Theo has never met a logistical challenge he didn't immediately make worse with enthusiasm.
So when the Humane Society Pup Crawl flyers started showing up everywhere — taped to the door at Thump, pinned to the corkboard at the gear shop, shoved under our windshield wiper in a parking lot like a summons — and Theo announced that he was going to "handle all the planning," I want you to understand that I said nothing. I smiled. I handed him my coffee. I have been with this man for two years and I have learned certain things.
The crawl goes through local breweries over the weekend. You walk a dog, you get a passport stamped, breweries donate to the shelter. It is not a complex event. There is a map. There is a route. Theo found the map and immediately described it as "more of a suggestion."
He decided we needed to borrow a dog. This was his first innovation. We do not have a dog. His reasoning was that a dog would help us "feel more invested." He texted four people before seven in the morning on a Saturday. His college roommate Tyler said yes because Tyler has a seventy-pound goldendoodle named Captain and apparently no attachment to his own Saturday plans or possibly his own sanity.
We picked up Captain at nine. It was 44 degrees and mostly cloudy and Theo was already in a t-shirt because he had "checked the forecast and it was going to warm up." I had a jacket. Captain had the muscular, boundless optimism of an animal who had never once experienced consequences.
Theo had "reverse-engineered the route for efficiency." This meant we went in the opposite direction from every other participant, so we were always arriving at breweries just as the stamp table was rotating staff and everyone was mildly confused about whether the event had started or ended. At the second stop, a woman gently told us we were going backwards. Theo said "we know" in a tone of great confidence that I recognized as meaning he had just learned this.
Captain, at this point, had decided he was not a crawl dog. He was a stop-and-evaluate-everything dog. He stopped for a puddle. He stopped for a sparrow. He stopped for a crack in the sidewalk that apparently required a full forensic investigation. We fell forty-five minutes behind a pace that was never timed to begin with.
Theo had also not eaten breakfast, which he mentioned for the first time in front of a food truck near the Old Mill at a volume that made the people in line turn around. He got a breakfast burrito and tried to eat it while holding Captain's leash and explaining to me that we could still "crush the back half" of the route if we moved with purpose. Captain ate half the burrito. This was not a theft so much as a natural transfer of resources, because Theo was holding the burrito at goldendoodle height while gesturing.
We finished four out of six stamps. Theo declared this "a strong showing." He got Captain a little bandana from one of the pet vendors — a pink one, which Captain wore with complete dignity — and sent a photo to Tyler before we even got back to the car.
The afternoon turned breezy, like the forecast had warned. Theo finally put on the jacket I'd been carrying for him since the second brewery. He said "okay this is actually pretty cold" as if he were delivering news.
He was so pleased the whole drive back. He kept saying things like "Captain really opened up in the second half" and "I feel like we helped." We returned the dog. Tyler said Captain smelled like hops. Theo said "you're welcome" and I genuinely don't know what he thought that meant.
Here is the thing about Theo: the crawl did raise money. The dog did get a bandana. The burrito was, by all accounts, delicious for the half he actually ate. We were outside for three hours on a gray Saturday in March and he was warm and loud the whole time and he held my hand on every block where Captain wasn't dragging him sideways.
I looked it up later. They're doing it again next weekend.
I haven't told him yet.