Always Say "Hi!" to the Dogs Monday Morning Check-In Post

How Are You??!!

Got These Spellcasting Boundary-Setting Socks Yesterday While Also Meeting A Lot of Dogs

I’ll stop what I am doing, interrupt the conversation I am having, cross the street, stop traffic, etc to say, “Hi” to every dog I see. In Chicago, there are a lot of dogs out and about right now happily living their lives in the city.

“He’s anxious around new people,” has been said to me more than once. This is one of the reasons I always carry a bag of treats in my purse. There has yet to be an anxious dog that’s crossed my path and has not taken a treat from me, either directly from my hand or via their guardian’s hand as a go-between unless the guardian does not allow it. Of course, the gregarious ones get treats from me as well. Our philosophy in this house is that all dogs deserve treats and there can never be too many. They also can jump on me and kiss me, I have no boundaries where dogs and their love are concerned.

The only time I won’t interact directly with a dog out in the world is if they or their guardian gives me the signal that they are not available for an interaction. I do not argue in these moments, respecting the necessary boundaries for everyone’s health and safety and supporting the dog’s success on their walk that day. Instead, I send the dog telepathic love messages from afar which I almost always see them respond to.

I was attacked by a dog when I was thirty years old. I arrived at the front door of a friend’s house, one I had been letting myself into for over a decade. I ignored the “beware of the dog” sign on the door as I knew their dog. Unbeknownst to me, a new dog had come to stay. As I opened the door he lunged at me, snarling and barking ferociously, and sunk his teeth into my upper right thigh right through the fabric of my skirt.

“No! No! No!” screamed his teenage guardian as she pulled him off of me and got him back into the house.

As scared as I was and as deep as the bite was, I felt no physical pain. The scar I bore for years has mostly faded now, just like the one I had when I accidentally stuck the knuckle of my right index finger into my just-heated car cigarette lighter, another instance when I felt no pain.

The dog attack did leave me with another kind of pain, a fear of dogs, which made me sad for a couple of years until one day, early on in our relationship, Jon and I were walking along Lake Michigan and we ran into a beagle puppy named Lucy. Before I knew it, she jumped all over me, kissing and loving me. The last vestiges of my dog bite trauma healed that day.

Five years later another beagle puppy entered our lives in the form of Lola, a baby beagle brought home one day as a surprise for then-ten-year-old Helena. At eight weeks old, Lola was all love and sweetness combined with a need to play constantly, like most puppies. Shortly after bringing her home, the family took a trip to California leaving the wriggling love machine in our care for 10 days. Jon would take her out for her 5 am potty break and then deposit her in bed with me where she’d fall back asleep tangled in my hair as I inhaled her sweet puppy smell while drifting back into dreamland until she’d wake me up a few hours later. This same scenario would repeat nine years in the future in Ojai with Zoey when she was a puppy.

For the rest of our time here in this building before moving to California, any time I would step out of our backdoor onto the second-floor deck, Lola would race up the stairs to kiss me and then run back down to be with her family.

The other day I came home to Jon, still with a worried look on his face. Sookie had disappeared for fifteen minutes. They were all out back and then she was gone. He finally found her one floor above ours sitting patiently in front of Theresa and Vasken’s backdoor, waiting for them to notice her. Their door was open and just the screen door was closed. Everything repeats, often with variations, and we now have the dog (s) who run up to the second floor where we used to live to give love to the people who used to live on the first and who used to have a puppy named Lola.

I keep meaning to mention this last thing that startled itself into my awareness while Jon, Zoey, Sookie, Teddy, and I were out for a walk a month or so ago in our neighborhood. As we walked along Ridge Road, we came to the East-West running street I lived on when I first moved into the city in 1986. I stopped and turned to my right. The street dead ends there at Ridge, but if it continued, it would run a couple of blocks farther West and right into the building we currently occupy.

I’ve said it before, the Rogers Park neighborhood has been my entrance and exit portal in and out of Chicago as an adult. With this new piece of information, it seems that it’s not just the neighborhood that operates as this portal, but the very latitude line that runs through this neighborhood I have landed on three different times now in two different buildings.

Holy shit. I don’t even know what this means other than this is some powerful magic I have yet to fully understand. Perhaps I also lived on this latitude line in another life.

How are you? Please leave me a comment below and let me know.

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