May 17, 2010
Greetings from the top of the food chain,
There are a few universal truths which are worth writing about. One is that every dog wants to go in the car with you so he can hang his head out the window. If there was atmosphere on Mars I am positive that dogs there would hang their heads out the windows of Martian cars going to the grocery store. No, NASA has not yet proven there are grocery stores on Mars.
The other truth is that every dog wants to sleep in your bed. I don’t care what kind of dog you have, or what kind of training he’s had, or if you have a waterbed or a TempurPedic mattress. If he is not already, given the chance, he will sleep in your bed.
In the face of this universal truth, I present an unbreakable rule established in the great Dog Negotiation of 2002: Our dog Max will never sleep in my bed.
Max is deaf. He lost his hearing at a young age so he has developed his other senses to compensate. One of those is the sense of sleep. He is the Zen Master of sleep.
Max sleeps on the couch, on the backs of chairs, in the window seat, on the floor, in the yard. He can sleep through anything now, and regularly does, falling asleep at almost any time in nearly any environment. But never, not under any circumstances is he allowed to sleep in my bed. It’s an iron clad, no exceptions, non-negotiable, deal-breaker, Cold War-caliber rule.
Max has always been an independent dog. Not exactly aloof, but not the kind of dog that really needs cuddling. Now that he is deaf, his independence borders on aristocratic superciliousness. This has worked out well for both him and me since he is on a Visitor’s Visa as far as I’m concerned. His autonomous attitude has protected our tenuous relationship; I don’t try to get him to chase a ball, and he doesn’t try to sleep with me.
When he is not sleeping, Max is a watch dog. His main function is to sit at the window and watch, primarily for the UPS truck, which he has been bred to protect us from QVC deliveries. He also protects us if a rabbit or squirrel comes in the yard, at which time he barks at it until we go deaf. Before he lost his hearing, Max also barked at the toilet when it flushed. Go figure.
I’m of the opinion that dogs are not really capable of emotions. They are a knot of ON/OFF switches primarily flipped by two instincts; eating and sleeping. Ok, maybe four switches, but this is a family show.
I have not analyzed the progression, partly because I don’t have insight into the mythical dog psychology, and mainly because I don’t care, but at some point Max’s ‘I want to sleep in your bed’ switch clicked over to ‘On’.
Because he is small, and has a gimpy leg, Max could not jump up on our bed without looking pathetic so instead he would ask me to help him. He does not speak English, so he uses another form of communication. Lurking.
Max would come into our room at night and sit next to my bed and stare at me. The kind of stare that can burn holes right through a goose down pillow which one might choose to hide behind. After that, piercing into my REM sleep state was no problem. The message he was boring into my head: I want to sleep in your bed. I countered by taking Ambien.
Some nights he would clear his throat, as if to say ‘ahem’. I responded by locking him in the laundry room.
Nature then provided Max with the ability to adapt. Somehow while I was at work each day earning enough money for thyroid medicine for our dog, he was at home practicing jumping up on my bed. I’m pretty sure the theme to ‘Rocky’ was playing.
Max was no longer asking my permission to get on the bed. He would jump up and sleep there all day in preparation for sleeping there at night. And so the first invasion stage was set. Max began appearing at my bedside in the night, and then leaping into bed and curling up at my feet. I would push him off, escort him out by the collar, and close the bedroom door.
Then came the pre-emptive stage. Max would beat me to bed, claiming prime real estate before I got there. I began going to bed at 7:30 just so I could have my own blanket. I could feel control slipping away.
One night I woke up and he was standing on the mattress looking down at me. If I didn’t know him better I might have assumed he had sinister canine intentions. In fact he was waiting for me to scoot over so he could lie down with his head on the pillow.
Aside from the inconvenience of having to negotiate for space on my Serta, the worst thing about this development is that Max laughs in his sleep. It’s a sort of chortle, actually. I think he is dreaming about sleeping in my bed, in spite of the unbreakable rule. Having the last laugh.
Dogs that sleep in your bed do not care what shape you have to take to sleep around them. And there’s nothing you can do about it. The phrase ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’ comes from the fact that their body weight increases by 1000 times when they fall asleep. Once a dog is asleep in your bed the only way to move him is to bring in a crew of burley men with a winch. Or a bagel with peanut butter.
To add to the insult, Max does not sleep through the night. He gets up and steps on my groin area to make sure I’m awake, then jumps down, roams the house, checks all the windows for the UPS truck and comes back to wake me again to tell me to move over.
Almost every morning, when I get home from running, I come into the bedroom to find Max sleeping in my spot, head on the pillow, and strangely, the blanket pulled around him. If he wakes up, which he rarely will, he does not even raise his head, just looks at me as if to say: ‘Allow me to demonstrate what I think of your unbreakable rules.’ Dog lips do not form into a smirk, but that would be redundant anyway.
I can feel the last semblance of control in my life slipping into the mist. The illusion that I am the alpha male, the lead dog, the big kahuna, slips a little each time I fill Max’s dog dish, or pay his vet bill, or find him curled up on my freshly laundered clothes. And right now, he is stretched out between my high count sheets, his head on my goose down pillow, smugly snoring, dreaming about the day when he will write his own weekly column.
With this, I can see a day coming when our dogs will be driving our cars, heads out the window, and we will be left tied to the tree in the back yard, barking at UPS trucks.
Hope this finds you in your place,
David
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Copyright © 2010 David Smith