Oct 9, 2014 3 min read

The best thing that can happen in those chilly, early morning hours when you have had to wake up to go to the bathroom and then returned to bed for another two hours of sleep is to have a largish, furry dog curl up behind you, in the bend of your knees.

I have the perfect dog for this. Howard the Wheaten terrier is 50 pounds of warm, curly goodness. He starts every night on the hall floor outside my bedroom, probably to protect those of us who are sleeping. Sometime in the middle of the night, he pushes open my bedroom door and jumps onto my bed in a boisterous galumph that I normally sleep through.

When I wake at 4:55 (which I almost always do; my, I’m precise), Howie is at the foot of my bed, snoring. Lately, I’ve tried to coax him into the bend of my knees.

He ended up there once, during a thunderstorm, and it felt snuggly – at least to me it did. Something about the pressure of a warm dog against the back of my legs was therapeutic, in a masseuse kind of way. It’s the human version of Thundershirts, the garments you put on dogs to keep them from freaking out during storms. Apparently, pressure equals comfort.

So there I was the other morning, wanting a snuggle from Howard and he would not oblige. First I called him, and he kept snoring. Then I hooked my foot around his collar to try to pull him up to me, but that’s 50 pounds of dog, and he wasn’t budging.

And here I thought that being next to a human was every dog’s favorite thing. When I’m working at home during the day, Howard follows me everywhere. He’s under my desk when I’m writing, sprawled across the entrance to the kitchen when I’m cooking, and not more than two steps behind me when I’m walking around picking up after people.

“60 Minutes” did a story last Sunday on how scientists are learning how intelligent dogs really are. There’s a man who has trained his border collie to identify something like a thousand different toys.

The story went on to report that brain scans are proving dogs feel love and happiness when their owners are nearby, something that most dog owners would say they knew all along.

Why, then, will Howard not rouse himself enough to come and lie next to me in the morning? I patted the mattress next to me and called his name. Howard lifted his head, glared at me, snorted a little and went back to sleep.

If Howard wasn’t going to come to me, I would go to him. I grabbed my pillows and headed to the foot of the bed, rearranged the comforter, inverted my position and backed into the dog, wrapping myself around his sleeping body.

It was a lot of work, but worth it. I’d like to think the pleasure center of his brain was lighting up like a Christmas tree just then.

But no, he just slept through the whole thing.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.