Benefit
Bluelighter
I saw a funny thing today.
A pair of khaki clad urban enforcers had the bent up living corpse of a vagrant pinioned against a palm tree on this strip of public park that runs along the palisades and overlooks the beach. The park itself makes for a hilariously absurd ensemble of tourists, bums and various local kids on skateboards getting in the way of pregnant joggers. Around dusk, when the city disgorges people onto the bluffs to catch the last twinkle of a hidden sun, the stench of urine and unwashed flesh bloats the salt stained air.
They weren’t cops. They were, I think, park rangers or whatever the urban equivalent is. The lady, too dignified or drunk to get up, lay sprawled on her back at the base of the tree securely caucused among her constituents: bags and dirty blankets and towels and whatever else a bum carries in their arsenal, being the mysterious pack rats of modern necessity that they are. The point of contention appeared to be a medium sized black splotch occupying the adjacent quadrant of grass. I assumed it was a dead dog, and the khaki men had come to wrestle it away from her so the German family standing some fifty feet away snapping pictures of the pier would remember the shopping and not the canine mortality rate among homeless animals and their owners.
Homeless people with homeless dogs are the saddest thing about poverty.
All of a sudden the black splotch jumped up and two things became apparent. The dog was quite obviously not dead and it was way out of its element here in bumstick park. It was a shiny black Labrador retriever, probably 2 years old or thereabouts. It looked clean and well fed, and I deduced that the dog had become separated from its owner and the homeless person had snatched it up and decided to keep it according to the Napoleonic code of conduct known as Finders Keepers. Either that or she stole it, but this lady did not look like a thief. She looked like dysentery in anthropomorphic form.
The civil servants in their ceaseless quest to demonstrate the grace of their superior moral fiber and its legitimacy as defined by the conventions of overweening social institutions had known immediately that something was fishy. When you see a dog with a substantially more impressive pedigree than its owner, something has to be out of joint. So they had come to confiscate the contraband. The lady yelled. They stood with their arms crossed and I think tried not to laugh.
On my way back, the dog was gone. There was just a clump of rags and the gentle ambrosial scent of feces in which the lonely lady now shrouded herself as she mourned (maybe?) the loss of her friend. The dog was safely on its way home, since I’m sure that even if it didn’t have a collar it at least had one of those microchip trackers that yuppies buy for their expensive dogs. Our Labrador has one.
Then it occurred to me that when the dog was returned, the servants of justice would tell the owner where it had been and they’d rush to give it a bath and wash the stink of homeless people off of it, then they’d feed it and shower it with love and attention. Conversely, and this is the funny part, the woman who now had no dog couldn’t even realistically hope for half of that.
It’s quite possible she will die before she ever bathes properly again.
You have to smile. What else can you do?
A pair of khaki clad urban enforcers had the bent up living corpse of a vagrant pinioned against a palm tree on this strip of public park that runs along the palisades and overlooks the beach. The park itself makes for a hilariously absurd ensemble of tourists, bums and various local kids on skateboards getting in the way of pregnant joggers. Around dusk, when the city disgorges people onto the bluffs to catch the last twinkle of a hidden sun, the stench of urine and unwashed flesh bloats the salt stained air.
They weren’t cops. They were, I think, park rangers or whatever the urban equivalent is. The lady, too dignified or drunk to get up, lay sprawled on her back at the base of the tree securely caucused among her constituents: bags and dirty blankets and towels and whatever else a bum carries in their arsenal, being the mysterious pack rats of modern necessity that they are. The point of contention appeared to be a medium sized black splotch occupying the adjacent quadrant of grass. I assumed it was a dead dog, and the khaki men had come to wrestle it away from her so the German family standing some fifty feet away snapping pictures of the pier would remember the shopping and not the canine mortality rate among homeless animals and their owners.
Homeless people with homeless dogs are the saddest thing about poverty.
All of a sudden the black splotch jumped up and two things became apparent. The dog was quite obviously not dead and it was way out of its element here in bumstick park. It was a shiny black Labrador retriever, probably 2 years old or thereabouts. It looked clean and well fed, and I deduced that the dog had become separated from its owner and the homeless person had snatched it up and decided to keep it according to the Napoleonic code of conduct known as Finders Keepers. Either that or she stole it, but this lady did not look like a thief. She looked like dysentery in anthropomorphic form.
The civil servants in their ceaseless quest to demonstrate the grace of their superior moral fiber and its legitimacy as defined by the conventions of overweening social institutions had known immediately that something was fishy. When you see a dog with a substantially more impressive pedigree than its owner, something has to be out of joint. So they had come to confiscate the contraband. The lady yelled. They stood with their arms crossed and I think tried not to laugh.
On my way back, the dog was gone. There was just a clump of rags and the gentle ambrosial scent of feces in which the lonely lady now shrouded herself as she mourned (maybe?) the loss of her friend. The dog was safely on its way home, since I’m sure that even if it didn’t have a collar it at least had one of those microchip trackers that yuppies buy for their expensive dogs. Our Labrador has one.
Then it occurred to me that when the dog was returned, the servants of justice would tell the owner where it had been and they’d rush to give it a bath and wash the stink of homeless people off of it, then they’d feed it and shower it with love and attention. Conversely, and this is the funny part, the woman who now had no dog couldn’t even realistically hope for half of that.
It’s quite possible she will die before she ever bathes properly again.
You have to smile. What else can you do?
