My dog Cleo will sometimes wander into the room where I’m sitting, find me, and then do absolutely nothing.
She doesn’t need to go outside. Her water bowl is full. There’s no mysterious emergency involving a toy trapped under the couch. She just walks in, sees that I’m there, and settles nearby.
This is one of the nicest things about having a dog.
There is an important qualification here. Cleo comes looking for me only if my wife isn’t available. My wife is very clearly her favorite, and Cleo has never made much effort to hide this. I’m the backup option. Still, second place in the affections of a small goldendoodle is not a bad place to be.
For a few minutes before she appears, Cleo has been somewhere else in the house doing whatever dogs do when nobody is watching. Sleeping, probably. Staring out a window, on sentinel duty for bunnies. Then, at some point, something happens in that little brain of hers that amounts to: Where are my people?
And she comes looking.
Cleo is a mini goldendoodle, short for Cleopatra. She’s named after the main character in the Cleopatra in Space series, although she has considerably fewer intergalactic adventures. Most of her expeditions involve moving between rooms of the house in search of my wife or, failing that, me.
The children apparently do not count.
She can be in a house full of kids and somehow still regard herself as tragically alone. They feed her things. They pet her. They are warm-blooded human mammals who speak and move around. None of this seems sufficient to establish personhood in Cleo’s mind. If my wife and I leave, she has been abandoned.
I find this funny, but also strangely sweet.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how much our pets mean to us. We take pictures of them. We talk to them despite knowing perfectly well that they don’t understand most of what we’re saying. We buy them ridiculous things and organize parts of our lives around feeding them, walking them, and making sure they’re happy.
It’s easy to forget that some version of the relationship runs the other direction too.
Dogs notice when we leave and when we return. They learn our routines. They know the sounds of our cars, the rooms where we usually sit, and the places they’re likely to find us. Sometimes they realize we aren’t nearby and decide to do something about it.
There’s something lovely about knowing that you can exist in the mind of an animal while you’re somewhere else.
Cleo doesn’t have any complicated theory of love or companionship. She just knows there are two people in the world she particularly wants to be near, and I’m fortunate enough to be one of them (when the preferred option is unavailable).
So every now and then I’ll be sitting somewhere reading or working and hear the little tap of paws coming down the hallway.
A moment later, Cleo appears in the doorway.
She was somewhere else in the house.
Then, for whatever reason, she thought of me.
And came to sit nearby.