When in Rome...

I told myself I wasn't nervous, but my behavior gave me away.  I chewed my nails down to nothing and every other little nervous tic I had ever exhibited was showing up randomly before I would really notice what I was doing in the week leading up to Thursday.  But finally the day came:  the day when I would have to go back to court for the second time on the whole dog barking thing.  I told myself I had controlled the issue and my next door neighbor knew I was on to her as the complainer (if you really want to keep yourself anonymous, don't let your friends come over and make loud jokes about shooting my dog for a $1.50) so if she really wanted to pursue it I was going to make her face me, which she clearly wasn't willing to do.  I knew that the odds were highly in my favor going into it, but the stakes were high.  My dogs are like children:  they make me insanely mad occasionally, but I love them deeply and completely.  I would defend them with my life.  And the very idea that anyone could threaten their very existence, even if that's an extremely unlikely outcome, by making a anonymous noise complaint is enough to make me anxious.

It was an interesting sixty days between the two court appearances.  Interesting and often uncomfortable, at least for a while.  It didn't take long to ferret out the source of the complaint.  For one thing, one of my other neighbors had inadvertently ratted out the lady next door I refer to as Mrs. Mike as being who had called the police before on Ripley.  She had been my leading suspect all along because she had been doing a great imitation of an Ice Queen since we moved in. Some of my friends suggested I talk to the woman, and I knew they were right, but one beautiful Saturday afternoon while we were both outside working in our yards, rather pointedly ignoring one another, a male friend of theirs stopped by and was joking around with her.  And, like so many Pittsburghers, he seemingly knows one volume only, that being LOUD, which he actually turned up a notch when he turned to look straight at me with a grin and made his comment about telling me (the "little lady") he'd be glad to shoot the dog for a "buck-fifty".  She laughed at his threat like he had just told the best joke in the world, and he left her to walk around back to find her husband.  I tried not to let it bother me.  But it did.  To the point where I flung my garden trowel in her direction, gathered my dogs up into the car and angrily drove off to the dog park.  If there was ever a time when we might have buried the hatchet, it passed in that moment.  If I hadn't have left for a while that day, it might have gotten buried somewhere alright...

Then for a while I think I was under casual surveillance by the local police.  Or at least it seemed a little odd that suddenly I would see a cruiser either parked along our route as we would walk in the mornings and again in the evenings, or one would slowly roll by and park up the road aways until I went by, then pull out and move on.  This happened a few times over the next week or so.  Never before or since.  Maybe it was nothing, but I learned by watching many, many hours of Law and Order that things are rarely coincidences.  Of course, that made me nervous, a little freaked and a lot of angry.  Seriously?  Didn't the police have anything better to do that spy on a middle aged woman and her dogs?   But, in all honesty, they probably don't some days.

So, of course, the whole thing was on my mind a lot after the initial court appearance when I was granted a 60-day continuance.  And one evening as the three of us (Ripley, aka Criminal, Cheyenne and myself) were starting out on our evening walk and the Lab who lives down the street was barking at us from his little second story back patio that is blocked off by a dog gate, it suddenly hit me.  Only one other family in the whole area lets their dog out to roam in their yard freely.  It's not that people don't have pets here, but they're contained.  They get let out either in tiny enclosures like that Lab's or on leads for a little while each day and their owners walk them once or twice a day, but they don't just hang out in their owner's yards.  It's just the way it's done.  And it hit me that I'd been trying to let my dogs live like they always had.  Like all dogs do in Montana (in the summer) and Texas (not in the summer because it's too hot):  outdoors most of the time.  So they can stretch, play and laze in the sun, and when they're tired they can hang in the cool concrete walled storeroom I had fixed up almost like a little house with fluffy blankets and dog dishes.  And I was holding myself to the same standards I always had as to what was acceptable pet noise.  By the standards of just about anyplace I know actually.  But not here.

That's admittedly weird for an outsider looking in.  Because there is wild, cacophonous noise all around us.  Motorcycles that sound like you could hear them all the way to Philly - they are home-shaking loud (and I'm not overstating that).  Then there's the Friday evening parties that go on well into the night around a fire pit with some bad Top 40's station as background noise.  And what about those fireworks that you can buy in the grocery store?  For days leading up to the 4th it sounded like a blitzkrieg out there.  As a matter of fact, when I was just outside letting Ripley out for a final potty break, I heard all three of those things - a full week after the holiday.  But that's the rhythm of life here.  It's the way it's always been.  The sound that you don't hear are dogs barking.  I finally got how this mess I found myself in even came to pass. My collie's high pitched yips - no matter when or how often - is the jarring off-key note to the song of life that is this little suburb.

The question would become, with my new enlightenment, could I change my evil ways?  Or rather, could I change Ripley's?  Because we were in this together.