I usually take my dogs to a dog park to let them run freely. While taking all of my six dogs there at the same time can be a huge burden for me sometimes, doing so can be much easier than walking them one by one. I also firmly believe that letting dogs run unleashed as much as they want is the best for them.
Anyway, I can meet a lot of dog owners there, and have opportunities to talk with them, hoping to find someone nice I can share my interests with or even find my future partner.
(Yes, I’m a very romantic type 🙂 )
Having the same breed of dog(s) especially allows us to feel closer and easier to start a small talk.
Since I’m normally not good at keeping comfortable distances with new people around me, getting to know the dog owners there without revealing much about ourselves on the personal level makes me feel just about right. Although we don’t know much about each other, having our dog(s) makes us tend to assume that we are “decent” people. However, in retrospect, I’m afraid that this is not always true.
The other day, something confusing happened to me. I came across a woman in my usual dog park. Since both of us had the same breed of dog, a Labrador Retriever, we hit it off pretty soon.
She lost her former dog three years ago, and she told me how she went through such a difficult time, and how her currant dog gave her a new life and so on. Those stories resonated with me, and made me feel closer to her – that’s at least how I felt. Then we said good bye to each other not even knowing if we could meet sometime in the future again.
A few days later, unexpectedly we ran across again. We had another talk while watching our dogs from the corner of our eyes. That day, just before I came to the park, I’d tripped and fell, and hurt my hip. Talking about it to her, she said that I should take good care of myself, and informed me about this very good chiro she respected very much.
She’d consulted so many chiros before she found him.
That interested me since I’d had the same experiences which resulted me to pay a lot of money in vain. Plus, my knee has been tormenting me ever since I started walking my dogs last year. This whole experience frustrated me because nothing helped no matter how hard I tried to hope it to get better. So my encountering with her totally thrilled me making me sure she was meant to be there to let me see such a great chiro.
I asked her if she could let me know the location of the clinic wondering if she would have any reason to refuse.
To my relief, she said ok.
Then, what she said puzzled me.
She said that she’d be glad to make an appointment, and set up the right date and time for me. As a matter of fact, that was beyond my expectation. I just wondered why she treated me like a baby while I was old enough to do that myself. Still, it looked as if it was good for her.
While not knowing what was going on, I decided to take it easy, and let her take care of it at this point.
To be continued to #2
※ This essay was originally written in June, 2018.
A nosey parker is someone who wants to know too much about other people.
ako's English Diary 