My husband Bob loves Gracie, our dog, more than me. So for his birthday, I bought the new invention - the Bow-Lingual, aka The Dog Translator. You attach a small red transmitter to the dog’s collar. There’s a wireless receiver you hold in your palm. When the dog barks, it’s translated into an English sentence that shows up on the screen of the receiver.

Gracie is trained to bark on command to, “Say goodnight, Gracie.” It’s from an old George Burns shtick. I know it sounds stupid. It’s especially stupid when I’m alone and a stranger knocks and I want him to think my dog’s ferocious. But I have to say, “Say goodnight, Gracie,” so she’ll bark. Then she sits and looks up at me, wagging her tail in expectation of a cookie. This makes would-be burglars belly laugh.

Bob put the red thing on Gracie and gave the bark command. She barked. Nothing translated. Again he commanded. She barked. Still nothing. A third time she barked. Nothing. Bob had forgotten to turn it on. When he did, he repeated, “Say goodnight, Gracie.” She barked again. On the translator, it read, “Can’t you hear me?”

Then Gracie barked at our cat. She hates cats. The translator read, “Get out of here.” After her supper, she goes to her toy box and picks out a stinky old stuffed toy for Bob to toss to her. The translator read, “Let’s play!” And when I commanded her to get off the only chair in the house that’s not cat-clawed to death, she did and said, “I did good, right?”

There’s a Home Alone mode that stores your dog’s barks while you’re out. I won’t do this. I don’t want to read, “I’ve spent the whole day crying, but I hope you had fun.”

So then I wondered, “What if everyone wore these things?”

1. The politician, on TV: “No new taxes. Better health care. And children,” with a deeply concerned look, “come first.”

The translator: “I can’t get this chunk of tuna out of my tooth.”

2. Your doctor: “We’ll have to repeat the blood tests.”

The translator: “Pay on your way out – today.”

3. Your teenage daughter: “I slept at Susan’s.”

The translator: “With Tom.”

4. My mother: “I’m thrilled you married Bob.

The translator: “I can’t believe this shlepper’s going to inherit our money. The first thing he’ll do after we drop dead is buy a brand new pick-up truck.” (He did.)

We spent most of Bob’s birthday cuddling, then doing what people in love naturally do. Like lunatic monkeys, we yelped, barked, growled and woofed into the translator at the top of our lungs to see what we could get it to say.

Nothing we “barked” made sense. But while we were screaming into the thing, Gracie barked. It said, “Pay attention to me!” So Bob snuggled with her - instead of me. 

Later, I asked him who he loves more – the dog or me. “You,” he said without hesitation. I looked down at the translator but he grabbed it from me and quickly shut the power off. Hmmmm.

Before bed, he said goodnight to me and then kissed the dog. She barked, “I love you.”

So I guess that now in our house  . . .  Gracie quite literally has the last word.