I was walking my dog this morning and thinking about the fact that I've been a bit negligent with the blogging. I was trying to decide what to write about because there are always a million blog topics swirling around in my brain...but the trouble with all of them is that they're kind of heavy, or involved, or something. It looked like today would be another day when I had too much to do to try to unwind any of those topics and write about them.
But walking the dog is a great time for thinking through things, which is what I was doing when I realized we'd been standing in one spot for a while. The dog was sniffing about furiously and finally I realized it might be the right time to pay attention. That's when I saw the disembodied rabbit's foot at my feet. I gave Bear a good yank and basically leapt over the foot, doing my best to drag him with me before he decided to help himself at the sidewalk buffet.
This got me thinking about the differences in what country dogs and city dogs encounter on an average walk. Fortunately, Bear is not obsessed with finding snacks when we're out and about. We can step around dead bats and birds, and rabbit legs too apparently. I appreciate this about him. Deeply.
Because when we lived in DC and later in Chicago, we had a dog who ate anything he could find. The dog was well fed, but that seemed to have no impact on his obsession with finding discarded "treats." He was like a vacuum cleaner for the city sidewalks. Half-eaten sandwiches, hot dogs, and fries were all fair game. Not to mention chicken bones. That dog could find and ingest a chicken bone faster than I can say chicken bone. Of course, none of these sidewalk delicacies could hold a candle to the time when he licked human vomit off the ground. I assure you, that little encounter resulted in my obsessive scanning of the sidewalk in front of me. It also got me wondering whether you could wash a pet's mouth out with soap, or at least some mouthwash.
Of course, it's good to have such an orally fixated dog in front of you when you're leaving your apartment on a hot summer evening and there's a rat on the steps outside your building. Then said animal can snatch up the rat, give it a good hard shake, and kill it on the spot, saving you the horror of a giant DC rat running across your sandaled foot. Which did, in fact, happen to a friend of mine one muggy summer night in DC. Fortunately, she was a few steps ahead of me and the rat ran over her foot and not mine. I know. I'm a true friend.
The rats rule that swampy town (and no, I'm not talking about the politicians). But that makes me wonder if the overpopulation of rats in DC is one of God's little inside jokes.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
lol, about the rats in DC!
And I remember our dogs dragging home all sorts of things when I lived with my parents. I think the worst thing we ever got was a decapitated owl head that had been perfectly sliced off clean.
It was really creepy because my pop said it might mean there was some occult practices nearby...I spent many a time wondering where, exactly, the occult practices were being practiced and hoping me and my brothers would not run across it in any of our sojourns.
YIKES!
Yikes is right! Why did he tell you that?
Last week we saw a hawk standing in our yard; it had something in its mouth, which we figured was a mouse. The next day, the boys found a decapitated bird in that spot. So I'd like to think that you had an enormous hawk engaged in owl decapitation on your property.
Post a Comment