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passing for service dogs
Tuesday, November 7 2017
It was election day, and like many people who've been traumatized by the results of the election day that happened a year ago, we were eager to participate in the beginning of whatever democratic correction the Trump fiasco necessitates. We had other errands to run, so we started at the Hurley Town Hall, which is our polling place, and took it from there. The polling place was as crowded as we'd ever seen it, though demographic didn't look to be an especially Trump-hating one. I voted a straight Democratic ticket except in cases where candidates were running as both Democrats and Republicans (there were three or four of these), and for those I wrote in "Nancy Leonard." (She was the closest citizen to the polling place that I could think of; her husband Ray is still a citizen of the Philippines.) I also voted no on the idea of a New York State constitutional convention, mostly because I could see it becoming an opportunity to revoke the constitutional protections of the Catskills and the Adirondacks.
Next Gretchen did some bank business at Mid Hudson Valley Credit Union branch on Hurley Avenue while I took advantage of their coffee-making robot. (For some reason Gretchen was especially worked up about the environmental waste inherent in such coffee. But for me it just seemed like a justified pleasure in life; Gretchen has plenty of those of her own to atone for if that's what she wants to do.)
We ended up at Outdated in Uptown, where we would be having a nice fast-casual lunch. We'd brought both dogs with us, and decided we'd take them into Outdated with us. Even though Outdated is a restaurant in addition to being an antique store, it's common for people to bring their dogs in there. Generally we'd eat outside if we brought our dogs to Outdated, but it was a bit too cold for that on this brisk November morning. Dramatically, we marched up to the counter, pulled somewhat by our enthusiastic dogs. "Are they service dogs?" the cashier asked? She had a somewhat austere early-60s retro quality to her. "Of course," Gretchen lied. That was all we needed to say. [REDACTED] While Gretchen ordered our food, I dragged the dogs back to a table and pled with them to please behave themselves. They weren't acting anything like service dogs. Normally the kinds of dogs people bring into Outdated are a lot less excited than they were being.
Outdated was crowded, but Gretchen managed to find us a better table, one further away from the restaurant's main aisle. As I was getting up to follow Gretchen, a dumpy older woman asked skeptically, "Two pit bulls?" I thought her discomfort was a joke and said, "Yeah, they'll tear your face off!" "Well, pit bulls make me uncomfortable," she elaborated. Gretchen would have none of it, saying loudly from a quarter way across the restaurant, "Wait, you're upset that they're pit bulls? That's like being concerned about a person because he's black!" That was suitably shaming, and, though a little embarrassed, I was also proud of Gretchen. Soon there after, several people came up to Neville to love on him. One woman wanted to kiss his delightfully smushy face.
The tempeh reuben at Outdated is now made with kimchi, which is great. But not everything was quite right with my sandwich. I wondered at the amazing cheese they'd put in it; it was rubbery and stretchy and seemed, well, like real mozzarella. Gretchen had already had a bite out of the sandwich and was pretty sure it was real. Another crime against veganism! I ate it anyway, and it wasn't quite the disgusting experience I've come to expect when the cheese turns out to be real.
This evening during my post-work bath, news trickled in from the off-year election results around the country. To my enormous relief, Ed Gillespie, the establishment Republican who had run a racist pro-Confederate-monument race for Virginia governor, had gone down to defeat, something that hadn't seemed like a sure thing in recent days. Not only that, but Democrats had cleaned up far down the ballot, even replacing the biggest homophobe in the Virginia House of Delegates with the nation's first transgender state legislator. It was a great night to be a Democrat, and provided some evidence that the United States had not become a dystopian hellscape. The only bad news of the evening seemed to that Doug Adams, who had run for the Ulster County legislature and apparently gone down to defeat. We'd developed a special fondness for Doug due to his several visits to our house when canvassing and also the fact that he shares his name with the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. We'd felt bad about not being able to vote for him during the primary; but that had been back when Gretchen was in the hospital up in Albany. (I'd actually brought one of his postcards to the hospital for Gretchen to gaze upon while the devices dripped and beeped.
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