Peeking into the rock

There's a park I take my dog to. It's the only offleash dog park that's offleash all the time. It's at Frederick Street Park, which is where some of my children's birthday parties were. It's in a neighborhood that has recently become tony. It used to be a kind of middling working-class neighborhood of small houses, contiguous to a slum ("The seedy Yacht Harbor district"). Now the slum is gone, and most of the small houses closest to the park and harbor, replaced with monstrous condominiums and "townhomes" -- many of these residences are gated, which looks really odd on a poky little urban street.

Anyway. There's a bod we always hope to meet there, a black-lab-and-something: locals know the type, we used to call them the "Santa Cruz Black Dog," they're more gracile than a true black lab but they have the labrador affability and playfullness. Titan wasn't there today, nor any dog that Truffle could hit get involved with (later on, another of the SC Black dogs was there, but Diesel and Truffle only just hit it off about half the time).

However, there were a handful of snooty old ladies. Pearls and bleach round frizzy hairdos and pretentious accents and excruciating posture and all. I was disposed to be friendly. There was a plump old lady with a New Zealand accent (see? they're all over the place: Zeborah, is this a sign that you should emigrate to here? Fair warning, there's not much work here) being friendly to all the dogs and, now I think back on it, avoiding the ladies at the bench.

So the snootiest, oldest, most excruciatingly straight-backed and pretentious-tongued of them all initiated a conversation. She said her dog seemed to think she owned the park. "Do you live around here?" she asked.

I allowed as how I lived downtown but I came here because there is no offleash dog area I can walk to from my house. I said we come only a few times a week because we have to drive here. I said we go a different place almost every day, actually.

She said. She really said this: "Lately we've been getting a lot of people who are not from here and they don't know how to take care of their dogs and they don't clean up after them. Oh well, I guess they have the right to be here. We should just be glad we have it."

Since I had just approached the bench after having cleaned up after my dog, and my dog was just sniffing around, and I was standing so I could see every move she made, and I was keeping voice contact with her, and she wasn't going very far from me (unlike the fancy-groomed Westies who actually wandered off and had to be found), this was obviously not pointed at me and meant to make me feel unwelcome at her dog park, right?

Really, I'm just too sensitive sometimes.

So we went away, walked around the yacht harbor and back, and when we got back Diesel was there and a bunch of other reasonable people and their reasonable dogs.