Dogs

One day I was sitting on a bench on the promenade in Cronulla, watching all the youthful elderly, and the fit mothers with little kids, not yet in school, often still in prams, while the mothers are running. Then we have  the dog owners or maybe they were professional dog walkers, hurrying by.  I am saying professional,  because how can anyone have three or four dogs? Or maybe you can! People do have three or four kids after all, come to think of it.

I am not  in any way a fit mother of small children and certainly not a dog owner, I am not even a certified retiree....yet. However I have a certain unexpected experience with dogs, surprisingly enough. When I was a child it was common that you rang the doorbell of someone who had a dog and asked if you could take it out for walk. All my friends did, so I did too.

One day, never to be forgotten, I was allowed to take Charlie out. Charlie was a teenage dalmatian. He got himself freed from the leach almost immediately, looked at me triumphantly and then ran off. I spent hours looking for him, asking everyone I saw if they had seen a lost dalmatian, but to no avail. No one had seen him.

Finally I realized with a heavy heart, that I had to go to the owners and fess upp. I had lost their cherished baby. I was sick with fear and quite nautious when I reached the house.  That's when I saw him sitting outside the entrance of the building and I swear he was smiling. (This is not a photo of him but he looked very similar.)

He ran up to me and tried to ingratiate himself by licking my hand and jumping up trying to lick me in the face.

That was the last time I walked a dog, if you can even call it that.  Omg, can't believe I am actually telling a dog story!