Snippets of life, or, why I love strangers
My neighbour’s dog is out running loose again. She’s got curly white hair - the dog, not my neighbour - and a collar, but no tag. She does not come to her name when I call her, but if I crouch down, turning my side towards her, she will grow brave and come to me.
I hold her by the loop where a leash might attach and I bring her with me back to the door where I knock copious times. “Oh, I didn’t even miss her!” she tells me - the neighbour, not the dog. “We’ve been looking for J’s wallet. He’s unsure of where it is. I wonder if she got out when I went to check the car for it.”
J has dementia, which as been in increasing decline these last few months. Mike shovels their driveway and sometimes she comes out to chat with him. I imagine she is exhausted, trying to negotiate the gaps that his particular dementia leaves her to navigate. It’s not easy.
This morning he is standing just behind her as we chat and says, “who’s that?” and I’m not sure if he means me or the dog. Either way, Ginger is home with her family again and we carried on with our walk.
At the cash register at the Starbies in the grocery store, my son is pulling coins out of my change purse. The purpose of the change purse is solely for his Starbies drinks. He needs $7.48 or something to that effect and I pull out $8. “Will that be enough?”
“Yes!” he agrees.
The guy behind the cash is late teen or very early 20s and he’s delightful. Tall and longer-haired, he is eternally patient every time we stop here. He waits as Ollie chooses a drink. He never says, “Oh those have caffeine in them” if Ollie orders a refresher, and he doesn’t mind doing a bit of math with a kid.
Knowing that Ollie will get change back, I ask him if he knows roughly how much change he is expecting, and he takes longer than usual to run the numbers in his head, rounding down to give me a response (50c), when normally at home he would have told me to the penny (52c - the pennies that we no longer have in Canada).
“Nice work.” the barista says and I dump the change in the tip jar.
“Thanks!” Ollie replies and heads to the end of the counter where we’ll get his mango dragonfruit lemonade refresher. He LOVES speciality drinks.
“We have come to eat our feelings!” I announce as we enter the shop.
At the local donut shop there is a woman who has tulips and roses painted on her nails. One hand for each. “Oh I just love the details in the flowers on your nails,” I tell her as Mike sorts out our order.
“My mother-in-law loved tulips,” she tells me, “and my mother’s name was Rosemary.”
“I’ll tell you, when we sold my mother-in-law’s house, I thought we had dug out most of the tulips,” she says, “but it turns out, when we drove by last spring, that there were so many more than we could have imagined. They were still there.”
“I love that you use nail art to remind you of them.” I tell her.
She looks squeezes my hands before I leave, because she knows I am having a rough day. It makes me tear up. “Enjoy those with a cup of tea.” She advises.
I’m stopped at a light, waiting to turn left. Auggie is in the window, partway out the window, with his big, beautiful red head. He loves to smell the air with his whole face, so when he is out with me, I always put the window in the back down so he can take in the sights and smells as we run errands.
A woman pulls into the lane next to me at the light. She wants to go straight into the subdivision, into the area close to the city hospital. She is delighted by Auggie. I can see that she is chatting with him and I wave at her, smiling.
He stands at the window, chirping and whining, wagging his tail SO hard.
I can’t really hear her, but I catch an errant, “look at you!”, which he loves, and I shout out, “he’s wagging his tail so hard for you!”
If possible, her grin grows even bigger.
When the light changes, I shout, “He says, ‘thank you!!’” before turning left.
n xx