Can you bark a few bars?

My dog is not a big fan of heavy metal music. He doesn’t mind a few bars of country music and he seems to appreciate jazz and classical, although he is indifferent to opera.

But strangely, oddly, and most un- doglike, he really, really seems to like anything that features ... a harmonica.

Yes, a harmonica. Not a banjo or a cello or even a French horn. The dog knows what he likes and what he likes is the harmonica.

When he was a puppy he liked any song that featured the word, “Hey!” Maybe he thought the singer was calling him? Maybe he thought there was somehow a treat involved? Who knows? But whenever he heard the word “hey” in a song, he would come running into the room and perk his ears up. It didn’t work if I said it. Only if someone sang it. I was hoping if we could find someone to sing the phrase, “No, don’t pee on the floor,” it might have helped with the housebreaking. But alas, that phrase did not show up on our Spotify playlist.

Many years went by and there didn’t seem to be anything else that caught his ear. But then one day a Bruce Springsteen song came on and Bruce wailed away on the harmonica. My dog Monty came running in from another room and stopped dead in his tracks. He actually seemed to be listening to the song. I thought maybe it was because he was a Jersey dog and Springsteen is a Jersey guy. But as soon as the harmonica part stopped, Monty lost interest, lay down and went to sleep.

I was flabbergasted at this realization, but I realized I needed to do true scientific study to test my hypothesis. So, I put on “Piano Man.” Billy Joel is not from New Jersey, so I thought this would be a good way to rule out New Jersey artists. Once again, when the harmonica started up, the dog’s head shot up in the air.

Since we had not, to my knowledge, played a lot of songs with harmonicas in them before, it was possible this was just something new that caught his attention. Kind of like how I feel when I see a new pair of shoes. Was it indeed a passing fancy or was the dog suddenly taking an interest in mouth-blown instrumentation? He was a retriever and they like to have things in their mouths, after all.

I thought it might be fun to indulge the dog’s interest, so I did what any sane, middle-aged woman with too much time on her hands would do.

I bought a harmonica.

I thought, how hard could this be? It’s only got 10 holes. That’s nine holes more than a kazoo, which I play very well, so the odds were good I’d be a natural. Confident in my ability to pick up things quickly, I watched a short YouTube video called, “How to play a harmonica in 10 minutes,” and then I picked up my harmonica and blew. Shockingly, the resulting sound was not a melodic convergence of musical notes. It was, instead, a convergence of the sound an elephant makes when he trumpets and a piano blowing up.

Before I even got to the end, the dog had run out of the room.

So, apparently, my dog doesn’t, in fact, like harmonica playing.

He likes GOOD harmonica playing.