Oct 09 2006
(Too) Close Encounters
I think I interrupted a close encounter of the commercial kind last night.
Sometimes when I take the Lovely Rita out for a quick pee, we go to the alley behind the building between us and the halfway house. Last night, we strolled there, and I heard an apparently disembodied voice say, “We’re just talkin’ here.”
I looked around, and a door of one of the parked and (I had assumed) unpopulated cars opened. The guy in the car noticed Rita, as people do, and started telling me a story about his own German Shepherd, who had, according to him, been senselessly shot by his neighbor when the dog was 19. Further, the purported slayer had wrapped the victim’s body in a carpet and thrown it down a well, where it wasn’t discovered for three weeks.
This kind of anecdote is hard to cope with politely at the best of times, let alone when a much younger bleached blonde (the “We’re just talkin’ here” voice) is in the car with the teller of the tale, adding her own comments which had nothing to do with the sorry saga in progress. Of course, Rita was off exploring in the bushes and couldn’t be reached. Finally, she emerged from her epic sniffathon and I bailed as politely as possible.
I had noticed that there were previously enjoyed condoms from time to time in that lane (always colored ones, so someone was feeling festive). I told my sister about it once, and of course she trumped me. She was babysitting a friend’s kid and took her to the park in San Francisco. She turned around to discover that the child was happily filling a condom with sand from the sandbox.
This is probably why my sis always has hand santitizer on hand.