Heidi (our Minature Dachschund) and I were walking through the school the other day when we came upon a kindly old man and a little dog named Dodger. I took Heidi off the leash, and let her run around with Dodger for a bit, but she lost interest after about two minutes, and so I decided to put her back on the leash and continue on our way. However, Dodger still wanted to play, and kept leaping on Heidi’s back. The old man was trying to get Dodger to stop, without much luck, and then suddenly, he started to shout “No, Dodger, no!” and then began to hit the dog with the leash. It was a dramatic transformation, one in which you could see an elderly man’s frustration with a world he could no longer control, suddenly turn to rage.
Further along, we watched as a mother walked her boy back from lunch. She was giving him instructions, saying things like, “Always brush your teeth, and never, ever forget to wash your hands!” Stuff like that. They were late, with the line of kids entering into the school dwindling down, and the boy began to run. He ran childishly at first, more side-to-side than A-to-B, and then, as he was being encouraged by the teacher ushering all the kids in, he began to sprint like a champion. The mother, with her son’s tiny knapsack on her back, was falling far behind now, and she began to shriek, “Hold the door, hold the door!!” Walking quickly, and with increasing anxiety and desperation in her voice, she kept yelling, offering more and more instructions to her boy, as he became smaller and smaller, a figure far in the distance, moving away from her and into a world beyond her protection.