It was less than an eye blink, the time it took for us to pass one another in the hallway of a common use building the other day and quite frankly the two folks heading in my direction were so engaged and engorged in their conversation I doubt they even realized I was there until I was gone, if even then.
For many of us, the story of our lives, but I digress because that's not the story today.
Bear in mind, I caught about two and half seconds of the conversation because that's about that was audible from the six or so feet away from each other we were when I could make out words being spoken and they seemed to sound like "so I asked her what's the difference between a dog we buy in Virginia for fifteen hundred dollars and a rescue animal we get here?"
I'm working on impulse control so I didn't immediately shoot my hand straight up in the air and beg 'call on me! call on me!" because I knew the answer, which was the difference is $1,500. That seemed too easy and in hindsight, I'm thinking that money aside, the larger issue was taking in an animal that had been abandoned more likely than not for having committed the sin of being inconvenient...We're moving and our new place doesn't allow pets...When I got her/him I didn't know the breed go so big....The color doesn't match the living room drapes.
All those two-bit weasel-worded alibis we offer here in the disposable age in which we live and where we jettison living creatures like they were day-old pate because they no longer suit us. Let's hope that idea never catches on across the universe, eh? Except, living in the material world as I do, and having the rental receipts to prove it, I got hung up on paying a thousand and a half dollars for a dog.
I'll tell you here we have no pets, and never have so if you're a "pet parent," this is probably a good time to move on because I tend to see you as a pet owner and you tend to see me as an oaf or an ogre. And that's fine.
My purely pecuniary point is that for that kind of money the animal needs to play a horn or ride a bike (a pony is a perfectly acceptable substitute) or do math problems or perhaps interpretive dance.
But returning to the more universal concern, there are are far more dogs and cats and Lord-knows-what in shelters who have done nothing to deserve being there and who will end their lives in those places not because anyone is so inherently evil and awful that they wish them harm but rather because those who seek out a companion seem to never look in their direction.
This is not a "cue Sarah McLachlan" moment by any means, though I guess it just became one, but if we really are the crown of creation as we tell ourselves we are, we have a concomitant responsibility of sorts to take care of the other travelers here on the Big Blue Marble.
And with all due respect to Steve Miller and Al Stewart, let's take to heart the words of James Osterberg even though the more I think about them, the more spooked I get.
-bill kenny
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