Researchers have identified the genes that make Great Danes gargantuan and that cause Shar-Peis to look like they swallowed a garden hose. Now if they can just tell me what my dog is trying to say.
Lately, this dog will not shut up. From the moment I get home until the minute I go to bed, most days it's snortwhinegroan snortwhinegroan.
It's driving me a bit nuts. This dog has always been a chatty thing. I've had her since she was a pup, and in the 11 years we've shared an address, seldom has she hesitated to offer me her opinion.
I tell her that it is unacceptable to bark at passing dogs.
She tells me why it isn't.
I tell her that it is unacceptable to keep chewing through the nylon cord that starts the lawn mower.
She tells me why it isn't.
I tell her that it is unacceptable to go slinking to the neighbors, hoping to get her stomach rubbed – or to lay in the hostas when she is hot – or to steal pans of banana bread off the kitchen counter when no one is watching.
She tells me why it isn't.
I never have quite understood why fate brought this dog and me together. Oh, I know the story of how it happened, of how my wife and kids went to an Iowa farm one spring day to look at some Labrador pups for sale and instead of picking one of the pups that were wrestling in the grass and rolling in the dirt and generally behaving like 6-week-old dogs do, they chose the one alone in the shed huddled in the corner whimpering.
That tale gets told every year, usually when all the conspirators who were at that Iowa farm that day have again returned home and are again seated at the kitchen table and this dog has again done something to make us – meaning me – question what they could have possibly been thinking.
I know the story well, and so I know how our fortunes – those of this dog and mine – crossed. But what has always eluded me is why.
Because until this dog walked into my life blah, blah, blahing about this and yak, yak, yakking about that, I always thought there was some unexplained force in nature where dogs and the people to whom they belong were guaranteed to be similar in almost every way. If the human liked big band music or argyle sweaters or excessive lethargy, so did the hound. The cosmos even caused them to resemble each other.
But this dog shot that hunch all to hell. Because long-winded I'm not. A sermon for me is anything more than "good morning."
Of all the people this yellow Lab that talks a blue streak could be paired in conversation, I am a poor choice then. That never has seemed to bother her, though. Even when I'm not listening, she thinks we're on speaking terms.
I have no idea what this dog has been carrying on about recently. If I had to guess, I suspect she is telling me what it is like to get old, how she cannot just spring to her feet anymore, how her hips feel like rusted hinges and how her brain and body often seem to be at odds, and that since she spent all those summers chasing me and others younger and harder to catch around and around the house in that silly made-up game of ours, the least I can do is come and scratch behind her ears.
I suspect she also might be offering me some advice in the event that, after her, I someday get another dog, how I might want to work less and hunt more, how it is possible for a person to have a good dog or a great yard but not both, how leaving fresh-baked banana bread out in the open is just asking for trouble and how if someday, after her, I get another dog and it decides to go exploring the neighborhood at night in the middle of a blizzard and it doesn't come home until a couple of hours later looking like it has been spit from an ice maker, I shouldn't get too upset.
The call of the wild is a hard one to ignore.
Or maybe it isn't that at all.
Knowing her the way I do, maybe what this dog is saying as I sit on the couch at the end of the day watching reruns of The Andy Griffith Show is this: "Would it kill you to give me just one of those potato chips?"
Doggone. It never ends.
Which would be OK by me.