Rush hour. Black and dark blue fabrics; leather shoes, bags over the shoulder. Faces look forward, never up or down, just straight ahead towards an indefinite object. Behind the buildings there is an unseen horizon. Legs march on the sidewalk, determined and certain, attached to the bodies focussed on getting home. I can see them, the line of people, at the next intersection and I anticipate joining them, becoming compatible with their walking rhythms, their steady gait, the ability to negotiate space and the desire to be somewhere else.
But there is a dog. It walks in
front of me, traverses from right to left, ambles even, in the relaxed manner
of an animal that knows what it is doing and knows where it is going but is in
no rush to do or go anywhere. Dogs don’t come downtown. If you want to see dogs
you go to the lake or the city parks or those neighbourhoods that have trees
and leaves and children in them. But there it is, a terrier I think, with dirty
blonde curly hair, padding along on the sidewalk, unperturbed by the volume of
traffic, as if it always walks with with such ease at this time and in this
place, heading in the same direction as all the people going home.
This dog is alone. Not technically
alone because of all the people. There is just no companion nearby. And if you
believe that humans own dogs, rather than it being the other way around, there
is also no owner to be seen. And the
people that walk on the sidewalk with the dog don’t even notice that it is
there. The suits and the shoes lost in their thoughts don’t notice the dog,
at all. And I worry that the cars and buses lost in their thoughts won’t
notice the dog either, and the dog is walking towards them.
Christian Martius (2016)
Christian Martius (2016)
