answer that. Because I didn’t know.
“That was love,” Stripes said, in his calm, low, confident voice, and then stared at me in his benevolent yet penetrating, seemingly omniscient, way. It was as if he already knew something that hadn’t quite settled in my brain yet.
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