Did You See That Dog?

Martin's night class every Tuesday means Girl's Night at Wazoo Farm--we eat early, pack on the candy, and watch TV. Okay, so it's a bit of a cliche--maybe we four females should be playing Scrabble or conjugating French verbs or writing proposals for energy conservation. Instead we eat gobstoppers and watch claymation. Life is full of compromise. Girl's Night with candy today, Nobel Prize tomorrow.

Tonight we had an extra girl--my dear mama, who's been letting me write in the morning and goof off with Martin, picking grapes and taking walks JUST THE TWO OF US(we also gallivanted off to eat sushi, our favorite thing to do without the kids).

Tonight the four of us women walked downtown and ordered barbecue sandwiches. Get this, the barbecue restaurant has switched locations and thus upgraded from a roll of papertowels to cloth napkins; from a concrete floor to carpet; bright turquoise walls (cracking) to dark maroon and ornamental wallpaper. BAD changes for a family like mine, whose eating experience includes mac-n-cheese all over the floor, children batting each other with fries, and everybody squirting their own ketchup. The new stuffy digs made me a little nervous, even though the pulled pork was as good as ever. Elspeth wanted to snuggle my left arm as I ate and Bea kept grabbing a full cup of soda and leaning over the edge of her highchair so it seemed she'd fall out, face-first, into the small meadow of noodles she'd dropped all over the floor. Sigh. A trough would be easier.

After barbecue we fastened the kids in the car and sought a little unwinding time in the winding roads of our county. We enjoyed the hills, golden with late sunlight, an old stone house up the hill from an ancient red barn, a one-room schoolhouse on a corner under spreading trees. We enjoyed the children who were plugged in and could not do much more than hit each other, make up, pinch each other, make up--and etc. On the way home, almost to town, I spied three boys above the road on a ridge, standing under a lovely tree, bellies pressed to a white picket fence. As we drove by, I saw a chunky kid in a red T-shirt pull his hand back and hurl something at our car, his mouth open in rapt anticipation.

Two driveways down, I swung the Subaru into an empty parking lot and headed back for the red T-shirt kid. I felt the sort of righteous excitement that adults who usually do not believe they are really adults feel, mixed with the same giddy anticipation the kid might have felt when he chucked the projectile at our car. I was going to put the fear of God in this kid, I thought as our tires crunched over the gravel of the driveway.

I had to hand it to them. As I swung open my door and looked over the top of the car, they just stood there looking at me. I would have fled, ashamed and shaking, and dove under my bed. I would have been petrified if an adult came zooming back in their car to give me what-for.

"Were you all throwing things at my car?"

They shrugged a little but not in a sneaky way. Then two of them pointed at the kid with the short hair and the red T.

"He did it."

"You threw something at my car."

No attempt to deny the undeniable. As I began to explain the dangers of throwing things at cars, the kid talked over the top of me with happy enthusiasm.

"See that dog up there?" he said, pointing up the driveway. "It's a pure-bred Husky."

"I do see that dog up there." I felt I must not be pressing my point. "No throwing things at cars, okay?"

"He's a pure-bred Husky. You see that dog? He's white and he's got blue eyes--"

Now a group of adults had stirred out of the garage by the pure-bred Husky with blue eyes.

"They were throwing things at the car!" I yelled up the driveway. In a lower voice, I reassured the kid again. "Yes, I DO see the dog up there." The man in a white T-shirt strode down toward us.

"Which one?" he asked.

I pointed the red T-shirt kid out. Then I sized up the man and began to soft-pedal. "It's okay, though. Just wanted to make sure they were being safe."

I did not want to be responsible for a kid getting whaled on by an embarrassed dad. Dad said, "Up to the house, boy." Then he said, "We don't live here--we were just helping out some friends. He was throwing apples at cars a couple of days ago."

Mom and I both tried to smooth things over as much as possible. Oddly, I felt moved by the kid's lack of repentance--maybe I had overreacted to a regular kid-thing. Hadn't I, as a kid, spread cattail fluff in the highway and watched semis create snowflurries? Or maybe I gave into this funny suspicion, that it couldn't be ME making a fuss as I am still not quite an adult(I think I am, really, but I don't feel it). Or maybe this kid suckered us all. As I backed the Subaru out of the driveway, the adults up by the Husky waved to us in such a friendly way you might have thought we'd all just shared an apple pie and a pot of coffee.

What a dog. Did you see that dog? It's pure-bred Husky with blue eyes. You don't see that kind of dog every day.