PUPPY-DOG DIALOGUE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (04-22-21)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     Every day for a little over a year, my dog Gidget and I take a walk around the block. It's a pandemic thing. We've been doing it so long that it seems a little like the movie "Rear Window," only in the front. I know everything that goes on in the neighborhood now, there's a rhythm to it.

     Gidget used to be afraid of other dogs, and I long for those days, because now she is into every dog's business in the neighborhood. "Hey," Gidget says, "did you hear that barking at the end of the street? I definitely heard the words 'Gidget,' 'emergency' and 'bacon.' Look, we better get down there and see what's going on." All of a sudden my dog is one of the "Real House-Dogs of New York," and she knows all the gossip going around. I'm not so sure any of this a good thing, because I watch a lot of Judge Judy, and half the cases she decides are dogs biting other dogs, cats and mail carriers. I don't want to be another victim, especially one that doesn't get mail anymore. I suggest you keep your dog busy by giving it a bone, preferably not one that came out of my body.

     Gidget gets a half-mile walk twice a day up and down our street. When we get down to the end of the road, a poodle named Peanut comes bounding out of her house at a million miles an hour. She gets about 20 feet away and stops, because Gidget looks much smaller from the kitchen window. She waits for reinforcements to come, a bigger and much older dog who lives there too. That dog is barking so hard I'm afraid she's going to spit out her dentures. She's barking out orders like, hey, you kids keep off the damn lawn, and get away from that mailbox, and go find your own house, and if I see you around here again I'm calling the cops, etc. Gidget seems unfazed by it and loses interest, although she does want to see what's so special about the mailbox. But we ease on down the road.

     There's a big black dog that lives at the other end of the street, he has big teeth and looks like he works out and seems like he could be a problem if he goes off his medications. He's part Labrador and part alligator, a Labragator if you will, and I recommend that you don't. If he's out on a walk Gidget likes to trash-talk him because she can see that he's on short, heavy chain, the kind that hold cruise ships to their moorings. If he's ever out on a longer leash we'll see if my dog can actually break the sound barrier.

     The family across the street from him is always milling around in their driveway on their phones. Either the reception is better out there or they're calling whoever who has the key to their house. There's another lady who's always sitting in her car at the end of the road. I assume she's waiting for her kids to get off the bus, but I'm not even sure she has kids. Maybe you just need to get out of the house once in a while during a pandemic.

     Two doors down from her there's a guy who's always pulling these tiny flowers out of his lawn. Oops, that's me. These damn little white flowers pop up all over my lawn and they make me nuts. I could spray the whole area with herbicide, but I'm afraid I would infect the water table because we get our water from a well. If the well is unwell, and I die of neurotoxins from the herbicide, I can imagine those stupid flowers having the last laugh. So I pull them out one by one and water-board them for information about where they came from, and I got two ticks on me the other day from spending so much time out there. Which reminds me, why don't they invent a tick collar for humans? It would look dumb, you say? Listen, Flavor Flav wore that stupid clock around his neck every day and nobody said a word about it. I bet he had ticks AND he probably still said he lost track of the time when he was late to a meeting.

     I have to go, it's almost time for our walk. They say that when America goes back to work, millions of dogs are going to go through exercise withdrawal. When I ever go back to work my dog will have to go back to doing whatever it was doing when I wasn't there, clipping supermarket coupons, making candles to sell on Etsy, hacking into Twitter accounts, that sort of thing.