What “5 More Minutes” Means to Me
I have heard the phrase, “5 more minutes.” It is a request for a short extension of time, often used when someone wants to delay stopping an activity, such as sleeping, playing, or working. It is the theme of a song that tells the story of people experiencing a moment in time they don’t want to end.
The last rays of sunshine on a summer’s night that show its time to end the baseball game. “Can’t we play for five more minutes?”
The alarm goes off and you hit the ‘snooze’ button when you are still tired. “I just need five more minutes.”
“Five more minutes” is open to interpretation depending on the context.
While attending a sniffing event, one of the most fun searches of the day was the game search. The game is called mother-may-I. The parameters were three rooms total to be searched; one class room, and two reading rooms. Teams had 5 minutes to find 5 hides. The rules; each team, one at a time, must clear a room before the team can move to the next room. The clock began ticking when the team entered the first room and stopped when the team found all the hides in the room and asked “mother-may-I” to move on. If the team asked to move on but hadn’t found the correct number of hides, the judge said “keep searching” while the clock ran on. The team continued until they found the correct number of hides.
Winnie started off the search strongly, locating hide 1 in the first classroom in twenty seconds, then moved to another area in the room and began working odor. For more than a minute, she worked diligently, and I encouraged and supported her efforts.
In a situation like this, if Winnie spends more than a minute but can’t source odor, I am inclined to think she is working on pooling odor. It’s time to fish or cut bait. She was working at hide 2, but I didn’t know that. Winnie moves on and efficiently sources hide 3, then displays behavior showing she is done.
At over two minutes into the search, I call mother-may-I in hopes we have found all the hides in room 1 and can move on. We have not and must stay. I knew Winnie was in odor at the front of the classroom before finding the next hide, so we go there. Winnie faithfully goes back to work. She goes round and round the area, back and forth, from a stack of bins on a cart to a wooden podium on wheels to a plastic depiction of the human skeleton hanging on a stand. She catches the odor low and tries to follow it up. Then she catches the odor on the wall, stands on hind legs and follows it down but lands on nothing. She surfs her nose along the edges of the dry erase boards and flat screen TV with a frozen image of SpongeBob SquarePants on the screen.
Time is ticking, and SpongeBob is mocking me. I’m thinking, “we are not gonna find this hide let alone have enough time to search the two remaining rooms.” With all the dancing on hind legs, I take a chance and call alert while Winnie stretches towards the dry erase board pen holder shelf. I feel my head explode when I hear the ‘no’. Where could this hide be? Within a split second, Winnie drops to all fours, her nose to the floor.
I know Winnie heard me call alert and I bet she’s thinking, “Why did you call that? I wasn’t done.” Winnie instantly sources the hide at the base of the wooden podium. “It’s right here,” she says with her nose on the hide about three feet from the wall with the dry erase boards and the SpongeBob TV that still mocks me.
I am flustered. We have found three hides. I forget what I am supposed to do next. I am certain we have used up all our time. Everyone in the room is looking at me with hopeful faces. Finally, I remember and holler, “Mother-May-I.” All that nonsense must have taken what little time we may have had left. Winnie had worked her heart out and I blew it. I squash my embarrassment, pull myself up by the bootstraps, and give Winnie the chance to shine.
That first room took almost four minutes. How can we possibly cover two rooms in one minute? We must give it a try. Don’t quit. Don’t stop searching. Use up all the time down to the nano-second then make them carry us out kicking and screaming.
The video shows what Winnie can do in a minute; clear the second room with no odor and source two hides in the third room. I call “finish”, stopping the clock in under five minutes. What a rush. My heart leaps with joy! The high of finishing all three rooms coming so closely after the low from the implosion in the first room is indescribable. No single search I have done in the past has ever taken me on such a roller-coaster ride from high to low to high again. With Nose Work and my partner, Winnie, I can have the time of my life and feel the rush of many emotions, all within five minutes.
I know my time with Winnie is finite. There will come a day when I’d give anything to have one more five-minute search with my partner. I cherish my time with Winnie in increments and relish every second, a feeling too profound to fully express.
