My wife and I might live forever.

OK. No. We won’t. Not really. The thought occurs to me that if laughter is what they say it is — that it helps with emotional, psychological, even physical health — then we’re likely in store for many more years on this good Earth.

Why? It’s Toby the Puppy.

He joined our family on Labor Day Weekend 2014. You’ve read the abridged story of how that event occurred already on this blog. In case you haven’t, here it is once more:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/09/puppy-tales-part-3/

My point, though, is simply this: We’ve been in stitches every single day since he came into our lives.

Toby makes my wife and me laugh damn near every hour.

We take him for walks through the neighborhood almost daily. Every time we take his leash off the doorknob in our entry way, he spins in circles; he can’t wait to get going. When we set out, he pulls on the leash, ready for action and his rear end wiggles and waggles as he tries to get to somewhere straight ahead in the briefest amount of time possible.

He goes straight to a bed we have positioned in our dining room. That’s his place while my wife and I have our meals. He looks at us just waiting for something from the dinner table. We don’t give him table food, but we do allow him to clean our plates. He cannot wait for us to finish eating.

Toby likes to play “fetch” with any number of toys we have scattered around the house. We toss the toy. He grabs it, shakes it viciously and then brings it to us. Often, it’s too far for us to reach. “Bring it here, Puppy,” we tell him. He nudges it closer, and closer, and closer. Then he paws one of our feet to let us know, “OK, it’s close enough. Now … will you throw it again — please?”

He cracks us up. We howl. We laugh at times until it hurts. I’ve given you just a small sampling of the things Toby does that brings smiles to our faces and joy to our hearts.

http://www.helpguide.org/articles/emotional-health/laughter-is-the-best-medicine.htm

Laughter can cure a lot of ills. That’s what we are told. Doctors have said as much. Other pet parents have as well.

Man, I believe ’em.

I’ve declared already my belief that we need to dump the term “pet owner” in favor of “pet parent.”

Toby the Puppy isn’t just our dog. He’s our baby. He’s our “good boy.”

He also isn’t just a possession. He’s a member of the family.

You have known this already, through the posts I’ve put out detailing our life with Toby, whom we acquired two years ago this month.

He joined our family in a most unexpected fashion. But it was no time at all before he captured our hearts. In fact, it well might have been love at first sight — for him as well as for us.

My wife and I have been married for 45 years. For most of that time we’ve had cats in our family. I can count precisely two dogs joining our family during that time. We had one in Portland for a brief period; after we moved to Beaumont, another pooch showed up one very hot, humid day in our garage. We had neither of those two dogs for very long.

All the while, we remained a cat family.

Toby joined us while we still had two kitties. They were getting older. Socks died suddenly in November 2014; we lost Mittens just this past February.

Neither of them were possessions, either. They were our babies every bit as much as Toby has been.

When we traveled two Germany and The Netherlands earlier this month, we took Toby to a pet spa, where he was treated well, spoiled and pampered.

We missed him terribly while we were away.

One does not miss something you “own.” Did I miss our car, or our pickup or our recreational vehicle? Did I miss the house we’ve called home in Amarillo for nearly 20 years? Not for one second.

Toby the Puppy? We missed him.

That convinced me beyond all reasonable doubt that one is not a pet owner. One is a pet parent — especially when the pet is as lovable as those who have come into our lives over the years.