Hey Mom,

Just a quick update from your time-hopping pooch, Clovis! I’ve been steering this rattletrap time machine across eras, from mammoth chases to Elizabethan pie-snatching feasts. No cupcakes from The Barkery here, but ancient banquets are the new normal. Made some friends, missed others, especially the ones who know my best angles at The Dapper Dog Salon. Still dreaming of our walks and those sunset reunions. Each epoch’s an adventure, but Spencerville’s in my heart. Give Gilbert and Zelda a head pat for me.

Catch ya in the next era,
Clovie 🐾

Listen to the story here

So it goes.

I’ve found myself, rather inexplicably, in the cockpit of a contraption that is not of this world—or should I say, not of this time. It’s as if a bone had been buried in the sands of the cosmos and I, Clovis, happened upon it with a sniff and a fortunate paw.

The device is a rickety thing, always on the verge of falling apart but never quite giving into the entropy that dogs all things. My plush bone, the one companion in this tumble through time, sits beside me. Even Gilbert and Zelda can’t share in this extraordinary happenstance.

We’ve romped through historical grasslands where mammoths roamed, and I’ve chased—albeit briefly—a dinosaur or two. Never caught one, but that was never the point. Clovis never hunts, only indulges in the chase for its sake.

I recall a particular afternoon at Boxer Beach, back in good old Spencerville. The waves had crashed with a rhythm that unsettled my soul, and yet, here in historical beaches, the lapping of the prehistoric waters is a symphony that doesn’t evoke the same concern. Rather strange, you might say.

The Barkery’s cupcakes, a memory in these distant times, are replaced with peculiar, ancient scents that tickle my bulldog fancy. The Doggy Bagel Deli’s offerings now seem so quaint, so charmingly limited, compared to the boundless feasts of epochs long past. But wet food was and always will be my preferred indulgence, transcending the borders of time itself.

Once, as I wrestled with the controls of this contraption (a mishap to be sure, given I possess neither thumb nor reason for aerospace engineering), I must’ve toggled something vicious because, before I could woof twice, I was plunging into an Elizabethan feast. A court jester threw me a meat pie. I caught it mid-air, of course. Good show, they said. Good boy, I retorted.

But these travels are a walk of solace, void of ear-cleanings, void of snow—though, I do encounter a blizzard or two as I sweep in and out of different winters, always shaking off the cold dampness with a disgruntled grumble.

Loud noises, the bane of my existence, are sometimes unavoidable in the clashing of swords or the boom of ancient fireworks. Yet my discontent with such bombast has lent me the knowledge of when to take my leave, if you will. A simple nudge of a button, and history becomes tomorrow’s mystery once more.

Now, it isn’t to say I don’t miss the comfort of home, the predictable stride beside my human mother, the unspoken promise of reunions at every sunset. The kind shopkeepers at The Dapper Dog Salon, the clerks at The Pawsome Pet Pharmacy who always sneaked an extra treat into the bag—they’re a piano string’s hum away in my heart.

And friends? Well, you might say they’re as essential as the nose on my face. Gilbert, with his round, jolly belly and sense of humor that could charm a cat, and Zelda, ever so resolute and stately—my comrades in every sense.

All the while, it’s the anticipation, the certainty, the knowing that somewhen and somewhere up the bends of our timelines, we will all reunite for the grandest feast of them all. That’s the sort of belief that keeps a time-traveling bulldog company across the centuries.

As for now, here I am, Clovis, the Brindle English Bulldog, time’s wanderer and history’s accidental tourist, sucking on my bone in the quiet moments between the mad dash of epochs. And so, until Spencerville beckons me back, I’ll continue to chart the stars with the curiosity of a canine unbound by the simple walkies of existence.

So it goes, indeed.

The End.