Dog Park Drama

Noah and his karmic buddy Cody

When Rob and Megan left  to visit his family in Minneapolis. Noah was feeling down in the dumps because his primary human had left (I’m a distant second in the Noah scheme of things), so I decided that if the weather cooperated, I would take him to the dog park early today. Around five that day, it was cloudy and marginally cooler (93) and the air smelled of rain. I hoped for a synchro and brought along a book, figuring the park would be empty. It wasn’t.

Cody’s human, Karin, had already arrived and set up the doggie tarp pool. Several other women were also there whose names I don’t know. But I could pick their dogs out of a police lineup – Thunder and Bruno, big, gentle boys; Lou and Bru, a pair of Dobermans who are major Frisbee players; Lily, a playful black lab; an Obama pooch (non allergenic) who is on meds for epileptic seizures; and then Mia and Bandit, a Husky and Corgi who belong to Rob’s private yoga student, Diana.

This group typically congregates around the dog pool, in the middle park (there are four adjoining parks for various sizes of dogs). Another group of dogs and their humans occupy a vastly shady area  on the far side of the other large dog park. In this group are some lazy collies and a couple of smaller dogs. Of these dogs, I know Mikey – a busy little terrier who enjoys humans, greets the people who know his name, but who generally spends about two hours crisscrossing the park with his nose to the ground. He wants to play with other dogs, enjoys chasing and being chased, but every time he starts doing this, his human – let’s call her Dot – calls him on it, her voice echoing across the park like the shrill cry of a banshee.

“Mikey, Mikey, get over here!”

Several days ago, Mikey trotted over to our group to greet everyone, and suddenly a man came hurrying after him, shouting his name, with Dot hurrying along behind him. Karin remarked, “Mikey likes our side of the park.”

Dot gave Karin the strangest, coldest look, and sniped, “Yeah, he likes hanging out with the lower class.”

Karin and I just looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Did she really say that?” I asked.

It turned out that Karin and Dot had arrived at the park at the same time that day and Dot  told Karin that Cody should be banned from the park. “He plays too roughly.”

Karin,  a non-confrontational woman,  simply shrugged. “That’s how dogs play.”

Dot  is odd. She always wears a hat, long sleeved shirts  and long pants – even when it’s 101 out – and carries a bag that contains who knows what. Dot never says hello to anyone except the people she sits with on the far side of the park. Even if you greet her, she pretends she hasn’t heard you. She never picks up Mikey’s poop.

It started raining about half an hour after I arrived and we all moved under shelters. The people on the far side of the park moved with their dogs into the area where we were huddled. The rain didn’t last long and we returned to our benches and  the dogs went about their business. Suddenly, several of us saw Cody chasing Mikey and saw Dot whip out her insect repellent and spray it into  Cody’s eyes.

It’s the kind of abuse that riles people, that riled me, that prompted Karin to shoot to her feet. “That does it,” Karin snapped. “She did this once the other day and I didn’t confront her yesterday, but now I’ve had it.” She headed for Dot, with the Doberman’s human and I hurrying along to support her.

Dot was already on her cell, talking to 911, rambling on about how a woman half her age (Karin’s 54, which would put Dot at 108 – slight exaggeration) and twice her size was in her face, harassing her. Karin and I and the Doberman human exploded with laughter. Dot rambled on like this for several minutes and then hurried over to her clutch of buddies for “protection.”

Someone washed out Cody’ eyes while this was going on, we stuck around longer than usual so Karin would have witnesses, and the police eventually arrived – two undercover drug cops. Dot hurried out to greet them, to get in her side of the story. The rest of us waited in our area.  These two young, tough-looking guys finally made their way to us.

Shift change. That’s why we had armed undercover drug boys instead of, well, dog park boys. They basically said that Dot has some screws loose, they told her to forget the bug spray, and that if it happened again, Karin could call Animal Care and Control and file a complaint.  “But the real problem,” says one cop,” is that this dog park is nicer than most kid day care centers. If the cops get too many complaints, the city may just decide to close the park.”

The synchro here is that I’m writing about shape shifters – humans who have been turned into dog/wolf shifters.  In this particular story, the species is violent. What I discovered, though, is that the dog part of this equation is willing to live and let live. It’s the humans who go for the jugular.

I may have to alter the particulars of my plot line.