How My Two Small Dogs Experience The Hour Before Dinner

I have a dim and uncertain memory of their dinnertime once being firmly anchored at 5pm, and even occasionally occurring as late as 6pm. Like the hour of dinnertime for the British middle classes in the 18th century, something changed — I could not put my finger on precisely when — but the change, having once occurred, has proved irrevocable.

If I am honest with myself and you, their dinnertime is no longer even at four, although that is the hour I most reliably admit to. They eat dinner by four, almost never later. I used to protest when they began agitating for dinner at 3:45; more often than not I now consider 3:45 to be a perfectly acceptable compromise.

I justify this by reminding myself that the sun sets at 4:30 these days, and I don’t like eating in the dark any more than they do.¹

And they are, it must be remembered, a five-pound and a ten-pound animal each. I myself am much larger than that, and so the same amount of time can pass leisurely through my relatively-greater surface area, whereas the hours of the day are much more highly concentrated as they travel through the comparatively compressed bodies of my dogs. The same hour, which might pass entirely safely and unremarkably through me without my hardly noticing it, unsettles their very foundations.

In the morning all is well. The five-pound dog wakes me up anywhere between 7:30 and 8:30 AM by perching lightly on my chest and sneezing directly into my eyes and mouth. We take a walk; they eat breakfast. The rest of the morning is given over to chasing one another around the apartment and going back to sleep, and I can get some work done.

By one in the afternoon there has been an indefinable yet observable change in the atmosphere. Their gazes have shifted from liquid to glutinous, though not yet solid and capable of arresting motion, as they will in another hour or two. Something is afoot. Nothing moves in the house without capturing their attention. They are actively monitoring the situation as it develops. What is the situation? — the possibility of a situation. Something may or may not be about to happen.

By one-thirty their gaze has fallen on me, or on Grace if I am not in the house. This is the gaze that falls like a bolt. If I get up to make myself a cup of tea, they must follow — and yet they follow with great wariness, not yet with the joyful certainty that this must be the trip that produces dinner that will emerge after two-thirty. I must be watched; like God, my dogs know that “It is not good for Man to be alone.”

It is true that I have tacitly encouraged such behavior by occasionally offering them an empty yogurt container to lick or a bit of sliced turkey while I am in the kitchen making food for myself. I admit this cheerfully; the sound of a small dog eating by surprise is one of the homeliest, snuggest, merry little sounds on offer, and I would not give it up for anything.

Since they are very small indeed, they cannot handle more than a whisper of yogurt once every few days, or a clove-sized ingot of turkey, but still, the solid and reassuring thwack of lunch meat on a clean kitchen floor, followed by the devoted and grateful apprehension of a small dog’s mouth, is a small domestic treasure, and I will continue to release fractions of turkey every other afternoon until one of us dies.

By two in the afternoon they become physically synchronized. They move as one, they think as one, they speak as one. Hunger has made them unanimous. I have became an extension of their shared body — and I am sickly, diseased, ineffective, not working. They confer with one another like doctors. They must find a cure for me, or I must be amputated. There is no other way.

By two-thirty they can no longer hide their anxiety. Something is wrong at the very heart of all things; time is wrong and life is wrong and there is no order, no goodness, no safety to be found under the sun. They can only give vent to their fears by walking stagily all over me.

If I am writing in bed, their tennis-ball heads drift over the edge of my screen, eyes like dinner-plates, little Grinch feet scrabbling ceaselessly against the shell until my laptop closes on my fingers. Usually it is only the five-pound dog, with the profound arrogance of the very small, who walks on me, but lately his larger brother has taken to following suit. He is less confident, being less practiced, and only takes about one stabbing step forward every ten seconds, having not yet acquired his sea-legs for walking over flesh, and it hurts to precisely the same degree that it makes me laugh.

If I have tried to anticipate their disturbance and am writing at the desk, they scrabble ceaselessly at my feet, which I have foolishly left on the floor, where they are vulnerable to ingress.

By three-thirty they re-enact the introduction of Ignorance and Want from A Christmas Carol:

“From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds…Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

Before three-thirty, I usually counter particularly-conspicuous acts of begging with a boisterous yet affectionate rebuke: “This is ridiculous. When have I ever fed you at two in the afternoon? This is without precedent. The Privy Council will never permit it. Be reasonable. Join the consensus.”

After three-thirty I begin to lose my confidence, and resort to begging in return: “Fellows, please! Don’t you trust that I will feed you? Hasn’t it always turned out right in the end?” But dogs only care about precedence as it affirms their constitutional rights; they do not accept precedence as a bar against their own behavior. They dance anxiously, they fret about my person, they butt their stupid little upside-down-teacup-shaped heads into my knees and armpits, they spin in anticipatory circles whenever I rise and howl in anguish whenever I sit down; they have no reserves of patience, no faith whatever in the words of Jeremiah, that I know the plans I have for them, plans to prosper and not to harm them, plans to give them hope and a future.² Their prophet says in return: But what have you done for me lately?

All they know is hunger, like Erysichthon of Thessaly, of whom Ovid said:

Destiny has separated Hunger

So far from the goddess of abundance

They can never meet; therefore Ceres

Commissioned a mountain spirit, an oread:

“Hear what I say and do not be afraid.

Far away to the north of Scythia

Lies a barren country, leafless, dreadful:

Ice permanent as iron, air that aches.

“A howling land of rocks, gales and snow.

There mad Hunger staggers. Go. Bid Hunger

Take possession of Erysichthon’s belly.

Tell her she has power over all my powers

To nourish Erysichthon. Let all I pour

Or push down this fool’s gullet only deepen

His emptiness.”

…He dreams he sits at a banquet

Where the food tastes of nothing. A nightmare.

He grinds his molars on air, with a dry creaking,

Dreaming that he grinds between his molars

A feast of nothing, food that is like air.

At last he writhes awake in convulsive

Cramps of hunger. His jaws

Seem to have their own life, snapping at air

With uncontrollable eagerness to be biting

Into food and swallowing––like a cat

Staring at a bird out of reach.

His stomach feels like a fist

Gripping and wringing out

The mere idea of food.

At three-forty I relent. It’s nearly four anyway. The five-pound and the ten-pound dog dance as if it were the first meal ever served on earth; for them it is.

And then I think, Why not fix some dinner for myself? I’m already up. And indeed I am.

1. If you wonder whether this means I also eat dinner around 4:30pm, the answer is yes. Why should I be ashamed to admit it? In the summer I like to eat at six, and in the winter I like to eat at four-thirty. It frees up the whole evening.

2. Jeremiah 29:11.