A Ghost in Love and Other Plays

She backed across the kitchen and through the doorway to the family room, and kept backing away, away, in my line of sight, until she was at the farther end of that adjacent room, fully forty feet from where she had started. Once there, she made several wheezing sounds that were as close to laughter as I can imagine a dog getting. Her tail began to wag, and she grinned at me. I know as surely as I know anything that she was having fun at my expense, mocking my mechanical ineptitude with the easily sprung traps. She was saying, I really want the dropped cheese, Dad, but I want to live, too, so IБЂ™m getting out of the death zone. G. K. Chesterton-who had two dogs, Winkle and Quoodle-wrote more than a little about the importance of laughter in a well-lived life, and of laughterБЂ™s role in a marriage, he said: БЂњA man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.БЂ«Dogs love to play the fool, and as part of the family, they are quite capable of recognizing the fool in us, and of celebrating it with a joke now and then ...»