We got to close to forty-five degrees, with a light breeze and mostly clear skies yesterday in these parts which was a lot nicer than the grey day we endured as the year began on Friday.
I went for a walk right up the street from our house (two-plus years on and I'm still not tired of typing 'our house') where Lincoln Avenue meets Washington Street (I call it the Presidents Day Intersection because my last original idea died of loneliness) on what's known as Chelsea Parade.
My goal, which I achieved (and I mention that because there will be too many days in this new year when I don't achieve my goals) was to make six full circuits around Chelsea Parade as part of my attempt at ten thousand steps a day. I know from experience it usually takes me about fifty-five minutes or so to do it. The older I get the slower I am. I can't change that; it's Science.
On my second lap, I crossed paths briefly with a man with a greyhound on a leash. They never look anything like the bus so I'm always a little wary of them and I realize it's the way they're made but I'm of the 'Cassius has a lean and hungry look' frame of mind when seeing them. Chasing mechanical rabbits will do that I guess; great chasing but lousy eating.
The greyhound seemed to neither know nor care that he was on a leash or with a human and paid me even less mind as we parted ways where the sidewalk splits the Parade between the statue of the Union Soldier and the memorials we've erected to those who've served in almost all the other conflicts.
I just realized as I was typing that sentence that I don't recall commemoratives for The Barbary War, The War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, or the Spanish-American War, among way too many conflicts in my opinion which is why I added 'almost' in there). If we just memorialized one-third of the wars on that list, we'd have no grass at all on the Parade because every square inch would have a monument. Not sure bellicosity is a word but if it were it would describe us to a 'T.'
Anyway on my last lap, coming from the opposite direction was a really big guy with those 3/4 pants that I'm never sure if they're intended to be shorts or if he beat up his kid brother and took his jeans, with a dog so large that, under the right circumstances, could easily blot out the sun.
I'm five feet eight inches tall and this dog's back was about level with the nipples on my chest (I was wearing a shirt so you'll have to take my word for this). He was the kind of dog that grows even larger as you approach him/her/it. The man had a fistful of chain tightly wrapped around his right hand as they walked and I made it a point to step from the sidewalk onto the grass to make sure however the dog defined its space that it had all it needed.
I'm not a dog person. I'm not an animal person, actually. And as many people around here can attest, I'm barely a people person. I socially-distanced decades before Dr. Fauci advocated it and the Orange Shitstain mocked it and have sixty-eight-plus years on my tachometer (so far) to show for my caution.
As the pair continued to walk toward me I noticed the man had a black bag in his left hand for, umm, doggie souvenirs. We have 'clean up after your dog' ordinances on the books and posted for owners since dog literacy rates are so sadly low and about twenty feet in front of me the dog paused and squatted and its owner had reason to use the bag, which as I passed him, I now realized was actually one of those black plastic forty-two-gallon contractor bags.
That's a lot of plastic bag but, as I said, that was a lot of dog, as well. By this point it was straining oblivious to my existence while engaged in its ejection activities when the owner and I locked eyes for a moment as I passed and offered what I intended as encouragement, 'I guess even the best of us suffer from performance anxiety.' In light of the glare (the owner, not the animal) I received it may be wiser if I spend the rest of January getting my steps in on the treadmill in our basement.
-bill kenny
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