"HOW many times did you say?"

I’m not sure if this is a typical Weimaraner behavior trait or an Olive behavior trait, but when Olive settles down to sleep, she twirls around in circles like a drunken ballerina. Not two or three times like most dogs but anywhere between 7 and 23 times. I’m not kidding. It is comical to watch. First she starts out counter clockwise, then in the middle of her OCD routine, she pivots and starts circling in a clockwise rotation. When satisfied that she has performed this ritual in a manner that pleases the “Number Gods,” she collapses in a heap and curls herself so tightly, that her little grey tail has almost inserted itself into one of her nostrils. This morning, I realized that these numbers may hold some unanticipated significance. They are prime numbers. Either my dog is practicing some secret mathematical exercises or she is trying to tell me something. Christ, I better start paying more attention. What if the fate of our planet depends on my being able to decipher these behavioral hieroglyphics? Actually, I’d stand a better chance of decoding this than solving a mathematical puzzle. “A dog is chasing a woodchuck from Schenectady to Sarasota. The dog is running 10 miles an hour three-quarters of the time. At the midway point, the dog stops to eat a fish from a stream that is 170 miles away from a shuffleboard court in Miami. At what point will the dog realize that the woodchuck is already sunning himself on Clearwater Beach?” This is how all math word problems seemed to me when I was a kid. They may as well have been in Farsi. Thank God, I have a dog who can teach me now. Maybe I just needed to see the teacher spin herself around and around impersonating prime numbers before I’d get it. Oh well. “OLIVE. COULD YOU PLEASE DO AN INTERPRETIVE DANCE THAT EXPLAINS LONG DIVISION?”