Last Saturday, July 31st, I had my final trip to the dog park for some time, before moving to a different neighborhood. I had visited that dog park almost every day, summer and winter, often twice a day, for almost three years. When I first got Rosie, the things that convinced the family I was adopting her from that I was a good choice were that (a) I worked at home (I didn't tell them I was more or less willfully unemployed) and (b) I lived within spitting distance of a very nice dog run, and planned to take her there every day.
The first day I got her I walked her over to the dog park, but as soon as she heard the dogs barking, she put the brakes on and refused to get any closer. The next day she let me take her inside, but she basically spent the whole time sitting on a bench and drooling with anxiety. Over the course of a few weeks, she got more and more comfortable, until she started to play—and I mean play. Rosie used to make it happen at that dog park. She would run into a quiet scene, tail wagging, howling, and just start sprinting in circles until all the dogs were chasing her and having fun. She lived for the dog park. If we didn't go one day, because it was raining, or some other reason, she was nigh miserable, barking and begging me to play with her. She was a puppy, and she had a puppy's energy and enthusiasm for play.
We very shortly developed a routine of going twice a day, sometimes for more than an hour at a time, and I started to become part of a community. Rosie had her friends that she especially liked to play with and who used to come to the park at about the same time as us, and I started to become friends with their owners—not all that dissimilar from the way in which my parents became friends with the parents of me and my siblings' childhood friends. The people I especially became close to were the ones who seemed just as dedicated as I was to giving our dogs the joy they sought from the social atmosphere of the dog park. We continued to go every day, even into the winter, through the snow storms and -15ºF weather. After that first winter was over, we exchanged cellphone numbers, so that we could text each other before we left, and make sure we met at the dog park. We would gossip about this dog, or that dog owner, or the fight that occurred the other day, or the crazy person that screamed at us about how our dogs were agents for disease. We found commonalities and forged emotional connections; we became friends.
As time marched on, Rosie grew, and she slowly lost much of her playful enthusiasm. She was mellowing out as an adult, and I was certainly appreciative of it—goodness knows I'd been yearning for it for a while. But I missed some of her puppy frolicking and friskiness. Days would go by when she wouldn't play in the park at all, just sniff around, sometimes hunting for the rats that had set up burrows underneath the garden that surrounded the run. When the weather was especially cold, she would look miserable and shiver, instead of warming up by running around, and when the weather was especially hot, she would potentially play for about thirty seconds before stopping to pant helplessly and drool.
Once Rosie began to play less, now over two years into the time that I'd owned her, we started to only go to the dog park once a day, and if she wasn't playing within the first fifteen or twenty minutes, I'd often snap the leash on and leave. And I noticed more and more annoying people inhabiting the run. Not that there were any more than there used to be, but once Rosie wasn't playing, I had ample opportunities to look around and see owners derelict in their duties: not paying attention, not picking up after their dogs, allowing their aggressive dogs to go about unchecked, and generally being willfully ignorant of their dog's and their own behavior and how it was affecting others.
I wrote some time ago about a woman who hit her dog in the park one day. That woman continued to come back to the park even after that incident, although I never again saw her hit her dog. She is clearly "not all there," though. She is an older woman, over 60 I think, obese, and African-American. She rides a bicycle into the run, with her little Maltese in the basket. She often wears very strange-looking hats and not enough else. She also developed a deep affection for Rosie, whom she referred to as "The Little Beagle," at least partly because I never took the time to give her Rosie's real name. She was mostly obsessed with Rosie because on one of the first days she noticed her, she said, "Hello, Little Beagle! HELLO Little Beagle!" and when Rosie turned to look at her, she was smitten. "He knows he's a Beagle! He looks at me when I call him a Beagle" she said over and over again, to which I mumbled, "She looks at anyone that yells at her excitedly." I didn't enjoy having a woman I'd seen beat her own dog cooing over Rosie, no matter how harmless it was.
On that last morning I went to the dog park, last Saturday, this crazy woman was in the park. I had headed there with a good deal of sadness in my heart, but mostly hope for the future. Nonetheless, this park had been a daily fixture of my life, and a means for making me feel part of a community in a way that I never had before. I had and have a lot of positive associations with it, and knowing that I was moving away from it, possibly for good, was bittersweet. As I walked in with Rosie, the place was reasonably crowded, being a nice summer morning on a Saturday, and one of the few less-than-horribly-humid days there had been in a while.
When Rosie pooped in one corner of the run, I picked up the shovel and headed over to clean up after her. Apparently, a middle-aged white man, probably in his late 40s or early 50s, had picked up his child, who looked like she was at least partly Pacific Islander, and dropped her over the fence, into the dog park, so that she could sit on a bench and watch the dogs. He remained outside the fence, looking in. This all happened right before I went to pick up Rosie's poop, but all right near the poopsite itself. Technically, people without dogs are not supposed to go into the dog park. There is a sign outside that says so: "no dogs without people, and no people without dogs." It's one of my biggest dog park-related pet peeves when people enter the run without a dog; it is not a petting zoo. And people with children are often the worst offenders, as all they are thinking about is how fun it will be for their young child to interact with the dogs, and not what it means to the dog owners and the dogs themselves. Some dogs don't like children, and some children will grab and poke and pull dogs, no matter how gentle you think they are. The surest way I have found to get people with children and no dogs to leave is to tell them "it's a liability issue." They're not happy about it, but they usually get the message. The crazy lady, the one I mentioned earlier, took it upon herself to deal with this issue, and being a crazy person, she did not deal with it in the same calm, rational manner I would have attempted.
"GET YOUR FUCKING DAUGHTER OUT OF HERE! YOU CAN'T BE IN HERE WITHOUT A DOG!"
This is when I was near the situation, and as the middle-aged man was climbing over the fence, announcing, "Try and stop me!" I felt like maybe I should step in and calmly assert that the run is community-managed, and it really is against the rules to be in there without a dog, but before I could get one word out of my mouth, the situation descended into chaos. The crazy lady, who is African-American herself, started calling the white guy a nigger: "You're a nigger! YOU'RE A NIGGER! AND SO'S HER MOTHER [referring to the daughter]!"
The middle-aged man yelled back, "You better watch it or I'll punch you in the fucking nose!"
"YOU'RE A NIGGER, AND YOUR DAUGHTER'S A NIGGER! SHE'S A NIGGER! A GODDAMNED NIGGER!"
The daughter was, at most ten-years-old. And promptly burst into tears. A third party yelled that they should both shut the fuck up, but that just precipitated more yelling from both sides, until finally the crazy lady left.
There is so much horribleness in this story that I'm not really sure it's worth dissecting—I think it's fairly evident. It took another twenty minutes before the little girl stopped crying. Rosie and I stayed there for another thirty minutes or so. I was desperate for this to not be our last experience in this dog park. In the end, though, it was fairly fitting. Things change, people change, communities change, dogs grow up, and perspectives shift. The dog park was a wonderful part of my and Rosie's life when we needed it, and in the way we needed it, and it always will be. The positives cannot truly be measured, and the negatives were always there, if not so plainly evident. The community of the dog park fostered a lot of goodwill and friendship—there was definitely a sense that we were all there for each other, as dog owners. It also gave people the sense that they can use their anger and frustration to tear a little girl to shreds. I will miss so much of it, but I know that both Rosie and I are ready to move on to a new chapter, and that is, in the end, growing up.
1 comment:
Oh, Dan, you are so wise and good.
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