A puppy became trapped and frightened when his leash got tangled up in the legs of a flimsy cafe table. At first the puppy just whimpered, pacing nervously as he watched his owner walk away from him, down one side of a long glass wall to the entrance of the cafe, but when he saw his owner walking back toward him, this time separated from him by the long glass wall, the puppy started tugging at the leash. He realized the full extent of the mess he’d gotten himself into when the metal chairs started tumbling around him. A loud crack of thunder only added to his anxiety. Having woven a maze of leash through the legs of the chairs and the table, the more he tried to escape, the more the knot of furniture tightened around him. The puppy panicked and started yelping.
Then somehow the puppy came loose. Bucking, he broke free from his harness. The puppy’s mischief had captured the attention of everyone inside the cafe, so when the puppy stopped bucking and turned his head toward the traffic in the street, the emotion inside the cafe turned from collective bemusement to horror. It was clear the puppy was seriously considering bolting. It was also clear there was nothing to stop him from doing exactly that. Although the puppy was close, on the other side of a long glass wall, he was also far away. There wasn’t enough time for the owner to run all the way to the exit then all the way back down the other side of the long glass wall to catch the puppy before he did something foolish like bolt into the street.
So a woman inside the cafe, a stranger to the puppy, taking a calm and measured approach to the situation, knelt to the level of the puppy and aimed her smiling face through the glass in the direction of the puppy, hoping to lure the puppy with her display of genuine friendliness. It worked. Through the reflected images of passing traffic, the puppy saw a beacon of warmth on the other side of the glass, walked toward the wall and sat transfixed. The woman was able to hold the puppy’s attention with her smiling face and her coochy-cooing fingers long enough for the owner to walk outside and secure the puppy. Everyone sighed. The puppy was safe.
The puppy hero, fresh from her quick-thinking puppy-saving smiling-through-the-window moment, made the long walk to the exit of the cafe, then walked backed down the other side of the glass wall to meet the puppy, now untangled and re-harnessed. She leaned over to smile at the puppy again, this time in person, as it were. This time there was no wall of glass separating the woman’s coochy-cooing fingers from the face of the puppy. She tickled his nose, babbling goo-goo ga-ga. The puppy hopped and hopped.
After playing with the puppy for a minute or two, the woman walked back down the long glass wall to the entrance of the cafe, and when she reached to open the door, some lady stepped out of the shadows, gingerly, and asked her for something, some spare change probably. If the lady, maybe sixty or sixty-five, was homeless, except for her too-short trousers, you wouldn’t have known it from what she was wearing. She was wearing decent shoes. Her hair wasn’t a mess. For all anyone knew, the lady could be someone’s missing grandmother. I couldn’t hear what the lady asked the woman, or what the woman told the lady in reply, but I could read the gist of the exchange in their body language. The answer was, “Sorry, I have nothing for you today.” As she re-entered the cafe, the woman barely slowed down, barely looked the lady in the face, even as the glow of her puppy encounter still registered as a smile on her own face.
I thought, “Damn. That’s cold. The woman had all the time in the world for some random dog, but couldn’t slow down for some random lady.” It’s not that the woman was mean about it, but it was the ugliest thing I think I’d ever seen in my life. In a side-by-side comparison -- some dog versus some lady -- the competition wasn’t even close. The dog won by a landslide. It devastated me.
It devastated me because I’d done the same thing to the lady when I walked past her earlier. I expended no energy whatsoever to hear the words coming out of her mouth, much less to offer assistance. It was like, having become so familiar with the routine, I’d decided to tune her out. People say you’re not supposed to feed them or they’ll only come back for more the next day and the day after that. People say you just teach them to depend on others. People say if you give them money, they’ll spend what you give them on crack. In downtown Houston, at six thirty in the morning, people say it can be downright dangerous. The lady didn’t look dangerous to me. She looked hungry. I’d made a point of putting birdseed out for the birds before I left home that morning, but I had nothing to give the lady, not even three seconds of my attention.
Then rain poured and the streets flooded. God knows what happened to that lady.