It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [77]
And we had a wonderful day; the snow eased up and we walked up and down the West Village, the East Village, stopped in for a slice of pizza, and then wandered through Washington Square Park. I bought a dress from my favorite clothes store, we stopped and had coffee at a café, and never once did I stop thinking about that old, starving dog eating out of the trash.
But much to my relief, when we got back to the apartment building, the dog was nowhere to be seen. I had images of it shivering in a corner or covered in snow, still foraging on the street, but there was no sign of it. Happily, I imagined it reunited with its owner, the both of them snuggled up in front of a warm fire, except in my honest version of the fantasy, the dog was forcing the owner to lick the remnants out of a crusty refried-beans can.
The next morning we hit Midtown, walked up Fifth Avenue to see the storefronts decorated for the holidays, then wandered around Central Park and went to the American Museum of Natural History. We returned to the apartment to get ready for dinner and were lucky enough to flag down a cab immediately after walking out of the door to the building. I got in the cab first, and when I turned to ask my husband the address of the restaurant, I gasped.
“There’s the dog!” I cried, pointing.
And there, on an otherwise empty corner, not another soul around, was the shaggy dog, peeing on the sidewalk as the taxi zoomed away.
“That was the dog!” I said to my husband again. “It’s lost again!”
“Either that or it never went home,” my husband added. “But there’s nothing we can do about it; it’s kind of on its own.”
I couldn’t believe that dog was still out there, in the elements, lost, and no one had bothered to help it.
“Really?” I wondered aloud. “Do people just walk by and not see an old dog wandering around by itself? I can’t believe it. That thing is probably starving. Order something big, because we’re taking half of it back with us for the dog.”
But when we returned that evening, with chops and steaks in hand, the dog, again, was gone.
It snowed again that night, and this time it snowed hard. I went downstairs twice to see if the dog was around, to give it our leftovers, but there was no sign of it or its paw prints in the snow.
The next morning, we woke up to a beautifully sunny day, although it was bitterly cold. We had brunch plans with my friend Jenny and her husband, Joe, at a café a couple of blocks down the street. The air was crisp in the way that it is only after it snows, and the minute we stepped outside I saw the dog, gingerly finding its way along the ice that had formed on the sidewalk.
I bent down.
“Don’t,” my husband warned. “We have to meet Jenny and Joe in fifteen minutes. What are you going to do with the dog, bring it along? There’s no leash on it, Laurie. It’s a stray dog. I know you feel bad, but we’re a little powerless here.”
Regardless, I tried calling the dog, but it wouldn’t come, no matter how many times I pleaded “Here, girl!” or “Come!” or “Wanna cookie?” The dog looked at me suspiciously and then ignored me. The last thing I was going to do was try to put my hands anywhere near the dog’s face to look for a collar under that matted fur, plus I knew my husband was right. The truth was that I really didn’t want to call the ASPCA on the dog; it was so old and decrepit that I thought it might get put down when no one came looking for it. I knew that leaving it on the street was not good, either, but I thought the dog should have some sort of fighting chance. It was clear that it stayed in the same area, so maybe it had an urban “den” someplace close, like in Hotel For Dogs, which I have obviously watched too many times. I didn’t know, but I was willing to stretch all limits of reason, still hopeful that whoever was looking for it would find it.
But there was no way the dog was going to come to me, and I had no idea what I would have done with it if it did. It would be one thing if we