A Peine For Your Thoughts

The obedience school courses Truman recently completed required that the owners wear a satchel of some type with large pockets for easy acccess to–what else?–treats. The entire world of dog training revolves around treats, and it’s amazing what Truman will do when he smells a treat. I believe he would will his own vocal chords to evolve and produce English vernacular if he thought it would get him more treats. But if there aren’t treats around? If we call his name and ask him to do something, and he turns to look at us, and a survey of both our hands reveals we had the gaul to request something of him without offering a Snausage in return? These are the moments where I become keenly aware that Truman should have paid the bill for the obedience school. Because for the low low price of $200, Drew and I are now perfectly trained. The house is overflowing with a variety of rawhides, snausages, dog jerky sticks, lamb liver, and everything else dog food companies have imagined. We wouldn’t want Sir to grow tired of just one type of treat.

As I cooked dinner last night, I watched Truman sit diligently at my feet, staring up at me with hopeful, earnest brown eyes, and I realized his small brain, while it doesn’t allow him to remember to not go up the stairs by himself because he doesn’t know how to get back down, it does allow him to remember that a month ago I made an apple pie and while I was standing in that exact same spot in the kitchen, I gave him one small piece of apple. And if he sits and stares at me for just long enough, there must be something up there I could give him. This is when I remembered my own eyes staring earnestly at my own parents in just such a way. But it wasn’t for a piece of an apple.

I always hear you have to be a different parent to all of your children, and looking back, I wish I wouldn’t have shown my hand so quickly. Why didn’t I make them work for it a little? Why didn’t I make them wonder what my motivation was, stay up endless nights talking and trying to figure out the psychology of their oldest daughter? Why did I prove that my brain was just one two-lane road going straight through a deserted stretch of scrub brush and tumbleweeds? Why couldn’t I have been like my sister, brain a jumble of highways on top of super highways on top of toll roads, all bumper-to-bumper traffic during rush hour behind wide blue eyes that were so calm and laid back that even if her motivation was changing that very moment, you could never tell. She bounded through childhood with a poker face, leaving my parents in her wake, making them wonder if she was even motivated by anything at all.

My own motivation was discovered after my first Happy Meal came with a kids’ size Coke. No one enjoyed me quite as much on caffeine. I was too fun of a drunk. So Cokes came few and far between. And just like Truman, I’d remember that one time after I helped my dad at the hardware store, he’d stopped and bought me one on the way home. So the minute the hardware store was even whispered, I was in the car, asking could I assist you with your purchases? I know I’m only seven, but I can carry an entire peg board. I knew that one time after I’d helped my mom at the grocery store, she too had stopped and bought me a Coke. For the rest of my childhood, I could be counted on to assemble grocery lists, weigh produce, load plastic bags into the trunk of her car. I would have gone anywhere, done anything, for that Coke. I was, what they call in the dog-training world, “treat-driven”.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Truman when I watch him will himself to sprout wings and take flight for a Snausage. We can’t all have complex motivations.