A Beautiful Morning

A break in the heat and humidity made it a gorgeous summer morning, and I was in great spirits because after 13 and a half miserable hours the day before, the power had finally come back on–and was still on. What a storm that was!

I’d gotten to the farmers’ market early enough to claim some of the luscious organic tomatoes and cucumbers I wait for all year, and I was chatting with the farmer, friendly, rather idle conversation, about the nasty storm (his power still wasn’t on), past nasty storms (the time a power line fell across his driveway), organic gardening, and the beautiful weather we were blessed with that morning, my dog, Elika, sitting calmly at my feet, the guitarist playing in the band shell in the middle of the grassy square, the smell of fresh bread and cut flowers.

The conversation took a sad turn when the farmer told me he’d had to put a horse down over the weekend, his daughter’s horse. He told me how much his daughter loved that horse, how they used to go to shows, what pals they were. She’s a college student now, lives out of state, but had been home for the weekend. Her horse’s intestines had burst into his diaphragm; a genetic weakness, the vet said, something he was most likely born with. I said it was a blessing that the horse had waited for his daughter to come home. He looked at me oddly, maybe wondering if I was joking. I told him I was serious. It was a blessing that they got to say goodbye.

 

Trouble

We didn’t have to try to change the subject because a woman a few feet away asked me if it was safe to approach the booth. I wasn’t sure what she meant until she pointed to my dog, my sweet Elika, who was calmly sitting, leashed, at my feet.

I assured the woman that Elika was perfectly safe; still the woman hesitated, then told me she used to have a dog just like mine—an American Eskimo mini. Her dog, though, had been very aggressive.

The woman catapulted into a long, frantically told story about this dog, this Eskie, and her two other dogs, Shelties, and how they sometimes got along and sometimes didn’t get along, and how the Eskie, a male, was very aggressive, would bark and bark and bark like a crazy creature when someone came to the door. (I added that my Elika used to be that way, too, just so the woman wasn’t talking to herself. I didn’t say that the behavior was actually territorial, not aggressive, but that’s what I was thinking.)

The woman said her Eskie, when he was barking madly at the door, would sometimes nip at the other dogs if they got in the way. I wanted to ask how she responded to this behavior, but I held my tongue. Then one day, she said, when a delivery person came to the door, the Eskie attacked one of the Shelties, grabbed the side of its face. Well, she said, she took the Eskie to the vet that very day. I thought, she took the Eskie to the vet? What for?

She told that vet she just couldn’t have this behavior in her house, couldn’t abide her Shelties getting hurt.

And I, not quite believing what I was hearing, said, “Wait. You had the dog put down?”

Yes, she said, what else could she do?

I turned and thanked the farmer for his gorgeous tomatoes, promising to come back next week. The woman was still talking about how she had to put the dog down, she couldn’t put up with that behavior. I turned to face her and said the first full sentences I’d managed to utter since she’d begun talking: “This was a training issue. It was your job to train your dog. Excuse me. I have to leave now.”

As Elika and I walked away, the woman launched into an even higher gear, her voice shrill and accusatory (accusing me?) explaining (trying to convince herself?) that the situation was just too dangerous, that the dogs had all lived together for four years, and if he was going to attack a dog that he’d known for four years, well, he just couldn’t be trusted, and it was an awful wound, and blah, blah, blah. Elika and I kept walking. I said a silent prayer for the lost dog. I tried not to think dark thoughts about the woman, who clearly had no clue. I thought about the vet who had carried out this death sentence.

 

Two goodbyes, one said with love and sorrow, one said with ignorance and fear.

 

 

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