Go Ahead And Bite Me

 We have a neighbor who takes her little dog out each morning. Usually this is early enough that my wife and I are still in bed. We are awakened by the same basic interaction every day: 

DOG: Arf, arf, arf!

NEIGHBOR: Quiet!

DOG: Arf, arf, arf!

NEIGHBOR: Stop barking!

This is the way they roll. Yelling at one another like an old married couple who yell at each other. My wife and I make an attempt to empathize. We had a dog. She barked at the mailman. Without fail. That was when she saw him. Most of the time she was napping and missed the chance to fulfill a stereotype. This was also somewhere between the hours of ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. Not at dawn. 

It was early in the morning when my younger brother and I made our way out of the hotel where we had spent the night in beautiful Broomfield, Colorado. We were gearing up for our eleven hour trek to Elko, Nevada. That was the halfway point we had chosen as a stopping point on our way back to California. Coming down the stairs to the lobby, we spied a woman coming through the door with a pair of healthy Black Labradors. The dogs were seemingly unclear about just how to get through the door without piling into one another and straining on their leashes. My brother and I paused on the stairway to let her and her puppy pals make it inside. Then we descended. 

On my way out, I paused and looked back at the dogs. I addressed the one who seemed to be most challenged, "Good dog."

I was met with a quick flurry of warning barks. First from the dog, then from the woman at the end of the leash.

"Can't you see they're in training?"

I apologized, not having meant anything but a connection with a fellow resident on the planet. 

This was not enough for the woman whose attention was now fully on correcting me. "You don't do that! It's not cute!"

I apologized again.

"You're not sorry!" And then she called my a name. It wasn't "dog lover." I kept moving and my younger brother and I let the door close with her still yelling after me. 

"Have a good day," I said to no one in particular.

And I felt immediately bad for the dogs who were most likely to be on the receiving end of the invective that I was now missing. 

Suddenly those early morning family interactions with my neighbor seemed much more relaxed. My younger brother and I got into our rental car and headed west.