Click! Click! Click!

Threes are significant in my life: I often think how great it would be if I had only three things to get done in a day. Juggling my life would be fantasy-like manageable. I take full responsiblity for my decisons however. For example, I used to have three dogs, the ideal number, which I know because when I had two I wanted another. Three were so much fun that I adopted a fourth. Now that I have four, I often reminisce about what it was like to have two plus one. Because of my special relationship with the number three, this will be my last post with a triplet-word title, and  it should not go un-noted that it is my third attempt at blogging, and it is the third of January. 

I began to consider the number three more seriously when I noticed the conflict between the negative "three's a crowd" and the positive menage a trois, specifically the repeated references on the sitcom Two and Half Men. How can there be the undesirable third wheel if the third sex partner is such a desirable boon? And two and a half men? It's clear the show features three males, all child-like, which is the opposite of Lionel Richie's song that features one female who is three times a lady. But if a man goes once, twice to the end of a metaphorical rainbow with a lady, wouldn't consistency of language call for "thrice" on the third trip?

Teaching my son portraiture last August, I noticed that Alex fired his Nikon D200's shutter not thrice but in groupings of four, which sounded odd to my three-canaled, three-ossicled ear. "Peculiar," I commented, and tried his four count method as an experiment, but by December when I photographed Shona Michaud's Australian shepherd Heelside Race You to the Top in Minot, Maine, I'd reverted naturally back to firing in threes. Called Nevis for short, this Aussie is named after Ben Nevis, the tallest mountain in Scotland and the last of three mountains in a race that is routed through three countries. This ambitious dog is named perfectly, so perfectly that I had to stop firing my camera in triplets and watch first in surprise, second in admiration, and third in wonder: surprise at this Aussie's determination, admiration for his strategies, and wonder about threes, not only for their significance, but as the ideal number. Ask any juggler.