If there’s one thing I love to do, it’s play fetch. Balls, sticks, clods of dirt – heck, I’ll even fetch a blade of grass. Any time my man human makes that throwing motion, I’m good for at least 30 minutes. But therein lies the problem. I’m lucky if he can manage to toss the “whatever” for more than 30 seconds.
Sure, we fetch a while when he gets home, but by then he’s tired. He’s had a long day. I, on the other hand, have spent most of my day snoozing, stretching, snoozing again and pressing my nose up against the sliding glass door.
But like Superman’s Bizarro World, “where alarm clocks dictate when to go to sleep, ugliness is beautiful and the world’s greatest hero is a chalk- faced duplicate of Superman,” we have Jerry and a Lam Ngo. No, a Lam Ngo is not a thing – or a typo. Lam is a software engineer in North Carolina and Jerry is his miniature dachshund.
Together, they built and perfected a machine that allows Jerry to play fetch all by himself for as long as he wants (we in the dog world lovingly refer to them as the Iron Men). Lam even loaded a video of Jerry playing with it on YouTube.
That was several years ago. Unfortunately, Jerry’s at the age now where fetching, alone or with Lam, is no longer an option. The machine is likely collecting dust or entertaining a new little puppy these days, and that’s just fine. I may have a few more dog years ahead of me than Jerry but, still, I envy him just a little bit.
Jerry and Lam are the epitome of what the dog-human relationship is all about. You get the sense their companionship and love for one another runs deep. Why else would one go to such lengths (it took two years to build)?
So here’s to you Jerry, and you Lam, for thoroughly enjoying each other’s company and for figuring out a way to do so even when you’re miles apart. But thanks, most of all, for sharing it and thereby inspiring the rest of us.
