Before we got a dog, I did what I do with most decisions I’d rather not make: I priced it.
Friends who owned dogs all gave me some version of the same warning. Get one only when you’re prepared to be the primary caregiver. Whatever your kids promise about walking and feeding, assume the job lands on you. I heard that as a cost estimate, and for years it functioned as one. My daughters asked. I ran the numbers. The numbers said no.
They were right about the work. I want to be clear about that, because I’ve since met people who think the warning was exaggeration, and it wasn’t. The walking is mine. The feeding is mine. The 2:27 a.m. run to CVS for hydrogen peroxide after a skunk got him in the backyard was largely mine.
What the estimate got wrong was the category. I had filed the labor as the price of the dog — the thing you pay in order to have him — when the labor turned out to be the thing that made him mine. Had the girls done the walking and the feeding, I’d have had a pet in the house. Instead I have a first son who parks himself under my desk and nudges my wrist when he’s decided I’ve typed enough.
This accounting error is the same one people make about civic life.
Ask someone why they don’t serve on a board, run for a seat, or show up to the meetings that actually decide things, and you’ll usually get a cost estimate. The hours. The aggravation. The email from a resident about something that sounds, at first, like a contrived inconvenience. All of it real. All of it correctly forecast. And all of it filed as the price of participation rather than the mechanism of it — the friction that turns an abstraction called “the city” into a specific set of people whose names you know.
I’ve never met anyone who came out the other side of the work and described it as a transaction they regretted paying. However, I’ve met plenty who declined it on the strength of an estimate that was accurate down to the decimal and wrong about what they were buying.
None of which I was thinking about three years ago, on the morning of Aug. 1, when I stood beside the road looking into the trees for what I was certain would be a body.
My latest Dallas Morning News column is about Coco Maxx, the worst morning of the last decade, and the math I got wrong.
An excerpt:
“Coco Maxx made me a better husband, father and friend; he influenced me to be less selfish and more present. My friends were right about the work and wrong about the math. Had my daughters done the walking and the feeding, all I’d have is a dog. The job stayed mine, and I got the better end of the deal.”
Read the full column: Smith: My dog is a lot of work and sometimes terror. He’s worth it
Quote of the Week
“Control has completely overtaken character.”
— Heather Manchin, daughter of independent Sen. Joe Manchin, a former Democrat, and CEO of Americans Together, speaking on Face the Nation about how both political parties have lost their way.