I had an errand to run Sunday morning across town in Norwich so I used Asylum Street to take me towards East Great Plains (I don't know if there's a West Great Plains; there's an East Lyme and an Old Lyme and a Lyme (I wonder if Harry's estate sees any money from the invocation of the 'other' citrus fruit?)); suspect North Lyme went the way of New Coke, only faster) and drove past Arf Park at about 7 AM.
I apologize for Arf Bark-not the place itself but calling it that as it has a real name, and not being a dog owner or even frequent petter, I don't know it. In trying to find out what that real name might be, aside from "Mollify Anne" (sort of an inside joke) I came across this, which is kind of neat and something I'll bookmark because I'd like to think I'll come back to it, except I'll forget all about it for the next two or three hundred years. (I somehow doubt the "Official Site of the Norwich Navigators" sees a lot of action anymore since that team name went the way of china cups and virginity some time ago.)
The Norwich Dog Park, sounds better doesn't it?, but it's technically the Estelle Cohn Memorial Dog Park (I love all the information in the world I can think of at my fingertips! Sadly, as I'm easily distracted, I can start out for point A and disappear down a hyperlink rabbit hole faster than you can type html. Look where we are now! See what I mean?). As I drove past it on Sunday morning, it was eerily empty-I'd never seen it without dogs.
The Dog Park gets used an awful lot. I'm not sure if it has lights for night-walkies, but we're at the time of the year where that would be helpful and we have lights on the clay courts hardly anyone uses and at the hoops alongside the entrance to Mohegan Park that doesn't go anywhere anymore. The soccer field near Kelly Middle School has more floodlights than grass or footballers, so I'm not sure why the dog park doesn't have lights.
Dog owners are subsidizing all of this through their license fees (and I think they also collected the money to build the park at no cost to the pet-impaired part of the city's population) so why do so many people feel put upon or that they doing the owners a favor in setting aside an area for dogs. Fish have the whole ocean, and a counter in the supermarket-birds have the sky, so share and alike. Unless you're named either Sonny or Gregg in which case, it's spelled C-h-e-r.
Whenever, until Sunday, I drive past, I'm always impressed by the catholicity of canines who use the dog park and how well they all seem to get along, The canines serve as an example for bipeds with canine teeth with their ability to coexist though I like the idea of shaking hands a bit more than the practice of sniffing butts (Ally and Billie notwithstanding).
But Sunday morning, the park was empty, leading me to wonder if the dogs were at church. Might I be a more regular visitor myself if I had a dog? "Forgive me Father, for I have barked..." and will I now burn in poodle Purgatory for being less than seriously sincere about this? Hard to say-I did wonder about an afterlife in the Great Beyond for pets, but only for a moment, as a visit to Google, generated 22,700,000 references in 0.22 seconds about animals in heaven so I'm not the only wonderer (take that DiMucci). And now I can't help but wonder why not?
If there is, indeed, a heaven, it's filled with people even Mitch Albom might be surprised to encounter. I wonder if the strays, the four-legged and two, look for a handout at the backdoor of the Seahorse Grille. The sea breeze and salt air can be bracing, especially on an early Sunday morning, inland.
-bill kenny
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