I Can Has Library?

Somewhere within the last few weeks, I read a description of a dog’s-eye (or rather, -nose) view of the world. It went something like this: As a dog crosses the living room, it is reading the Doggy Daily News.

Pretty funny.

But since I’ve now had a few months’ practice walking a very olfactorily-oriented dog up and down the street, and around the yard, I think I’ve got to sharpen the analogy a little.

Here’s the way these walks go:

1. Trot out front door.
2. Sniff exploratorily at front porch.
3. Canter briskly up the sidewalk or, if the mood strikes you, detour across the shortcut to the driveway.
4. Trot up the driveway to the street.
5. Stop. Sniff the air. Look left, look right, turn around so as to look over your shoulder, turn around again.
6. Toss a doggy coin and face left or right, accordingly.
7. Apply nose to ground.
8. Go.

By “go” I don’t mean to imply that what follows resembles anything like haste. No, because you see, every blade of grass must be sniffed. Every crack in the pavement potentially conceals scented wonders. Bricks and trees and every single leaf which wasn’t there the last time around — or perhaps has since turned over, or shifted slightly in the wind — need to be explored. And although no other dogs or other creatures may have passed by since the last walk, all these little items of interest must be re-inspected with each new walk because the wind is coming from a different direction, or the temperature or humidity is higher or lower, or it has since rained, or indeed because now on this pass one’s own footprints (and hence scent) are now part of the mix, and doesn’t that make things even more interesting, more urgent even?

A walk up our little cul-de-sac — maybe a tenth of a mile or so — takes typically a half-hour or more. Neighbors pass in their cars, headed out to the convenience store a couple miles away, and they return twenty minutes later to find that Sophie (the miniature Yorkie) and I have not progressed even four more houses along the street. They wave on the way out, but they simply smile — and perhaps scratch their heads — on the way back in.

(What is the human end of the leash up to while all this is happening? I guess I should take along an MP3 player to listen to music or an audiobook. But no: I just watch Sophie; I think about things like blog entries and book structure; I look up and marvel — for the thousandth time or so — how prettily the pure blue of an autumn sky contrasts with orange and yellow. I can’t say I’m bored, although it may appear so to the there-and-back neighbors, who can’t help noticing that ivy has started to twine around my ankles and cobwebs have appeared between my ears and shoulders. Sophie, needless to say, forgot I existed the moment we undertook Step 1 above.)

Maybe a dog’s walking across a room is like a human’s reading a newspaper. But when a dog steps outside, I think its behavior more closely resembles another familiar experience: a human’s entering a huge bookstore or library — and if the former, entering it with an unlimited expense account.

If you’ve ever visited the Strand Bookstore at 12th and Broadway in NYC, you’ll know what I mean. They boast of 18 miles of shelves, but that doesn’t begin to do it justice. Why? Because the overall sense is that it’s 18 miles of shelves containing no more than one copy of each book. This isn’t even close to an accurate sense in terms of facts, but if you let your mind sort of squint as you make your way around the aisles, you’ll see what I mean.

That’s what Sophie’s experiencing when she steps out and sniffs the air, I think. She can “see” a gazillion volumes, and the ones she can’t see she still knows are there, somewhere. She’ll never tire (mentally) of walking up and down the street. There isn’t enough time for her to pull every single book off the shelf, let alone read it cover to cover. But she’ll never run out of new books.

And wouldn’t you know it, given that she’s The Missus’s and my dog? Sophie’s a freaking bibliophile.