Last night I saw a woman having a conversation with a dog.
This is normal to me. I grew up with pets. A lot of them, actually. We were sort of a halfway house for animals. We had a three legged cat we saved from a bush. We adopted a dog that was pretty sick and a dog that someone gave to us as a dying wish before she had cancer. My mom talked to the pets. I've talked to pets.
But this was on the street, as the Collie was tied to a parking meter. The streets were wet from melting snow and the woman, probably in her sixties, was wearing a skirt and standing in a deep puddle having a conversation with the Collie.
The Collie wasn't talking back.
"So, do you like it warm here?"
PAUSE. As if the woman was waiting for an answer.
"Do you like it when you are tied up like this?"
PAUSE.
"Do you like bones?"
PAUSE.
"Do you like chasing cats?"
More silence as the Collie looks up at the woman who, as I wait for the bus, I realize might not be all there. As the woman asks more questions without more answers here tone becomes a ton more frustrated...as if she is getting annoyed that she is not being talked back to.
She continues to ask strange questions. Her voice raises higher and higher as the dog starts pacing, looking for its owner. Cars whip by on the wet street and as the bus rolls up to pick me up, I see the owner-- a younger guy-- come out of the video rental store and save his puppy.
On the ride home I think about how maybe we try too hard at things that aren't meant to happen.
Sometimes we attempt things and put our everything into it hoping that we will get the answers we want to hear. We try so hard. We get optimistic. We get excited. We want what we want...
And when we don't get it we feel like we've just made the biggest idiot out of ourselves.
Except, maybe, we need to look at it like a talking dog. They don't exist, and if you want it to exist you are going to be waiting a really, really long time for that to happen. Some things are just not meant to happen at a certain time, with a certain person, with a certain job, with a certain opportunity...or are never meant to happen.
And the questions we keep asking others... ahem, or dogs, are the questions we need to be asking ourselves.