Ran originally April 5, 2020 in The Times and The News-Star

So far during the Current Crisis, everyone’s been really nice, nice being a relative term.

I’ve almost gotten picked off a couple of times in parking lots, but that’s business as usual. Drivers seem to think there are no rules in parking lots. Puzzling. They park in the little lined rectangles, orderly, but getting there is every driver for himself.

Be extra careful in parking lots.

Having never lived through a pandemic — hope I won’t be able to stay that when this one’s over — it’s impossible to compare eras. Maybe everyone’s nice in a pandemic and this is normal.

So good for us.

I thanked the manager at the grocery store more than two weeks ago when things were starting to get dicey and he smiled and said things had been good, that everyone was acting kind. I saw him again this week and he said the same thing.

“About one in 100 will do something,” he said, “but things have been surprisingly good.”

And he smiled when he said it and it reminded me again how much I love my grocery store folk, ever since I was a boy and the only store in town was the IGA, and Kermit Flowers was the king of it and when he wasn’t fishing at Santee Cooper, which was often, he was always there being nice and keeping shelves stocked and smiling in a grandfatherly way at my mother and extending her credit, which I didn’t know until I was grown.

I just googled Santee Cooper, sort of the Toledo Bend of South Carolina, to make sure my mind remembered it right and it did, but what popped up before the Santee Cooper lakes — Santee Cooper is more than one lake so it’s also sort of like the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail of South Carolina too except it’s fishing instead of golf — the Santee Cooper electric company — Sigh…Santee Cooper is also sort of like the Swepco of South Carolina — popped up, and with this message:

“Santee Cooper will not be disconnecting power for delinquent bills until further notice, while we are monitoring COVID-19’s impact in South Carolina.”

See? People being nice.

But besides people being nice and smiling — I’m guessing now because most everyone’s wearing a mask — I’ve noticed something else during My First Pandemic: It’s a beautiful thing when the neighborhood goes to the dogs, to the real ones, the four-legged gifts from heaven, the guys and gals who always act the same, national crisis or natural disaster or three-error game.

Dog. God spelled backward. Coincidence?

Uhh…probably. I mean, I’m seeing a lot of selflessness here. A lot of unconditional love. A lot of living-in-the-moment. But …

Honestly, the dogs in our neighborhood, awesome as they are, are a bit off the leash. They don’t know what they’re doing because their owners haven’t taken them for many walks, until now.

For more than a year we have tried to do a daily one-hour walk through the ’hood, and we might see three dog walkers. On the weekends now there are dozens.

There’s the Confused Dog who darts this way and that in short bursts like the ball in a pinball machine. There’s the small dog with Little Dog Syndrome who barks at dogs bigger than him, which is every dog.

There’s the Great Dane who carries himself like he knows he’s a stud and the Chihuahua trying to keep up with his family of five dogs and he’s the runt, his little legs going three times faster than his bigger brothers’ and sisters’ legs. Appreciate his attitude.

There’s the Bored Dog because his owner keeps stopping to look at his cell phone like he’s expecting a call about a kidney transplant. (Leave your phone at home and be present with your dog, man …)

There’s the Basset Hound and Border Collie being walked by the same women, and a more contradictory pair she could not have chosen. The hound lags and the collie charges and the owner’s arms are stretched in front and behind, to the limit, like suddenly it’s the Middle Ages and she looks as if she’s about to be lifted up, drawn and quartered.

As it is in this case, most of the dogs are actually walking their owners.

We need dogs now, more than ever. It’s sort of ruff-ruff out here lately; hopefully the dogs will walk us through it.

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