Country dogs and bible men

2019.08.21, by Anatolij
Filed under Journal, Personal

The dogs are so cute. Yesterday, some time after we let Poppy the cat out, all the neighbourhood dogs began to bar just outside the porch. I thought it was very strange. They bark when they play, at each other, but I was sure they were barking at our house. I opened the door and Poppy came dashing in. Bright and his offspring had been barking to tell us, “Hey, your cat wants to come back inside! Open the door! We know he lives here!” Some days ago when I was tearing cardboard outside, Bright and the others came bounding and barking…

They must not have known what the noise was. It could have sounded like a strange growl, I suppose. I stopped before they got here; Bright came to see if I were safe and sound, and they stood guard protecting me until I went back inside. He reminds me so much of Ansel. Devoted parent, protective of everyone, his heart in the right place… C. calls him “Bright” because he’s kind of dumb, you see. Not very good at picking up puppies by the nape, and he’ll sometimes forget where he’s set them down and sit right on top of them. But he has a good heart. Ansel wants me to draw a comic about Bright.

Ansel says to me, “Woah, the guy next to us is reading about « God’s wrath against sinful humanity ».”

The man next to us is deep in prayer. He’s some kind of trader. Has been deep in prayer for much of the flight. Before we departed, he was on the phone telling someone to “buy whatever xxx”… and, I glimpsed his phone before take-off, saw a message to buy “1000 pcs of random xxx”. Strange folks from Texas. He really didn’t enjoy the baby crying in the aisle behind us.

It was a poor Hispanic family with a baby, a two-year-old boy, a tattooed young mother, and two tattooed young men with close-shaved heads and backwards-facing black baseball caps. They all sat in the same row. An attractive white couple gave up—well, traded their seats so the family could stay together. The baby was wailing at the time. Another passenger, after the trade, joked about the couple’s “sacrifice” of leaving an aisle with a crying baby.

The flight has been delayed…