Saturday

Today was World Wide Knit in Public day. Luckily it was also a Sunny Weather day, otherwise knitting in Eugene would have to be not-any-more-public-than-usual! I was sitting outside the Knit Shop with some knitters. A car drove up in front of the coffee shop nearby and the driver started honking the horn… apparently she was trying to get the attention of someone inside the coffee shop… not considering the knitters and farmers market shoppers who were deafened by the earsplitting honks. Just then, one of the knitter’s greyhound dog that was sitting with us started howling, a slow, melodious howl that lasted just a bit longer than you’d expect for a pair of mammal lungs. Evidently he heard a siren in the distance, his owner said he always howls with sirens. I couldn’t hear the siren, really, and I wonder if the honking driver thought maybe she’d provoked the howling. A little bit later I noticed a very old, feeble man getting into her car – and I wondered why she’d been honking for him rather than going into the shop. Must have been in an all-consuming hurry, or something…

Suddenly, the greyhound went bounding across the parking lot, his leash had gotten caught on a metal folding chair and he got scared and tried to escape, but the chair was still attached to him and clattered alarmingly against the pavement. One blink and he was already across the opposite street, and we gasped in horror as he sped uphill toward the main drag, a busy street with 2 lanes in both directions. In the time it took me to think that we should all have jumped up and chased after him he was already out of sight, and none of us could have come close to keeping up let alone catching him, and he was towing that chair as if it were a plastic bag. The owner did set out after him, and the woman next to me anxiously murmured that Eugenian motorists would definitely stop for a dog. (That is, if they even saw him, tearing along approaching the speed of sound!)

We were relieved to see him come safely back with his owner and her friend, mostly OK except for a bloody foot. (I think the chair had scraped it.) One of the other knitters got a first aid kit out of her car and someone held onto him while 2 others worked on bandaging him up. He stayed pretty calm except his brown eyes looked a little bulgy and he let out one sharp bark of protest.

I have been reading a volume of “short novels” by Anton Chekhov, and in the current story the narrator mentioned cruel adolescent townsfolk who would tie an empty kerosene can to a dog’s tail and the poor thing would run himself ragged trying to escape… I felt it was an odd coincidence that I’d just read that a day or two before today’s dog/chair incident.