I called ahead and asked if Bay Village allowed guests to bring pets to visit residents.
A chipper female voice was delighted by the idea.
“Why we so enjoy when families bring their kitties and little dogs. Please do.”
“Is there a weight limit?,” I asked keeping my own voice light.
“Oh, no” was the quick response, as if she understood most dogs to be Shih Tzus or Miniature Poodles.
With the occasional Golden Retriever.
Fancy place, Bay Village. Located in south Sarasota, with a view of the Gulf if you had enough money.
Mom’s studio overlooked the mall. “Perfect.”
It’s a two-hour drive from here, usually took me ninety minutes, not counting a stop at Quizno’s for three submarine sandwiches, one large, one medium, one small. And chocolate cookies and diet colas all around.
We usually had a coupon.
Most people have never seen a Caucasian Ovcharka close up. It can be a gamble. Google Russian prisons. National Geographic tells us the gulag guards use COs when German Shepherds can’t get the job done.
Hagrid had the personality of a Chocolate Lab with a concealed weapon permit. He was always carrying, just never needed to pull the trigger. Almost three feet high at the shoulder, six foot long, a hundred-eighty. He made quite an impression.
Had an Ovcharka before this one. Bigger and better-looking than Haggy, who is gorgeous and huge. The Dude had a hair trigger and it was erratic. As he grew and we introduced him to polite society, he could snap unpredictably for no serious reason. Turns out The Dude had two luxating patellas and hip dysplasia. A guy in Tampa can make titanium hips for eighteen grand. I put him down. The Dude, I mean.
I was three inches taller and five pounds lighter than Hagrid. Nobody noticed me. And a key rule is to keep moving while everybody’s mouth is agasp and they’re trying to make sense of what they’re seeing. Like Michael Corleone when he shot that guy in the restaurant and just walked back out.
We got in the elevator and that’s where our invisibility ended.
“Can we come in?”
Hagrid, The Young Redhead and I are alone up against the back wall.
“You are more than welcome.”
A slender family of blondes gets in like it’s their own elevator.
Nobody is looking at me really, because Haggy is sitting straight up, his head at my waist level. His head is enormous.
A little girl, herself a pet by the looks of it, asks, “Can I touch him?
Kids usually ask if he likes children and I usually say, he sure does, he ate one for breakfast this morning. Everything but the barrette. But Mom has been telling me all my life, I am not as charming as I think I am and she’s gotta live here, so I don’t. “I usually let him decide but today I think it’s fine.”
Remember one time we went through this and the child had his arm down Hagrid’s throat up to his elbow and I am thinking how twenty-percent of everything I ever earn again is going to this kid ’cause he is suddenly left-handed.
But there’s no problem and we leave the slender blonde family who really do look like organically-grown skinless chicken breasts in shoes and we enter Mom’s apartment.
If you thought it was tiny before – she keeps the Murphy bed down all the time as she’s too weak to pull it out of the wall – the three of us show up with sandwiches.
And it all goes quiet as we eat.
Except for the moist noises of a canine the size of a adult male human with teeth the length of your finger.
The most exciting thing that happened to that old lady in months was Hagrid Little Bear softly taking a bite of ham and cheese pita from her hand.
Nobody was harmed during the consumption of those Quiznos.
Like Mom said, don’t believe everything he tells you but he will never lie to you.
After Hagrid’s visit, a size limit on visiting pets was introduced.
Always with the fucking rules.
As Mom used to say.
