Clairvoyance REquired

There is a commercial that runs sometime around six most evenings, always during the news, always the same setup. A dog, some breed with a name I can never remember, trots to a bowl and eats. Not warily. Not with the air of a creature weighing its options. It simply eats, tail going, the whole business settled before the announcer finishes the sentence.

I have come to resent that dog.

Not the dog’s fault. The dog was cast for a reason, and the reason is that most dogs are, apparently, capable of this. Mine are not. Mine require a kind of clairvoyance I was never issued, and which no amount of practice has managed to install.

Some mornings it is kibble, plain, no negotiation. Some mornings it is wet food, and if you have chosen wrong, you will know within four seconds by the particular way a golden retriever can make eye contact and then look away, slowly, like a man declining a business proposal. Some mornings it is wet food, but only the correct wet food, which is to say the most expensive one, the one with the little foil peel-back lid instead of the pull-tab, as though the extra forty cents a can buys you some dignity.

Morgan wants salmon and sweet potato. Captain wants beef and lentil. I know this the way I know my own name, until the morning I don’t, and I set the wrong bowl in front of the wrong dog, and watch him stare at it like it has personally wronged him.

Occasionally, and I have never caught the exact mechanism of this, one of them will decide the other has been given something better. It does not matter that the bowls are identical. It does not matter that I portioned them myself, with a level of care usually reserved for surgery. One dog simply becomes convinced, and the solution, apparently, is to walk over and take the other one’s bowl, leaving his own untouched, so that now I have two dogs eating the wrong food out of the wrong dish and looking, somehow, satisfied about it.

My wife handles this differently than I do. Her approach is a shrug and a line she’s used for years. “They’ll eat eventually.” Said with the confidence of someone who has never once tested the theory, because within the hour she is in the kitchen frying bacon, shredding a little cheese over it, and pouring what I am fairly sure was a Merlot into a shallow bowl she sets down like she’s finishing a place setting.

They eat that. Every time. Immediately.

I have started to wonder if the dog in the commercial has a wife too.