Pug Hill - Alison Pace [60]
I wonder if she might be right about this, and if maybe, I want her to be.
“Yeah,” I say, deflecting any invitation for further debate. Happily, Pamela seems to have said all she needs to say on the now vastly confusing topic of how being single is so great that everyone on earth wants to run away from it, and she moves on.
“Well, what are you doing today? Do you want to go to lunch?” I look outside, at the two chairs on my balcony, sitting side by side, looking out onto a late Sunday morning. There’s something else I want to do much more than have lunch with Pamela.
“How about coffee at, like, four? Want to meet a Café Edgar?”
“What are you doing until then?”
“Um, I just want to work on this assignment I have for the public speaking class,” I lie.
“You want to go to Pug Hill, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah,” I say, “actually I do,” and hope that she doesn’t want to come. Probably she doesn’t. Kara and Chloe see the beauty of Pug Hill and they come with me sometimes.
Chloe loves the pugs, even though admittedly I don’t think the pugs love it when she screeches and runs after them. Pamela is not as interested in Pug Hill, mostly I think because she thinks only married guys and dorky guys actually own pugs. I think of the Tretorn guy, and of how I have to learn that footwear is unimportant.
“Okay, four o’clock. Café Edgar,” she announces, and that’s good. “Hope?” she asks, “if you like pugs so much, why don’t you just get one?” Pamela again has a point.
“Not right now,” I say, “not just yet.” “Yeah,” she says, “that’s probably good. I think having a dog would make dating harder.”
“Absolutely,” I agree, even though I really don’t.
I walk across the park, down a hill, up another incline, and I’m almost there. I don’t really expect there to be many pugs because it’s not all that warm out. I mean it’s not like I expect there to be no pugs like that day, it is Sunday, after all. Can you imagine no pugs at Pug Hill on a Sunday of all days, a day I believe to be the day of all days for pugs coming to Pug Hill? Saturdays are up there, too, but the day for coming to Pug Hill, if you are in fact a pug, or, like me, just an admirer of pugs, is Sunday. I step through the row of benches and across the cement path. I’m here.
There aren’t too many pugs, but there are actually more than I thought there would be. That’s one of the benefits of being cautiously optimistic rather than just brazenly optimistic: you get disappointed a lot less than if you were brazen. I look around at the pugs who are here, and they all seem especially jaunty and proud. The way they march around, spinning, snorting, darting off at nothing in particular (definitely not at a thrown object of any sort) makes me sure that these pugs know just as well as I do, maybe more, that Pug Hill is the place to be.
I take a seat on the bench. The ground by the tree that I like, the ground anywhere actually, is looking a little too cold and uninviting. I glance hopefully toward the pine tree, but unfortunately, Kermit is not waiting for me there. Actually, I don’t recognize so many of the pugs today. They’re all bundled up in their coats and sweaters, and it’s hard to know them as well when they’re all so bundled up. I lean back on the bench and take in all the pugs, pugs that I don’t quite recognize but still adore, all prancing around like so many secret agents.
“Eustice!” someone yells from a few feet to my right. An extremely, let’s say, girthy pug, in a gray turtleneck sweater, comes bounding up the hill. His tongue hangs out to the side, the way so many tongues of so many pugs seem to like to do, and he’s panting very loudly; I can hear the panting, accompanied by some intermittent snorting even before he gets close, even before he heads in a beeline right past his owner and right toward me.
“Well, hello, Eustice,” I say very encouragingly and very enthusiastically at his arrival. He looks up at me, and very politely hoists his tongue up and licks the foam from his pug nose. And the way he does it, everything about him, makes me smile so completely.