Red balls in the ocean

Red sails in the sunset? [old song] I've been enchanted by a delightful anecdote, told to me yesterday by my son, concerning the extraordinary dog Gamone (born here at Gamone, Sophia's daughter), who now resides with her mistress (my ex-wife) in Brittany.

For Gamone, the most-treasured object in the universe is a dirty reddish rubber ball, about 20 centimeters wide, inherited from Natacha's lovely old dog. François tells me that Gamone is capable of catching her red ball in what we humans would describe as total darkness. Gamone must have the kind of hi-tech night-time vision once employed by US GIs against Bin Laden and the Taliban.

My son took Gamone for an outing to the magnificent nearby Breton seaside. What did Gamone find there ? Dozens of red balls, in fact mooring buoys, floating in the sea, a few meters from the beach. Gamone was out of her mind. How the hell had her familiar red ball been cloned into all these countless maritime specimens? François tells me that Gamone dashed intrepidly into the Breton waves in an attempt to solve this mystery.

I don't know the exact language used my my son (who communicates satisfactorily, like me, with certain living species) to inform Gamone that it was—as they say—a false problem. No e-mails on this subject have reached me yet, but that might merely indicate that our dog Gamone has run into typical access obstacles that hold up her communications for a dog's-hair elapse of time. So, I'm hoping that everything has now fallen into place, and that the dog Gamone realizes, in the context of her red balls, that she is not necessarily the only Gamone—well, almost—on the planet.