#74 PUPPY -- TIME

“Are you playing me, Scooter?”

Scooter Sublime Pine has been working on communication with me since his eleventh week adoption, and now, nearly six-years-old, he asked, “What’s this, ‘playing’ word?”

“Here’s an example. When I say, ‘Retrieve the small ball,’ and you go for it but lie down in the hallway with it in your mouth, then I wonder what your plan is other than responding to the word, Retrieve. You retrieve that ball all the time over in the play yard. What’s up here in the house?” I think you’re playing me. Not all the time, but …

 “When you say, ‘time,’ as in ‘all the time,’ you must mean ‘occasion,’” said Scooter, who by now had stretched out on the hallway floor, pushed the small ball away, and rested his chin on his left foreleg.

 “Good for you,” he says. “All dogs, not just superior Doodles, mark time by occasions—like when their people climb out of bed in mornings, by scent, by body clues, and the environment. We have a natural awareness of time. Your species, while admirable in many ways, has pretty much lost that. Reason enough, probably, for you to have created the clock.

 “By the way,” his chin lifted for this bit of information. “What you measure as 60 minutes, is in dog time about 75. This has to do with metabolism, but I’m not asking you to understand, or change your clocks. I use hormones, scent memory, circadian rhythm, the environment, and the sequence of events to keep me aware of what you call time.

You humans perceive time subjectively, using attention, and emotion, and memory, even context to feel time passing fast or slow; you know, neurological processes. Once your kind depended on heavenly bodies for actual time passage, but now you depend on clocks to keep you corrected. I’m not sure which was better.

 “Remember that time I started growling at an approaching elevator?” Scooter asked.

“Yeah, somehow you knew a dog had boarded at some other floor.”

“I knew which dog boarded and who was headed our way. Pepper. Big deal, she’s beautiful. Not my favorite, you know, spaniel. English spaniel at that. By the sound of the elevator, I knew how much time would pass before the door opened at our floor, and that she would be in that elevator.

“You two made a horrible scene.

“She barked first, Mom.”

“But, about my original question,” I said. Scooter neglected me, resuming his professorial pronouncements.

 “It was Pepper’s scent wafting high in the air and getting stronger as the elevator approached that told me she was aboard. Not that she had been recently. In that case, the scent would be low and weak. You might say this is an indication that I understand the past from the present.”

 Scooter suddenly leapt to his feet, walked to the pantry closet that holds his kibble, and sat down, pointing his nose to the door.

“Time to eat?” I asked.

“Time to eat.”

I walked away.

“Mom! You playing me?”

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