My Road And Otis

It's funny the things you see when you are watching. I am at greater liberty to do so than others perhaps, because they are driving and I and riding or walking all the time. I don't have to concern myself with the road, and I am often traveling slowly enough that I can watch things play out instead of zipping by them. That happened the other day, when I would just as soon have been in a car, but found myself walking up a hill.

I was on my way to a gig, and found that the bus did not go up the hill. Rather, it stopped at the bottom and turned. That's sensible enough I suppose. I started walking, and found I was making better time than I guessed. Maybe it felt that way because I had company. There was some guy walking up the hill for reasons of his own. He wasn't there for the reason I was. Maybe he was there for one of the industrial-looking businesses around. He walked on one side of the road and I the other.

He wasn't even the interesting aspect of things, especially. There was this dog walking up the hill. I thought it was the guy's dog for a while. It would wander out into the road, passing from one side to the other and back again. The guy would tell it to get out of the road, so I thought it was his. He told a passing car that it wasn't, and so I realized that it was a stray dog that just lives there on those streets around the hill.

Once I realized that, I wasn't worried about the dog anymore, as I figured it was a survivor that knew what it was doing. I started worrying about myself, because it seemed the dog just might follow me all the way to where I was going, and how would I explain this mongrel dog when I got there? I needn't have worried, because the dog went off on his own at some point. It's his loss: there was lots of food there.