Brad (my son) and I just finished playing in a three-day “member-guest” golf tournament at my club. It’s always one of the top events of the year, for the club and for me, and we had a terrific time. Lots of good socializing, lots of good golf, too much food, and all the things a member-guest tournament should be. And a great father-son adventure.
The good times were marred, but only a little, by one player who seemed to have a hard time playing by the rules of golf. If you’re a golfer, you know the rules are pretty strict. They are also very well-defined. So they shouldn’t be a mystery to any golfer, at least not to any golfer who has played more than about a year. But some people just seem to want to bend the rules, or see what they can get away with, especially if they think no one is paying attention.
All of which reminded me very much of one of Jamie’s Rules for a Good Life. After I finished writing My Doggie Says…Messages from Jamie. How a dog named Jamie “talks” to her people, I realized that a lot of Jamie’s communications and behavior had a little “moral to the story.” So I went through the stories and identified twenty seven “rules” that Jamie seemed to follow. Someone can probably figure out how these rules relate to life in the wolf pack, but I haven’t tried to do that. I just know that Jamie lived by certain principles that seemed like they could be a model for human behavior, as well as dog behavior.
The first rule I identified, and the one that prompted me to look for others, is “Play by the rules, even if there’s no referee.”
I arrived at this rule by observing Jamie and Ishka wrestling with each other. They had wonderful wrestling matches. They would paw at each other. One would try to dive under the other. One would pin the other to the ground. One would bite the other’s ear. Sometimes one would really “go for the jugular.”
But it was all in fun. And, if it got too rough — if one dog drew blood, or if one dog “yelped” in pain — both dogs would immediately stop and “go to their neutral corners,” so to speak. It was wonderful to watch. No referee. No one had to bust up the fight. They just seemed to have their own “code of wrestling,” and they both knew when to stop.
Ninety nine percent of the time, golfers abide by this rule. It truly is a gentleman’s game. But we ran into an exception.
Another one of my favorite “Jamie’s Rules” is “Don’t bark if a ‘wuuf’ will do the job.” A “wuuf,” you have to know, is a very gentle, almost unhearable, “WOOF.” Jamie always started with “wuuf.” And she only escalated to “WOOF” only if absolutely necessary.
So we tried “wuufing” a little at the golf-rule-bender, but it didn’t work. So, finally, on the last hole, with the match tied, we WOOFed. And strangely enough, it upset our rule-bending opponents, and we won the hole and the match. 🙂 Sometimes, in doggie wrestling and in the great game of golf, there is justice!
You can learn a lot about the philosophy of living a good life by watching your dog!
