Recently Surfaced in Memory

1996. Springtime. Walking down Henry Street, past the cheerfully filthy front of the C-Town. Encountering the front of a typical example of postwar development in South Brooklyn: squat apartment building with a narrow rectangular concrete space in front surrounded by iron fence: a little sovereign aisle just wide enough to be a miniature run for the large and slightly quizzical canine who stands at one end, regarding me inscrutably. Out of my mouth, a reflexive utterance, in the kind of voice one adopts with regard to dogs. "Puppy," I address him, this the lone word I speak but my Aren't-We-A-Good-Boy voice conveying the full imbecility of my desire to insinuate myself into the heart of nearly every quadripedal mammal I see.

His eyes follow me with a blankness that bespeaks exactly nada. His presumed owner sits in a housedress on a folding chair on the stoop a few feet away. As I pass her stoical dog, she takes her Marlboro Light from her mouth and bestows upon me a broad smile which contains two long rows of tiny yellow teeth, pinprick-pointed as if filed that way. He'll take yeh hand off, she says with a quiet and prideful joy.