The usefulness of a pickup truck

I met anoth­er of our neigh­bors yes­ter­day, but in the most unusu­al way yet.

I had walked with Mor­gon a cou­ple blocks to Jer­ry and Erika’s house drop him off so he could play bas­ket­ball with Malachi. Eri­ka gave me a plate of ours to take home, and I start­ed back.

As I round­ed the cor­ner to our street, I saw a dog walk­ing and sniff­ing around on my side of the road. She looked to be a pit bull mix, not too big, but I did­n’t see an own­er any­where. I crossed to the oth­er side of the road and kept going.

The dog spot­ted me, how­ev­er, and crossed over to my side of the road. She was com­ing around a cou­ple of parked cars, so I kept those in between us and crossed back across the road and picked up my pace, keep­ing an eye out for the dog. I could­n’t tell what her inten­tions were; her body lan­guage was­n’t con­vinc­ing me that she was too friendly.

The dog came around the side of a car where she spot­ted me again, and imme­di­ate­ly put her head down and start­ed com­ing right at me–not run­ning, but very deliberately.

Oh boy, now what? I looked around quick­ly and saw that I was right next to a pick­up truck parked in a neigh­bor’s dri­ve­way. I took two steps and jumped into the back of the truck right as the dog was get­ting to me. I glanced up and caught the eye of a woman just then com­ing out of her house lead­ing three small dogs on leashes–the own­er of the truck I had just jumped in.

Her expres­sion was pret­ty fun­ny. She looked total­ly bewil­dered. I real­ized then that her truck doors were stand­ing open–she was in the process of load­ing up her truck to go some­place. This isn’t that great of a neigh­bor­hood, but usu­al­ly men don’t go around jump­ing into the back of vehi­cles at ran­dom. I’m sure she was momen­tar­i­ly won­der­ing if she should be wor­ried about my inten­tions, but I think it was pret­ty obvi­ous that if I was try­ing to steal her truck, I was going about it the wrong way.

I imme­di­ate­ly start­ed apol­o­giz­ing and explain­ing about the dog, which was still sniff­ing around. She quite calm­ly came down from the porch and got her dogs into the truck. She appar­ent­ly knew the dog I was run­ning from.

“Don’t wor­ry about it,” she told me. “I total­ly under­stand. I think the dog’s pret­ty sweet with humans, but I’ve had some prob­lems with her and my dogs.”

We then intro­duced our­selves, her name was Mau­reen. She was real­ly nice about the whole thing, and we had a good laugh about the sit­u­a­tion. I then went home, thank­ing her for the use of her truck.

“Any­time!” she laughed.