a man and his dog and normalcy

I’m a sucker for routines. A routine makes me feel safe and secure, makes me feel like I have some control over my life. When you exist within the confines of an anxiety disorder, that sense of control is so important. Taking the same route to work every day and never deviating from it is just one of the ways I control my environment.

My route is circuitous and sort of out of the way, but it’s the route with the least amount of traffic lights and cars. I navigate it seamlessly, driving as if on autopilot. I’ve been doing this over twenty years. My subconscious knows the way. And it knows that when I make that right onto Maple Avenue that I should be hyper aware. I need to look out for a man and his dog.

I first spied this dog — a golden retriever — about a year ago. I see a lot of people walking dogs on my drive but this one really caught my eye. It had a plastic water bottle in his mouth and was walking as if that bottle was the grandest prize in a game that only he played. He was proud, he was happy; his tail wagged and pranced along the street, stopping only to pee on a fire hydrant but not letting go of that water bottle.

I leave my house the same time every day. 8:10 on the dot, to be at a job that is seventeen minutes away that I don’t have to be at until 9:00. I am habitually early for everything. Apparently the dog’s owner is as stuck to a routine as I am, and every single workday I would see the man and the dog, and the dog would invariably have some prize in his mouth. I got used to seeing them…