Signe and Shady

February 16, 2005

Italian wine sipped from fancy Italian wine glasses, a German movie, Thai food, and chopsticks. I've been talking about The Tin Drum for months now. It's a brilliant book, but not exactly one that you just breeze through, so it took me a while to finish it. I finally did, though, and the day after I read the last page, Signe invited me over to watch the film version.

Signe doesn't own a television set, so we used her laptop instead, propping it on a chair a few feet away as we ate Thai food off a folding tray. It's not an easy movie to watch while eating. Not because of the grotesque scenes -- severed horse heads, live eels, puke, et cetera -- but because reading subtitles is nearly impossible while using chopsticks.

Even though the movie was nearly as brilliant as the book, it didn't prevent either of us from being distracted by Signe's dog, Shady, now and then. I don't remember what breed of dog Shady is, but her face looks just like a bat's. Cataracts have turned her eyeballs into bubbles of milk, which means she's as blind as a bat, too. During the movie, Signe would occasionally throw a rubber toy into the next room, and Shady would go sniffing after it. Occasionally, the toy would take a wild bounce and wind up in a far corner of the kitchen, causing Shady to sniff around for a good ten minutes before giving up and coming back into the room, defeated. "Where's your ball, Shady? Go get your ball." Shady's would just look up with her milky marbles, trying to figure out if the game was fun or not.

I couldn't decide, either.