October 22, 2018
Dog Park – TriBeCa
Here at the dog park again. A cold, late October morning.
“Bark, bark, bark,” says a dog named Roxy.
I think my days here are limited.
Teddy’s booties keep falling off and it’s a real pain to continue putting them on over and over again.
There’s a woman with a golden retriever and a man with a black lab. The two of them spend a lot of time talking to each other here on Monday mornings.
Teddy once fought the golden retriever. I broke them up before any damage was done. Ted was real shaken up about the whole thing.
I think the black lab guy is into the golden retriever lady. It’s in his body language.
It’s in his eyes.
—
Sometime in 2020
I read this story and think a couple of thoughts.
First, I was right about one thing and that is that my days there were limited.
My mother up and died six months after writing about the golden retriever lady and the black lab guy and I moved out of the city, which meant I no longer spent day after day sitting at the TriBeCa dog park putting on Teddy’s booties like some sort of psychopath.
Second, I would again cross paths with the barking dog, Roxy, two years later. She was walking with her owner on the sidewalk in Hudson, New York, and I saw them from a mile away. I said hi, they said hi. I had only recently moved back to the area and was surprised to see familiar faces. It was an anticlimactic reunion but reminded me of those bittersweet TriBeCa mornings.
I think sometimes that I’d go back to them if I could.
Words 