The New York Times runs a weekly feature about what semi-famous people do with their Sunday mornings. Yesterday it was about a couple who serve a Coca-Cola-marinated pot roast to guests for dinner. Their strange confession reminded me of my grad school bachelor days, when Sundays meant the single guys in town would gather at my place to craft elaborate meals from highly processed ingredients—like Bob’s bone-in ham baked in Tang, the powdered orange juice (is it still around?)—which we’d eat while watching the Bears lose yet another game, more pathetically every week.
That Tang-soaked ham stands out in my tattered memories of those days—the conversation centered not on football, but on the sexual exploits, real or imagined, of the gathered host, so I’m fuzzy on the details—because it offered Alex, “my” 90-pound Weimaraner, the chance to make what must be called a moral choice.**
Bob had come over early, at 11:00 AM, to put his ham in the oven while I contemplated the complexities of cooking powdered mashed potatoes and frozen green beans. We drank a few Budweisers as he pierced the bright-orange mound of meat with 20 whole cloves. “What’s with the cloves,” I asked, although i had seen hams similarly bristling with little black climbing hooks at Easter dinners; I had never bothered to ask about their function, and I didn’t expect an answer from Bob, like me a grad student who worked construction to pay his bar tab at Bill & Rog’s.
“Well, it gives the ham a piquant flavor, offsets the sweetness of the Tang, you know? My mother stuck it into everything. She’d sprinkle it on ice cream, even.” I was surprised. “And it has health benefits. It’s got a chemical compound in it, eugenol, that kills cancer cells, kills bacteria, e coli and plaque, too.” Now I was astounded: “How the fuck do you know this, are you making shit up?” He said, “No, my brother tells me all this stuff” (his brother was a distinguished professor in the Chemistry department at Northern Illinois University). “And it’s good for your liver, which you oughta know.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Jesus, who knew cloves were that important? Fucking cloves!” Bob shoveled the ham into the oven, and I got out the appetizers, chips and store-bought onion dip. The other guys arrived before noon with their 12-packs, schnapps, and Scotch; we started with some shots. Meanwhile I unwrapped the green beans, put them in a pan to boil, mixed the potatoes with milk and water. The ham came out at 12:45, but Bob insisted it had “to rest before we slice it.” So we put it on a huge platter, left it on the kitchen counter, and got ourselves seated in the living room for the 1:00 game.
Ten minutes into the first quarter, Alex comes—what?—sidling out of the kitchen with that whole 7-pound ham between his teeth, tapered end in his mouth. He’s moving deliberately, ears back, head and tail down, but that tail is wagging slowly, expectantly, interrogatively. He stops and waits for a response to his formal presentation of a moral choice.
Now, Alex could have just gobbled the whole damn ham in the kitchen, figuring it was worth the inevitable punishment. He could have torn off a bite or two, hoping for a reduced sentence. He could have begged from the guys as they were eating, knowing that a few of us would’ve handed over some ham. But he didn’t—he chose to ask our permission to eat a fair portion, just like any civilized human being does implicitly, without words, when he or she sits down to eat dinner as a guest.
We all laughed riotously, but briefly, because we quickly realized the genuine gravity of the situation. Alex was asking us to acknowledge that he was welcome him in our midst as a sentient being who could do, and had done, the right thing. I said, “OK, Alex, drop it, good boy.” He did, so I picked it up, took it into the kitchen, wiped it off, and sliced him a thick slab, which I put on a regular dinner plate and placed on the living room floor, where he could watch the game with us.
I punished Alex after that when did the wrong thing, like eating Volume III of Lenin’s Collected Works (The Development of Capitalism in Russia [1899], the man’s best book). But I knew, in doing so, that he understood exactly what the stakes and the choices were. His moral capacity was undiminished until he died.
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**I put the possessive in quotation marks because Alex was nobody’s hound. He was his own dog. The story of Ralph the demon predator, inspired by today’s story in The Guardian about the “goblin mode,” follows shortly.