The toy duck and the coffee cup

If you were sitting here with me now, this is what you’d see: me, sipping coffee from the cup my Ma gave me for Christmas back in 2018. I like to think it’s her and me having coffee together every time I use it. I know it might sound silly, but it brings me a little joy every morning I get to sit here and feel like she’s here too. It’s the one way I still feel her sitting across from me in the quiet. The rest of the house is still asleep. The dogs haven’t even come down yet. So it’s this coffee, this cup, and old memories to flip through, which is how I found this video of Louie.

There’s nothing better than new toy day if you’re a one-year-old Cocker Spaniel named Louie.

In this clip, he’s out on the patio, prancing around in a warm patch of sun with a toy duck almost as big as he is. The sunlight catches the fuzz on his floppy ears and turns that soft yellow duck into gold. He struggles to wedge it into his mouth, drops it on the concrete, noses it back up, then prances in circles like he’s just brought home the grand prize. Every so often he looks back at me, like he wants me to see just how good life is in that moment. And that tail, that happy, unstoppable tail, is what gets me every time.

Watching him, I couldn’t help but wonder when we forget how to love something that much out loud.

Dogs don’t care if the duck is fancy. They don’t check if the neighbor’s toy is bigger or squeaks better. They just care that it’s theirs, that it feels right in their teeth, soft under their paws. It turns an ordinary afternoon into a memory worth saving, the kind you pull up ten years later just to feel that tail wiggle all over again.

I think about Louie, out there in that sun, not once looking over his shoulder to see if anyone was laughing at him. He didn’t care if he looked silly, didn’t care that the duck was too big for him. He didn’t wait for permission to feel that happy. He just did.

We forget that as we get older, don’t we? We scan the room before we celebrate. We learn to keep our happiness small, tucked in where it won’t stand out. We forget that not everyone who watches us is rooting for us. Some people are just spectators, not friends. Tourists in our lives. And we need to be cognizant of that. Some people see your joy and feel a crack open in their own. Instead of facing it, they spit out a joke or an eye roll to shut you up. It’s easier to bring you down than to look at what’s missing in themselves.

Don’t let them.

Don’t let anyone shrink what makes you proud, especially not the ones I wrote about a couple weeks ago. The ones who always have a problem for every solution. The ones who would rather see you quiet than see you strut.

And this cup, the one from my Ma, reminds me why I hold tight to the small things that make me feel alive. It’s mine. Just like that duck was Louie’s.

May we all find our version of the toy duck. May we wrestle with it when we need to. May we drop it and pick it up again, no matter how many times it slips away. And may we stand in our own sunlit patch of patio, coffee in hand if we’re lucky, maybe even in an old cup from someone we miss, tails wagging, proud of what we have claimed for ourselves.

If you have your own version of the toy duck, or a cup that brings someone back for a while, I’d love to hear about it while the house is still quiet and my cup is still warm.