Dog Vs. Terrorist*

* Disclaimer:  This is a lazy re-post from an older entry on a blog far far away.  But given the date, it seemed appropriate.

I was just starting my commute to work on the morning of September 11, 2001, when I turned on the car radio and heard the news about the World Trade Center. I made the 45 minute or so drive from Oakland to San Mateo and listened in horror to the descriptions of the events as they rolled in. Slowly we learned the number of planes, the number of targets, the pentagon, the fate of the plane that was headed to the white house.

By the time I got to work, I was officially shaken up. I got on the phone and called Charley at home, where I thought he might still be in bed. (He had just been laid off the month before, literally the day before we closed on the purchase of our first home in North Oakland.) Eventually he answered the phone. His groggy voice confirmed that he had been asleep.

“Charley, terrorists have flown two airplanes into the world trade center twin towers in new york city.”

“What?”

I could picture him standing in the kitchen, in the tiny space that was billed as a “charming, well lit, breakfast nook,” but that must surely have been a closet or pantry at one point in time. I could almost hear him scratching the stubble on his chin, as he held the phone to his ear and looked out the back window into the yard, trying to process the big news I was telling him.

I started over. “Terrorists. Flew two commercial passenger planes. Into. The World Trade Center.”

There was a pause. and I waited as he took this in again. Eventually he spoke.  “Jesus Christ…”

“I know, it’s horribl–,” I started.

“No, no. It’s Huxley.” Our mentally unbalanced pit bull-australian cattle dog mix. “She’s going crazy in the back yard. The sprinklers are on, and she’s attacking them.”

Wait. Is he talking really talking about the dog right now? I wondered.

“Holy shit. She just bit the head off of one of the sprinklers. There’s water everywhere. I’ve got to go.”  And then the phone clicked off.

I got off the phone and turned to my friend L, who had been sitting in my office. “Huh. That was weird.” I described the conversation that I had had with Charley, and she shook her head, equally baffled.

“Maybe he was still kind of asleep?”

I shrugged.  For the rest of the day, we spent most of our time in a weird state of disbelief, occasionally checking out the news broadcast that was being played in most of the conference rooms at city hall.  The next day when I got back to work, L mentioned that she had told her boyfriend about Charley’s weird response to the whole thing.

“Maybe it’s a guy thing,” she said, “Because his first response was, ‘What the fuck is wrong with that dog?’.”

What the fuck is wrong with that dog, indeed.

image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandonj74/