Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

During our fifty-odd years of marriage my wife and I had a series of dogs. All different, yet all memorable. Still, a couple of them standout and those two pooches came from different ends of the spectrum. By that I mean that pets, particularly dogs, pick up some of the traits of their master. For instance, I had a friend who had a gosh awful stammer and his dog – a setter/boxer mix – developed a hesitant kind of bark. When someone came to the door, the animal would rush over and try to get out a “woof-woof,” but most of the times couldn’t manage it. Best he could do was growl, then whine and finally get off a single “ruff” then run and hide beneath a breakfront from embarrassment.

I guess it was because both my wife and I are Jewish that a setter we had for thirteen years became Kosher somewhere along the way. Believe me, it was nothing we planned. The animal grew up on Puppy Chow and a few table scraps, but started refusing to eat anything but our Kosher cuts of meat (chicken, too). We were young marrieds at the time and living on a tight budget, so feeding rib steaks and brisket to a fast growing pup became a bit pricey.

My wife, who is a real “out-of-the box” thinker (a math major in college) came up with the idea of buying Kosher style meat at the supermarket, instead of the more costly fare at the Kosher butcher. You would think that that would do the job on my Kosher gourmet, but it didn’t. Before the few slices of brisket were unwrapped, Clyde would slink away and hide under the couch until we broke out a decent piece of corned beef, you know the real McCoy from Hebrew National.

Being a college grad myself, I reasoned that since the animal couldn’t read he must be alerted to the un-Kosher meat because of the Waldbaum bag it came in. Well, nothing with four legs was going to outsmart me, so I kept some bags from the Kosher butcher hidden in the garage and changed the salami we bought at the supermarket to a “Kosher” bag and cut the salami up into thin strips – just the way he liked it – and put it in his bowl. You can’t imagine the look he gave me as he stalked away after sniffing out the ersatz salami.

That episode ended our efforts to “fool” the dog, after all if he wanted to keep Kosher, there must be something Talmudic going on. Just what we weren’t sure, but who were we to argue. So Clyde lived out his allotted dog-span years with no further machinations from us, except for the time I tried to take him to Temple . “No way!” my wife said. “It’s either him or me, kiddo – take your pick!” And I did.

Epilogue: In my formative years while living with my parents we adopted a Boston bulldog, who, we learned, turned out to be a “closet” anti-Semite. But that’s a tale for another day.