It is time to attempt a taxonomy of pets.

This undertaking is not without hazard. I can feel you bristle in anticipation. The portrait painter’s jeopardy: “That’s what you think I look like?!”

Our affections depict us with cruel candor. We are who and how we love. We may be more, but we’re at least this.

Affection is a narcissist. We wear our relations no less than our clothes, to look swell. I could watch couples parading Manhattan streets all day: human couples and humans with their animals. Gay couples sometimes coif and dress identically, so you get the point.

Pets blazon preferences. Old New Yorker cartoons featured stuffed stuffy matrons with their perfect poodles. Fierce pit bulls are favored by folks who mean to cow. I half-envy souls who exercise their scruffy mutts with apparent indifference to appearances. I say apparent, because their choice may implicitly chaff those who’ve swung for handsomer breeds.

I’m a dog person; I dislike cats. Jane’s a self-confessed cat person, though she’s loved several dogs, Henry emphatically.

What I dislike about cats is their independence. My insecurity demands fealty. I cannot love you if you don’t love me back. I’m forever enticing, inviting, striving to endear, particularly with words. I attribute this neediness to being love-starved as a kid. No one hugged in my parents’ house or said I love you or kissed except for formal pecks on forehead or cheek. I’ll always be awkward kissing lip to lip. I loved my German shepherd, Ophelia, because she loved me or allowed me to think she did. In my kids’ frequently wrangling childhood home, our black Labrador Paddle dependably exuded warmth. How often he licked our sadness away, sensing the need.

These days I do not lack love, only such gnawing needs are insatiable, enough is never enough. Periodic squalls of doubt capsize me, as Jane will attest. Excavate my character to its core and you will find a small boy alone in the woods with his grinning dog. (And yes, dogs grin.)

Cat lovers, I’m guessing, are more secure than dog lovers, less likely to dread abandonment.

Dog lovers I see as more sentimental than cat lovers, more susceptible to signals from the divine. Henry’s brown eyes look through me, as God does. He forgives – which I need. He credits intentions. Cats are into themselves, Henry’s into me, ever alert to my whereabouts and mood. We neutered Henry because the procedure’s recommended for medical and practical reasons, but also, truth be told, for the same reason Pharaohs made eunuchs, to affix their focus.

Henry’s looks matter to his human overlords. He’s not vain, but we are. Beauty reassures, insensibly affirming the value of being. We glow when friends flatter Henry. Often we glance at him and beam. The adjective cute is threadbare but we have no better. Henry really is.

Is Henry my doppelganger? Not in appearance surely. I’m a sagging graying old guy, he trim muscular energetic gleaming brown. No one calls me cute and means it.

Spiritually, I spy a fraternal likeness. We both seek to please, love to play, devote ourselves wholeheartedly to a cherished few. We crave the security of routines. We’re inclined to bound, not trudge – I with my prose, he with his furry legs. We aspire to grace – he instinctively, I deliberately. Parted, we yearn to reunite – I surely, Henry apparently. Henry adjudges my pondering preposterous and complicating: why make trouble? Why not embrace existence as is, without ruing what it isn’t or imagining what it might be? He is right, of course – but it takes all sorts.