There is a checkpoint at my front door now. It has four legs and a tail, and it does not care about your receipt.
Noodle came home from the shelter at eleven months old with ears that point in two different directions and a firm opinion about basically everything. Six years later I still cannot tell him he is wrong about anything, mostly because he has never once looked uncertain.
The groceries are his jurisdiction. He hears the trunk close from the back bedroom and gets to the door before I do. The first bag gets one long sniff from the outside. If that sniff comes back interesting, the inspection begins.
Here is the process, as far as I can tell. Bag one gets circled twice. Bag two gets sat on. If a bag crinkles in a way he approves of, he follows it to the counter, sits down, and looks up with the face of a man who has heard a rumor and would like it confirmed.
If you have met Otis, the black lab mix who hands out gifts to every guest at the door, you already know this personality type. The difference is that Otis gives things away and Noodle takes inventory.
The carrots get dismissed without comment. I bought the carrots. I would like some credit for the carrots. He moves on to the next bag as if the carrots were a formality, which, to him, they were.
The rotisserie chicken triggers a full alert. Last week he stood up on his back legs, put both front paws on the counter, and gave me a look we both understood: we can do this the easy way or the easy way.
He does not get the chicken. That is the part nobody believes when I tell this story. He does not get the chicken and he does not sulk about it. He files the information away and shows up again next week to check whether anything has changed.
What he actually wants is not the food. It took me years to work that out. He wants to be the first member of the household to know what came through the door. If I open a bag in another room, he is standing there before the paper settles. If I sneak a bag of chips past him, he finds out, and then he sits next to me while I eat them. Not begging. Just present, the way a building inspector is present.
My husband has a theory that Noodle is not inspecting the groceries at all and is instead checking whether any of it smells like the dog park. There is no evidence for this theory. I have also been unable to rule it out.
One honest note, because the internet is a place where somebody will try this at home: the bags that skip inspection entirely are the ones with medication in them. If a pharmacy bag comes home, it goes straight into a closed cabinet. Some of that stuff, naproxen among it, can hurt a dog badly enough that one tablet means a vet visit. Noodle inspected a bag of grapes exactly once, and I have never moved that fast in my life.
The eggs are the other problem. Eggs require a delicate hand, and Noodle has never met a delicate hand. There was an incident in March. We do not discuss the incident. What I will say is that he looked at the puddle, then at me, then at the puddle, and walked off with the confidence of a dog who has decided the matter is closed.
He has never carried a single bag in his life. What he does is stand in the doorway, tail going, supervising the arrival of forty dollars of vegetables with the seriousness of a customs officer who has found something and is now deciding how to handle it.
It is not a useful contribution. I would not trade it. Somebody in this house should be excited about the groceries.