This might be a metaphor. Mostly it’s just a rant.
Walking my precious baabookins, Keely, through the local neighborhood is usually relaxing.
Except when I’m being stalked by Trust Fund Poster Couple and their yappy brat of a dog.
Okay, they weren’t stalking me. We were all out having a casual evening stroll with our dogs, and they happened to to end up walking the same stretch of road I was. This is an very private enclave in Mid-Town, with no sidewalks but its own park, so walking on the road is just how it’s done.
Anyway, these two had apparently stumbled out of a Brooks Brothers advertisement for casual rich people. She, of course, was blond and pregnant. He, of course, was tall and whitebread-handsome and holding the dog’s leash.
Neither one of them paid the least bit of attention to the dog. It was clearly just a prop.
It was a cute dog, but it was on a retractable leash that unspooled out to about 40 feet, from which it liked to lunge excitedly at…everything.
Trees. Cars. Me. Keely.
And this couple? They did not care.
I dwaddled to let them pass me at a respectable distance, which, if no one ever taught you, is how you deal with annoying people who walk near the same speed you do. You do not pace them. You do not run in front of them. You let your dog smell the 307th tree-of-interest for the evening and let Super Oblivious Couple and Their Obnoxious Dog go their own way.
I even went to the other side of the street because their dog kept running backwards to lunge at Keely. Mind you, these were friendly lunges. This was not a dog out to wreck havoc, it was just so excited that it could not stop itself. Keely was still freaked out by it, though, and I was not any happier. The guy never reeled in the dog until the leash snapped to its end, and he never paid attention to it lunging. But we were all far enough apart that I figured I could, at least, make it out of the neighborhood (pssshhhh, like I could afford to live there? No. Ha!) with both Keely’s and my nerves intact.
Naturally, Too White to Bite Couple just had to cross the road and then stop to talk to a friend. So I wandered over to the other side again and tugged Keely along to keep her from getting distracted by Dog of Desperation lunging on its leash at us.
Look, here’s the deal, and they should have known this: let the person walking the dog that your dog keeps lunging at to pass and move on. Spend an extra 20 seconds chatting with your neighbor and then go back to your Upper Middle Class stroll.
But not this couple. No, they start walking. Right. Behind. Me.
Either I had to jog to escape them, or about-face and walk the other way and make the walk twice as long because that’s how the roads wind.
The whole time, their dog kept trying to lunge at us, and this couple did shit to stop it, they were too busy staring into each other’s eyes or something. I don’t know. Keely was freaked and I was powerwalking and honestly? I feel really bad for that dog. It’s not getting attention, it has no manners, and I suspect once the baby is born that dog is either going to get shipped off or shucked out into the yard.
And I say that because I know people, I’m a writer, I watch and I study and analyze. Those kids? Don’t care about anyone else. They don’t feel like they need to pay attention to their surroundings, because they expect their surroundings to part for them. They might be good and honest and hard working, but they are also oblivious and selfish and rude.
Maybe that’s a lot to extrapolate from such a non-encounter with them.
Maybe not.
That poor dog.