THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 7, 1995 TAG: 9504070656
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
A colleague, who knows more about dogs than most dogs do, said he'd read or heard somewhere that dogs have little or no comprehension of the passage of time.
What stumps me is how experts read the minds of animals who are, to me, an eternal mystery. Even the chocolate Labrador retriever with whom I spend inordinate time.
I spend more with that dog than with these columns. Summer comes soon, and we'll be slipping away to the beach for a plunge.
Get a hobby, well-wishers say.
``Hobby nothing!'' I reply. ``What the devil could a body do who is at the beck and call of a dog?''
Tatting maybe, if I knew what tatting was. One puts as much exertion in exercising an active dog as others expend on a golf course.
One friend is amused at my devoting so much of self to a dog who, most often, gets the best of me.
The dog's mastery should not be surprising, I tell him.
After all, I have to think of a hundred things while the dog's mind is bent on just one - outwitting me. As he does 10 times out of nine.
He reminds me of an adage from Erasmus and, earlier, Archilochus: ``The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one great thing.''
Scholars like to throw - or tho' as Sonny Jurgensen says - some such cryptic utterance as that at you and then smile, knowing you have no idea what it means.
I'm not above asking - I'd rather play the fool than remain one - whereupon they shake their heads in pity - and depart, without enlightening the fool.
The saying came my way, long ago, in Tolstoy's ``War and Peace,'' when phlegmatic, patient General Kutuzov drew Napoleon ever deeper into the Russian winter.
Or, alternately, Kutuzov knew that the hordes of his people could and would outdie the French in defending Mother Russia.
What the hedgehog knows is to curl into a spiny ball against foes.
Dogs know how time passes. Just don't ever lie to them.
On leaving for an absence of 15 minutes to an hour, I say to Boomer, ``I'll be right back.''
For that advice, he doesn't bother to raise his head.
Tell him, ``I'll be back in a little bit,'' and he'll come and bid me adieu at the door - and be prepared to wait upwards of two hours for my return.
And when I advise, ``Rusty will walk you,'' knowing he is in for a longer vigil, he climbs into a special chair and curls up on an old olive-drab wool Army shirt that has been placed there for him.
The flat wood arms of the chair, smoothed at the edges, widen at the end to about four inches. The chair is so angled as to afford a view of the driveway and the field beyond.
He places his chin on the chair's flat, smooth arm. If he dozes, the slightest sound brings up his head, alert. So by the time door opens, he is there, wagging his tail, ready.
A dog is well aware of the march of time. by CNB