Dogs are tricky

It was hard for me but especially hard for my mother, who had been taking care of Illy for the past few years. When we lost my father nearly two years ago, Illy did what dogs do. She took care of the person in her life.

But this isn’t supposed to be a sad dog story.

Here’s the happy part: I have a new puppy. Well, I am co-parenting a puppy with my mother, which brings up all sorts of Freudian implications, but we’re at the beginning of a dog movie, and that’s usually the funniest, most wonderful part.

The new puppy is a purebred Labrador and is sort of a tan color. And like all dogs, she is basically a devoted Leftist. She firmly believes in wealth distribution, especially as it relates to foodstuff. As far as she’s concerned, what’s hers is mine, which is true. But she also believes in the reverse — what’s mine is hers, which is not. And she (mostly) follows orders. In fact, I think she prefers it.

It’s hard, especially when she’s happily napping after a vigorous game of run-and-get-something-pointless-I’ve-tossed-for-no-reason, not to feel like one of those despot dictators, like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro, who loved their people but also thought they were kind of slow. “They’re buying this?” you can see them thinking as they strut around in their silly military uniforms. “Are they, like, dumb?”

I look at my puppy the same way: “It’s just a toy! It’s not even a real bone! And I keep throwing it in the same place! And you never get bored!”

But that’s where dogs get tricky. As any amateur psychologist will tell you, people project their feelings onto other things — spouses, friends, even dogs.

For instance, my dog has a rubber toy with a hollow core, and what you’re supposed to do is fill the core with peanut butter or cheese or cubes of something delicious. Then, you watch as she nudges it and bounces it and tries to get at the treat inside, but she mostly just stares at it, totally baffled. It’s hilarious.

Yesterday, I caught myself looking at her mentally exhausted expression, and I realized that it looked very familiar. It’s the same expression a lot of people (well, me, specifically) use when the latest poll numbers come out and we’re trying to make sense of the cross tabulations.

Writers weren’t math whizzes in school. None of us, not the screenwriters or the novelists or the journalists, were good with numbers, which is why we are clicking away on keyboards while the math majors are filing for IPO’s in Palo Alto.

But when the latest poll numbers come in, suddenly, we’re all pretending to be experts. And like most experts, what we’re really doing is waiting until someone smarter figures it all out for us — until someone fishes out the peanut butter or cheese cube and pats us on the head.

Here’s what we all say about dogs: “They give us unconditional love! They just love us for us!”

But is that true? In the first place, what would it even mean to a dog to have “conditions” on love? What would those conditions even be? As it is, most of our dogs have a pretty terrific setup, with food and playtime and a snooze-anytime lifestyle.

I think it’s more accurate to say that we give them unconditional love, or we come awfully close to it — closer than we do with the people in our lives whom we’re really supposed to love without conditions or strings or projection or expectation. When there’s a dog in the house, for a brief moment, we know what it’s like to love something freely, without hesitation and with silly voices.

And when the dog is gone, we’re stuck with our complicated, tied-up selves, wishing we could see for just one last time the way that dog looked at us when we had a tennis ball in our hand.

But of course, what we really should be remembering is the way we looked at the dog.

Dogs are tricky that way.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.