Read Dogmen of Wisconsin (or What I Did On My Summer Vacation :: Cans With Strings Would Have Been Better

When Ben and I were six or seven or something, a yearish before Louis’s family moved to town from Detroit, we saw some old show about kids who lived in a world of black and white and got up to all kinds of shenanigans. That show inspired a lot of our best ideas — the time we used a marker to draw a circle around Tinkle’s right eye — Tinkle being the pup Mrs. Addleston from three doors down from me, two doors up from Ben used to own. Or the time we put on a play to save the town. Which I’ll tell you the town never really thanked us for.[OK?]

And the time we stuck a piece of string between two cans that had formerly been home to baked beans — vegetarian, since neither of our families ate pork — and used them to communicate in the darkest hour of the night, when the need was most dire. You know, like when a town needed saving with a play.

We both got in trouble when our moms each found a can’s worth of beans in the garbage.

We used those things for years. When Louis came to town, we showed him how to make his own — though we made him dispose of the evidence by eating the beans, something we all came to regret camping in Ben’s backyard that night, all three of us crowded into a tent. A poorly ventilated tent.

The only problem was, whenever someone spoke into one can, anything they said sounded kind of like the way the adults talked in those old Charlie Brown cartoons. “Wa…wa..wa wa wa wa wa….”

This year before setting out on our summer camping excursion, we decided to devise a superior means of communication, something that could carry the subtleties of our evolving thoughts and dreams, could convey our innermost aspirations to dear friends in the wee hours. That could be used to plot our plots and plan our plans in all their complexity.

So. We went out and got three of those teddy bear pins that you can smack onto a toddler so that if they wander out of sight, you can find them with a press of a button. And scare the heck out of anyone standing within thirty feet of them.

We [opped those babies open, plugged them into an oscillating refibulator, finetuned the frequency of each to exactly the same range on the kleptomancy scale, and turned down the alarms a wee bit. If any one of us hit our toddler alert button, the other three bear pins would all light up and give out a wee little “blip.” It was perfect.

Well, perfect after we all learned Morse code. Well, after Ben and I learned Morse code. We could always tell when Louis was on because the bears would just blip to the rhythm of “Shave and a haircut - two bits!”

Luckily, Louis rarely had much to add to the conversation anyhow.

Still, there were times we thought maybe the cans had worked better.

And yes, the money we’d made with our Three Guys Who Will Mow Your Lawn for Money lawn care company could have bought us walkie-talkies. But where’s the fun in that?

That night, just before I fell asleep, that bear’s little red nose lit up from under the corner of my pillow where I kept it, just in case, and it let out its little burp of a beep.

H-a-m-z-a-a-r-e-y-o-u-a-w-a-k-e

A-m-i-r-h-a-m-z-a-y-o-u-m-e-a-n

S-e-r-i-o-u-s-l-y-n-o-w-d-u-d-e

S-h-a-v-e-a-n-d-a-h-a-i-r-c-u-t-t-w-o-b-i-t-s

S-t-o-w-i-t-l-o-u-i-s-t-h-i-s-i-s-i-m-p-o-r-t-a-n-t

OK. I’m not going to do the whole conversation like that — my dash-finger is starting to cramp up. So — just imagine the rest blipped out in code.

“Indeed, all of which we are about to speak must indeed be weighed and pondered with the utmost gravitas, is that not so, Benjamin, my dear friend?”

“Indeed so, Amir Hamza, most noble of the princes of that ancient land of Hind.”

“You are too kind, noble descendant of Abraham, Moses and Isaac!”

“No, sirrah, you are too kind!”

“Nay, sirrah — you!”

OK, I might be paraphrasing a little.

Let’s go with:

“That ATV is still in the water. What are we going to do about it?”

“Shave and a haircut, two bits!”

“Knock it off, Louis. We need to go see if we can get it out of there. Maybe put it someplace where someone will find it, but not there. Somewhere where it’ll look like it was stolen.”

“Bro, it was stolen.”

“Borrowed. Like cops sometimes borrow cars. We’re citizens. Citizens can make arrests. So it’s the same thing.”

“You have a gift, Hamza.”

“Amir Hamza. I am a man of many gifts.”

“Shave and a haircut, two bits!”

“Louis!”

“Are your parents asleep?”

“Snoring like babies. Yours?”

“Like babies.”

“Shave and a haircut, two bits!”

“What about Louis’s?”

“Let me check to see if the lights are on in their cabin.”