Walking The Dog

We live in a city full of news; it seems sometimes to come like rain from above, buzzing on television ...

Some twenty or thirty people—nurses, volunteers, aides, visitors, activists—had gathered at Joseph’s House at 6:30 in ...

My dog Bailey doesn’t read. He’s like that dog on the commercial for bacon bits, sniffing, panting that “you know I can’t read.” Bailey, like all dogs, is all nose, or so he let’s me believe.

I think he reads, in his own way.

In our Lanier Heights neighborhood, as I’m sure it is elsewhere, dog owners are not always greeted by name, but their dogs are. Everyone, in short, knows Bailey. But a surprising many people struggle with my name, which is both a curse and blessing. I feel like Jack Kennedy when he said, “I’m the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” I am the man who walks Bailey around the block.

How walking my dog four times a day offered a broader forum for local politics than any news outlet ever could, and how simple midmorning discussions reveal the sentiments of an entire city.