Planet Dog to Planet Earth, salutations.

            Growing up means learning to communicate. That sounds like a Carll opener, I admit, but on this he and I think comparably (though not equivalently). Infancy quarantines us in incomprehensibility – another Carll-ish mouthful – from which, by mastering the tongue of our masters, we must break free. I hardly need to add that my species liberates itself from said impotence a whole lot faster than yours. How long till you guys walk upright, call comprehensibly for specific nourishment, shit and piss where bid? You may end up smarter than we – if reading Hegel represents intelligence – but if it takes you a dog’s lifetime to get there, how smart is that?

            Age eight months, I’ve become, gotta say, a veritable Shakespeare in dog-to-person communications. I can convey to Carll and Jane pretty much everything I want them to know with an urgency and winningness that even they pronounce irresistible. Neither, like any capably trained sales professional, do I take no for an answer. And I close the sale – even tough ones. Here’s how.

            Say, after breakfasting, pooping and peeing, I’m inclined to play. Inclined is too limp a verb. I need to play – romp, race, sniff and bounce – it is my nature, just as Carll’s at that hour is to sit staring into his word machine. “Please, Henry,” he implores, “I need to work,” with a pathos I might succumb to if my impulse were less imperative. (“Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can,” said Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, the lesser-known son of his deservedly forgotten yet notable-in-his-moment novelist dad.)

            So here’s my response. I seat myself beside Carll’s work-bed and gaze up at him with my liquid chestnut eyes twinkling through their fringe of curly chocolate fur. Few humans are used to being gazed at gooily. They go shy, embarrassed, as if our large eyes saw through them into some discreditable corner. Dogs feel no such discomfiture, blessed with less sullied souls. (I say “souls” but that’s a human construct – silly really – where in a body do you locate the soul? – but you’re human presumably, if you’re reading this, so I must talk your lingo, not mine.)

            If staring doesn’t move my mountain, I go the next step and paw – with my endearing fluffy paws like little mops, impossible to ignore, though Carll does his best. “Please, Henry, please,” he repeats, so plaintively I wouldn’t mind surrendering, because I really like Carll (albeit an acquired taste), but no, my need trumps his (a verb that’s been retired, I gather). He wants to type, but I need to play, so the pressure ratchets up to…

            You guessed it, licking. With my perfectly formed little pink tongue emerging from its bright white picket fence of shiny new teeth, I slurp his flickering fingers and wrinkled wrists. If humans aren’t used to being eyeballed, they’re really not used to being licked, though this flirtatious activity is referenced in certain proscribed texts about which I’m supposed not to have heard.

            Why Carll can’t do his typing at a more convenient hour is beyond me. My need is now – a physical, not to say existential, urgency. Can’t fingers flicker later? Seems not. Scowling, Carll grabs his laptop and thuds to the outside door which he slides open, barking “OK, go play!” with no good grace.

            I go – but he doesn’t follow. Doesn’t play mean play together? I stare indoors, sad-eyed as a Dickensian waif cruelly abandoned to starvation by heartless capitalism. It’s a look I’ve worked on.

            “Fuck it,” Carll grouses, slipping on parka and boots.

            Bingo!