Me, as drawn by Jacqueline Bisset for Carrying On
Well THAT was a morning.
So you know how I’ve been having all these Big Life Realizations lately? One of them is that I need to refocus this site to be less about *me* – essentially because I’ve started to realize that I want to be peaceful, and happy. Which means having less drama in my life. But which also, alas, leaves me with fewer stories to tell.
That’s okay, though. It has to be. Because I’ve also realized that when you spend ten years writing about your life, it just kind of happens: Consciously or not, you welcome the chaos, if only because it might make the “what do I write about today?” question an easier one to answer.
I’m ready for a boring-er life.
Except it turns out that even when I slow down and start actively avoiding the dramatics that I used to see as a kind of mixed blessing, and now see as exhausting and unnecessary…I was still #BorntoBlog.
It is an inescapable fact.
Because what just happened this morning was that I literally (literally!) leapt from my car and helped to break up a dog fight using the only thing I had handy, which was my Rebecca Minkoff purse. (Naturally.)
Here’s how this one went down: I was driving to my son’s school with his purple Triceratops transformer for Show and Tell (which had been forgotten at home that morning, to the tune of much despondency, so I was in a bit of a rush), and there, in the middle of the street, was a man who was planted in between an enormous dog that had its jaws locked around a smaller dog. All three appeared to be bleeding.
So, I ask you: What do you do in that situation? I think there are choices smarter than the ones I made – which were to pull over, whip the strap off my Rebecca Minkoff purse to use as a Macguyvered dog leash, and (with the help of the man who’d been breaking up the fight) maneuver the larger dog into my car so that it was at least contained. …But are there more badass ones? I’m going to say no.
I do understand that I did something super ill-advised, by the way. But once the big guy released the other dog he relaxed, and he didn’t seem to be aggressive towards humans – he just sat down and panted while I got my strap around him and walked him towards the car. And he even listened to me when I told him to please stop bleeding all over my front seat and move to the back. (I’m being flip about this, by the way, because spoiler: everyone’s fine. The guy got a little banged up on the asphalt and both dogs had cuts, but they were all superficial. I do have a serious car-cleaning in my future, though.)
So the man went off to make sure his dog was okay, which left me alone, in the middle of the street, with a car full of dog who had moved on from bleeding to Turner-and-Hooch-style saliva-flinging. All over my freshly-cleaned seats.
Like this:
Stop. Drooling.
With the help of my neighbor Margo, who just so happened to come wandering down the street right then, I made calls to the following:
- Neighbor with a similar-looking dog (is it yours? nope)
- Animal Control (only for removal of dead animals? apparently?)
- Various local shelters (no answer, anywhere)
- City Services (have you tried calling a shelter?)
- Police (half an hour on hold and counting)
At this point, the dog and I were old buddies. I sat down on the curb and looked at him. He looked at me and added a little more drool to the collection on my steering wheel.
Eventually, during the thirtieth minute of me sitting on hold with the police department, a woman came down the street, practically in tears, and said that the dog was hers, that he’d been let out by her gardener. She had a week-old baby at home, she explained, and everything was chaos. She helped me wipe down the inside of the car; we hugged; she took her dog back home; that was that.
So there you have it: This incident now joins that time I ended up with the top half of my body inserted into an industrial-sized dumpster coated with 6-inch-thick black slime, that time I was driving down the highway and realized that the scent of Cheetos and death that was making me choke was coming from…me, and the time Lucy’s dead eyeball fell out of her head and crawled across the floor in the canon of Reasons I Was Born To Be A Blogger.
…Or maybe I just need fewer dogs in my life.
P.S. Did I forget to snag back my purse strap? Of course I did. We’ll consider it a donation to a worthy cause.
Hello, you are a clutch now.
