Recently in Nonfiction Category

At the riverside visitor's center I paused with my mother's corgi while mother took a quick bathroom break. Nearby, a clean-cut man in his thirties sat with an unusually large brown pit bull.  He started chatting with me. "People think these dogs are vicious," he said in a pronounced southern drawl, patting his enormous pit bull on its flat head.  "But it's just the training. It's like with guns. Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well all right, I thought, people kill people with guns. But that's neither here nor there. "She's a sweetheart," he said.  "Never had any problems."  I made some sort of comment about how even corgis can get a little grumpy sometimes (anyone who has tried to separate a corgi from a pork chop can attest to that) but their smaller jaws made them a bit less lethal. 

And then the fellow opened up. "Oh yeah," he said, "Those jaws, they lock on and they just don't let go. She's two for two. Took apart a rottweiler."

"A rottweiler?"

"Yeah, guy brought over a rottweiler, and she ripped her up, they took the dog to the university and they worked on her all day but there wasn't anything they could do."

It was then I understood that I was being visited by a stranger from an alternate universe, one free of irony or logical malfunctions. I scooted the corgi a couple of feet to the left.  "Wow,"  I said, and as Mom emerged from the bathrooms off we went.