Tammy vs Tommy

I'm sick again (which I'm sure I'll write about in whiny detail later) so I wasn't able to go out of town with my friends this weekend. The silver lining is that, since I'm staying home anyway, I can watch my god-daughter while her parents go up north.

My god-daughter, like my own children, nieces and nephews, is of the furry and four-legged variety. On our early-morning walk I was reminded how Jodee — that’s her name — embodies the canine cliché of stopping at every fire hydrant. My neighborhood, unlike her parents' street, has an awful lot of fire hydrants so we made a lot of stops. As I waited for Jodee to do her sniffing and things associated with stopping at a fire hydrant, I had to wonder what it is that compels her to live out the doggie stereotype.

There's the argument of nurture vs nature that psychologists, parents and whoever else has an opinion like to bring up when it comes to behavior. I can't imagine that Jodee, a former show dog, spent a lot of time hanging out around fire hydrants before being fostered by her current owners. So why is she so enthralled by them now?

For whatever reason, the nature/nurture question makes me think of how parents try to allow their children to make gender-centric choices on their own rather than simply giving Tammy a doll because she's a girl and Tommy a truck because he's a boy. I had three older brothers and I played with their toys and dreamt of blowing things up just as often as I played with Barbie and planned her dream wedding. Still, I think I ended up being more of a girly-girl than not (though I don’t cry often enough and enjoy action movies and toilet humor).

Anyway, back to the hydrants. The most logical answer is that all of the other dogs in my neighborhood, for whatever reason, all like to do their business around the fire hydrants and Jodee, with her large-mustached scnauz, is simply going to the places with the most stuff to sniff and investigate. But, again, I ask what is it that drew the dogs before Jodee to the hydrant in the first place? I'm sure if I looked around online I could find some canine psychologist with an answer but I'm not that bored yet. As it is, I'm off to rent movies for my convalescence — probably ones with stuff blowing up.