Light On Dark Water

Lucy In A Bind With Pancakes

We have two dogs, Andy
and Lucy. How a family in which the
wife does not much care for dogs came to have two of them is a
long story, like the story of how we came to have four cats;
suffice to say that it is a testimony to the power of motherly
love. Andy is small and cute, while Lucy is large—really
too large for our small house—and smells bad unless
she’s been washed in the past few days. Accordingly, Andy
is allowed certain liberties, such as getting on the furniture,
which Lucy is not. It’s clear that Lucy is jealous of him,
and from what I know about the social life of dogs she is well
within her rights: not only is she five times Andy’s size,
she was here first, so she ought to be the top dog.

Yesterday morning my wife and daughter cooked pancakes for breakfast.
There were a couple left over, sitting out on the kitchen counter. A
couple of hours after breakfast I ate one of them and decided to
give the other to the dogs, who were already hovering around. In
this situation I usually give Lucy her share first, partly in
guilty compensation for her other indignities and partly to keep
her from trying to steal Andy’s. So I tore off about
two-thirds of the pancake and gave it to Lucy.

Instead of darting off to a corner to gobble it down, which is
what she usually does with a treat, she stood staring at me,
pancake in mouth, eyes going back and forth between my face and
the remainder of the pancake in my hand, while Andy jumped up and
down beside her.

In order to get Andy’s share of the pancake she would
have had to drop her own, in which case Andy would have gotten
it. And she would in fact have ended up with less. She
couldn’t enjoy what she actually had in her possession
because she was too concerned about getting more, and could
easily have lost what she did have.

The applicability of this to human life needs no
elaboration.