the best thing

yet another entry about how everyone loves the socially awkward dog

the small brown dog stands very still and stares straight ahead. until the woman in front of him situates herself so that he is looking at her. and then he moves. away. when he is at home, he likes nothing better than to stare balefully into the eyes of his victims but when he is here, out of doors, leashed up and eel-toothed, he will not acknowledge the existence of anyone. the woman is patient and shifts her pink phone camera a bit but all she gets is a brown blur. later, she says. she is a crossing guard and sees us every day. she has time.

the dog already has his picture pasted up a block away in the corner pharmacy, staring blankly ahead, one eye brown, one blue, red lizard clamped in a mouth that looks smiley and is why people like to look at him. he is so happy, they say, so proud. and they love what they see as joy in his predatory little face.

i do not know whether it is because it is summer or whether people who live nearby simply feel comfortable after seeing the dog so many times, feel like some part of him belongs with them, but the last week or so, the shutterbugging has gone wild. we are walking down the street, maybe wednesday. probably thursday. a man is talking to a woman toward the street side of the sidewalk, facing us. he says to her wait a minute and then he runs down the street in front of us. he sits, waiting, across the intersection, snapping photos of the small brown dog with the long orange stripedy eel. he walks along with us a bit, the giant lens of his camera upstaging the camera itself. he asks what sort of dog and then he asks his name. guthrie, i tell him. he says he was going to go get a few photos of dogs at the dog pond in the park but now he doesn't have to.

we walk a few blocks more and turn a corner, up toward the park. a woman waves her phone quickly in front of the dog's face, snaps what must be a bigfoot-like photo of him, then giggles herself away. we head back toward home and see a woman from our building, maybe the one who gives music lessons in the afternoons. she is young and smiling and asks if it would be okay to take a picture of the dog. i say certainly. the dog glares. she takes the photo and we walk around the corner and up the street together. the dog never acknowledges her existence.

the next morning we are walking home past bakeries and grocery stores and laundromats when a man stops next to us at an intersection. he laughs, fumbles with his phone. when the light changes and the dog hurls himself out into the intersection, the man walks next to us, his phone making a tiny movie of the whipping tail and swaying belly and the steady orange stripedy eel. he chats some and laughs more and smiles as he turns up his street.

then yesterday afternoon just past the dog toy store and the little cafe a man yells to us, asks if he can take a picture. the small dog freezes, looks into the distance just a few feet past the man, lets himself be captured. and now, walking back again toward where the woman this morning tried for a picture, we stop again, the dog more tired now, willing to let her take a picture, maybe two. the crossing guard with her walks us back along the block home talking to me, talking to the dog. her family has them. low dogs. we are all of us part of a cult.

and there are the people in sidewalk cafes and the construction workers sitting on stoops for lunch and hospital workers in scrubs taking a smoke break who stop conversations and meals to look at him. there are shopkeepers and waitstaff at several restaurants who stand in doorways grinning like fools when he strolls by. there are old guys sitting on benches or standing in clusters on corners who lean in, arms outstretched, and say to him in my uncle dale's voice i'm gonna get that toy! there are the people who giggle and point and wave and gasp every single day. the ones who clutch at the arms of their companions and discuss the possibilities of what it is the dog is carrying. well, i don't know but it looks like an umbrella. there is the maybe homeless, probably schizophrenic old guy on the same corner most days who stops his ranting about the evils of the world each time he sees guthrie so he can say that is a good dog. good dog he says, loud and garbled, and every time the dog leaves his own focused eelworld and looks up. i want to explain to the man how rare this is, eye contact from this dog, but he is there most days so i suspect he knows.

there are those who promise that the small brown dog is the most precious or adorable or wonderful or simply the best thing they have seen all day. every day someone says that. the best thing. really. i mean it, they say, in case i might not know what i live with. it is strange that he is unaware of them all, completely unreachable strolling down the street, pouring out all that joy without knowing a thing about it. i stroll along beside him, like flannery o'connor with her backward chicken. i am just here to assist the dog.