LETTERS FROM HOME: IT'S NICE TO HAVE AN EMOTIONAL BAROMETER AROUND THE HOUSE

Jan. 29, 1998

Dear Patty,

Hank and Lucy awakened me as usual this morning. First a clomp, clomp, clomp echoes on the back stairs, then it's the ticking sound of eight paws trying to accelerate in the hardwood hallway, followed by twin bounds that send shockwaves through the mattress.

If I'm lucky, this sequence of events registers on my pilot-light brain and there's just time to pull the covers over my head. If not, a cold muzzle and slurpy tongue assault each ear.

This was an unlucky morning, but as much as I grumble about dogs on the bed, dogs on the couch, dogs in my dreams, hearing them coming still pushes my thrill button.

The dogs uncannily mirror us. Like me, Lucy ordinarily maintains the visage of a sphinx, but she can look concerned, too. Like DC, Hank looks concerned most of the time. But sometimes, if no one is looking, he sighs, closes his eyes and relaxes.

I've suggested to DC that Hank might, as you say in the West, mellow out more if she herself did. But how to impart a sense of well-being and calm to someone, human or animal, who hardly knows what it feels like?

DC has not yet suggested that I become more disciplined so Lucy will mind us better.

Hank and Lucy are our buddies and emotional barometers.

One day last week, DC asked me to put some newly laundered clothes away. I said I had to write and would do it later.

A day and a half later, I was reading in bed. DC was staring at the ceiling. The dogs ordinarily would be sleeping in the kitchen but were at the foot of the bed. I didn't ask. When DC got up, I thought she was going to watch TV until she got sleepy. The dogs tailed after her.

The next thing I knew it was morning, and DC and the dogs were sleeping on one of the twin beds in the back bedroom. Turns out, I was in the doghouse from the laundry caper. And from the way the dogs looked at me and were surrounding her, you'd think they knew it.

If DC and I don't always tell each other how we're feeling, at least the dogs know.

At the risk of sounding too Californian, I am convinced that dogs have an inner life we humans little perceive. Perhaps we aren't intelligent enough to appreciate ways of knowing that are different from our own.

Though we love to flap about in the water, too, we can't imagine a seagoing mammal could be our intellectual equal or better.

"If dolphins are so smart, why don't they have any hospitals?" Rush Limbaugh said one day on the radio.

If we're so smart, why do we need hospitals?

And if building things is one of our measures of intelligence, what of the architectural marvels we call nests and dens.

The problem really is our limited concept of intelligence. We prize the ability to invent, to diagnose, to persuade even if the argument is untruthful, the diagnosis is hopeless and the invention is a nightmare.

Awareness is more than a function of intellect, it is also an awareness of emotional truths and a summoning of all the powers of the senses.

We need our Nobel Laureates, but here on the throes of a technological revolution we may need our Forrest Gumps more. A dog is a reminder that joy and devotion and love are as uncomplicated and as within our grasp as a wagging tail.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.