This weekend, dozens of young middle-class nonconformists, all nonconforming in precisely the same manner, stuffed their identically oversized canvases into a parade of indistinguishable SUVs and called it a semester. Yes, Baltimore, we’ve blipped over spring and arrived at summer: the art school students are moving out of their dorms.
One of them turned up at my door on Sunday, clutching a Boston terrier. “Is this your dog?” she asked. “One of your neighbors said it might be yours. I found it wandering down the street.”
It was half again as big as Goblin Foo and a boy to boot: definitely not ours, but I brought him inside anyway because I thought I recognized him as Joe, the affable creature from up the street, and I needed to retrieve my keys before taking him home.
The look on Rob’s face was priceless when I said, “Look, honey, it’s our new dog!”
Goblin was not amused.
Luckily, the dog’s owner passed by. “Did you unhook his leash from the fence?” she accused everyone in the vicinity.
“Uh, no, he was just walking down the street,” muttered the student, slinking away to load her parents’ SUV.
“I was just getting my keys so I could bring him home,” I explained as I turned the dog over to his owner. Maybe it was the relief of having the situation resolve itself before I even put on my shoes, but I don’t recall hearing a thank you. If I had stupidly left Goblin tied to a fence and had her disappear, only to turn up in the home of a breathtakingly handsome neighbor, I think I would have been a little bit more grateful that everything turned out all right.
For one shining moment, I had two Boston terriers. I imagined them playing together in the house as they grew up, then one day becoming surly, ironically bastardizing fashions from the early 1980s, and going off to art school, where every semester, I’d arrive in my hybrid SUV to pick them up. All the way home, they would tell me how my conformity stifled their freedom of expression, and I would just laugh and point out that they are wearing identical pantsuits.
