At the park the other night, there was a couple with two dogs on one of the tennis courts. And I decided that since they were breaking the posted “no dogs on the tennis courts” rule, I’d break it too. So Bishop got to run around off leash, made some new friends (through the fence), and got new toys because I found two stray tennis balls and appropriated them.

My dog does not play fetch well, by the way. He will chase a ball if you throw it, but half the time he has so much fun running that he gets distracted and forgets all about the ball. The other half the time he’ll gallop back to you with the ball (or stick or other toy) in his mouth but he’ll keep going past you and randomly drop the object somewhere well beyond your reach. The only time he brings an object directly to you is when fetch is HIS idea. As, for example, when I was trying to fall asleep this morning and he kept tossing a mangled and slimy tennis ball onto the pillow next to my head. But he has so much fun with all the different variations on fetch and non-fetch that I can’t help laughing at/with/near him regardless.

Anyway, so the tennis balls came home with us and have proven surprisingly durable. Bishop carries them around in his mouth, tosses them into the air, and falls asleep with a tennis ball wrapped in his jaws. I’ve seen him like this with other toys, of course (and, in his puppyhood, also with my shoes, my TV remote, my phone, the couch cushions, and several pillows), but it’s a fresh reminder of how the dog acts with something he loves. Which explains a lot–to me–about his behavior with Zuli and, to a lesser extent, Gorey. He tries to carry them around in his mouth and trap them beneath his massive paws and nosh gently on them. If they would hold still long enough, he’d probably even fall asleep with his jaws resting open around one of their little heads. They don’t hold still, of course, and who can blame them?

But they sometimes, when he’s passed out in my lap, sneak up over the sides of my big chair and curl up against him. They’ve been known to try grooming him. They even parade themselves in front of his nose when he’s awake, rubbing up against him in that way cats have of marking their scent on their people and their homes and–dare I say it?–that which they love.

Of course, he sometimes reacts to this by trying to show his own love, resulting in a chase or a squawking cat or a claw swipe to the nose. Sometimes we’re clumsy and even hurtful in how we express our love here in my home, but at least we do love.