It has been an explosive summer, and not just because I haven’t been giving Goblin her anti-fart pills. In Baltimore, the Fourth of July means fireworks, and not just at the official time when they’re pretty in the sky, but also in the weeks leading up that special day. They pop pop pop at odd times of night, like gunshots. Well, those may actually be gunshots, it’s hard to tell. We don’t bat an eyelash over gunshots in this city, usually. Perhaps it is only the looming holiday that makes them seem celebratory.
The problem is that Goblin, in recent times, has begun to object to explosions near and far. At the sound of distant fireworks (or drive-by shootings, or whatever they are), she freaks out. As Independence Day approached, she began trying to get out of her nighttime walks, and no matter where we were in the neighborhood, if she heard a bang, she would turn on her heel and start running for home.
We gave her a tranquilizer on the night of the Fourth and hoped for the best.
I think that was the night I knocked a glass bottle of seasoned salt off the kitchen counter and watched it explode on the tile floor. Rob and I and Goblin were all barefoot, so the resulting maneuverings were delicate in the extreme. The puzzling thing was finding jagged glass shards in places they could only have arrived after the sort of twanging multiple ricochets found in cartoons.
I don’t know why our little Boston terrier gets so panicked over the sound of hollow bangs from miles away when the most perilous accidents occur in the kitchen of her own home, and she doesn’t bat an eye over licking the floor of that room clean on a daily basis.
P.S. Yesterday, I was on my way to meet an advertising rep for lunch when I passed a dignified Asian woman on the street carrying a parasol in one hand and a urine sample in the other. I mean she was carrying it, not I. (I have to confess that is a combination that would not immediately occur to me.) This had absolutely nothing to do with explosions but is the kind of thing that leaves an impression nonetheless.
