“Are you writing that down?” His voice becomes mechanical, but not in a mocking way. “Rusty crapped by the door.” Now that I’ve started writing, I get a fair amount of teasing about taking notes all the time.

What I was really writing down was “I apologize to dogs when they crap in the house.” I was a few steps ahead of the conversation in my mind. I explain my opinion to him. Empathy brings about gentleness. If an already trained dog craps in the house, there’s no point yelling at them about it. I’m sure they feel bad about it, and I chalk it up to my own failure to meet their needs. They must have been really uncomfortable. And they usually already act ashamed, so it’s not like they need the reminder that they’ve done wrong. Animals are sensitive and intelligent. So my policy is to apologize, let them out, clean it up, and forget about it.

“Yeah, but he should have let me know if he needed to go out that bad.”

“Maybe he was trying and you didn’t wake up.” I wanted to give Rusty the benefit of the doubt.

We sit in silence for a moment before he mutters to himself. “Empathy breeds tenderness. Nope, gentleness. Hmm.”

I had to coax more out of him. He complied. “When I hear things like that, like many things, I ask myself what compelled the person to put those two words together and what made them choose those words. Sometimes I hear those type of things and it’s just a group of words to me. I’ll be reading some aviation books and by the time I’m done, it’s “What in the world did that just say?” I just don’t understand.” We pull into the driveway. “Hey, there’s no footprints headed to the mailbox.”

The next moment proves that he’s more exultant of words than he realizes. He hops out of the truck, talking to himself more than anything. “I’ll put some footprints out there. Prints of feet, Prince of feet.”