11/14/01: Secret Chemicals
It's a Wednesday, a little after noon. We're eating turkey bacon and unfrozen bagels and drinking coffee as we watch Emergency Vets on Animal Planet, our favorite channel. He leans over to me, smelling my hair, my neck, my arms, anything around me, making little weird contented noises. I ask him what he's doing.
"I'm smelling you," he says.
"Okay," I say. Not much more you can say. We go back to watching the vets. They're fixing a dog's broken leg.
"Did you know," my boy says, "that a dog's brain changes when it's around its owner? That if you have a dog that's actually pretty smart, you know, a kind of dog that if you show it a treat, and show the dog as you put the treat under a pillow or something--" (here he grabs a pillow and hides a napkin under it) "--you have a dog who can tell you where the treat is, right? 'Cause he saw you put the treat under the pillow, right? But then you give them their owner's scent, and they just get stupid. They forget where the treat is. They're just so happy to smell their owner their brain turns to mush."
"Interesting," I say.
He leans over and smells my hair again. "You're doing it on purpose," he says.
"Yes," I say.
"Secret chemicals," he says, and makes little contented puppy noises.