Things Michiganders Have Said To Me About My Dogs

Previously in this series: Things Italian men of a certain age have said to me about my dogs.

“Quanto costa? Quanto costa? [Inaudible due to I don’t speak Italian] She is good.”

“What is that? What is that? Is that a toy? [on the phone] Shut your mouth, shut your mouth, shush, wait. [To me] Is it real? She’s real, she’s not a toy? How’d she get like that?”

“[Accusatorily] I haven’t seen these guys around as much lately! [I explain now that Gogo doesn’t weigh three pounds he doesn’t have to go outside every hour] Hm. [Suspiciously] Okay, then.”

Things kids and crossing guards have said to me about my dogs:

“Am I looking at a skunk? I’m not seeing a skunk, am I?…Wow, he looks just like a little skunk, and I thought maybe for a minute — that can’t be a skunk on a leash.”

“I can pet these dogs. I see them all the time around the neighborhood. I see these dogs so much, they’re around all the time. I see them everyday practically.”

“[Accusatory] I saw a dog that was even smaller than your dog yesterday.”

Until pretty recently my family and I lived in a walkup apartment in a fairly Sesame Street-like neighborhood in Brooklyn. The downside was that every time my acorn-sized dogs needed to pee, which was often, I had to carry them up and down three flights of stairs; the upside was that once out of the building, we couldn’t stir a step without being charmingly accosted by affectionate Italian-American grandfather types. I had never lived in so crowded a neighborhood my whole life, and I liked it very much. I liked walking everywhere, and I liked the prodigious volume of faces, some familiar, most new to me, that I got to see every day.

Now we live in a fairly small town in Michigan. There’s much to be said for it, and Bon-Bon has grown passionately attached to running around in frantic circles in the backyard. The happiness of a small dog in motion through fallen leaves is a good happiness to watch. But there aren’t as many people here, not nearly as many, and I find myself hungry for more minor, incidental exchanges with strangers than I can often find. On Halloween night we got five or six groups of trick-or-treaters; I wished for a torrent of them. I’m glad we got that many, but I wished the door to the front porch had been banging open and shut every five minutes for hours. I wished we had run out of candy; I wished the sidewalks had looked like a parade was coming through town.