it happened this morning..I wrote it tonight

So I take the dog for its ritual walk up the street this morning. Here I am following behind picking up after her I couldn’t possibly think of a better way to start a day NOT!

This morning I decided to go a little bit further and rounded the corner at the top of the street to suddenly come across this little waif of a child no more than about 18 months old standing right in the middle of the road at a T intersection.

Oh the images of that little kiddy getting hit by a car coming over the hill and not being able to stop in time, all sorts went flashing through my head as I calmly walked up to the little bugger!

Of course the little boy started to back away from me as I had this rather over eager dog at my side who thought this was a grand game. So as I am walking up and saying hello its ok my doggy is friendly the kids is at least backtracking up to the footpath.

I managed to convince the child that the dog was friendly and to hold my hand as we stood there for the next few minutes. I thought that surely any moment a worried parent would be calling names and frantically running into the street to find their child. How wrong I was!! I finally decided I would just have to knock on doors to find out where he lived. I knew it would be useless to ask the little tike where his mummy and daddy were but thought I would try, but nope, that was no good. So I picked a house down a bit of a drive and proceeded to ring their doorbell. They must have been wondering who the hell was ringing their doorbell at 7am.

Eventually this man comes up to the door and I stand there like a complete idiot saying “this doesn’t belong to you does it” he looking at me then he finally says, “oh you mean the child”! Doh hadn’t even crossed my mind that they would think I was talking about my dog!! And me clutching a doggie bag filled with what it was designed for!! Anyway the little boy was not his and after a bit of prompting he said he might live at the white house up the hill as he has seen him out before.

So off I go to see if I can give the dog away again, I start to walk down the side path of the white house, when a woman starts to yell from inside the house “Gerald, there’s a woman walking around our house!” of course she couldn’t see the child I was dragging beside me as the window was too high on the house. I get to the back of the house and looked at the stairs and there is no back door!! They had closed it in, which left me no choice but to walk around the house again, past the window and to the other door where their dog was barking madly and leaping up on a fence with my dog whimpering beside me. As I walked past the window little faces were pressed up against it saying “She’s got Jean Claude” so then the woman’s starts yelling “Gerald, Jean Claude is out again!”

Oh good grief, I wish I had never turned that corner!! As I get to the front door there stood 3 more waif’s, taking Jean Claude from me and thinking that was going to be the end of it, but oh no I wanted to make sure at this point that I was acknowledged for bring the little tike back. The father finally appears t-shirt on and underwear only, trying to cover up parts of his body I had no desire to see. “oh thanks very much lady”. I was pretty gob smacked by the whole scene at this stage the welcome of the waifs and the mother who sounded like a banshee and the father who looked like he wasn’t the brightest light bulb in the shop!

So I turned and took my dog home in pure wonderment of how often does he escape and the reason that he does (although I would have a good guess at that one!) and how easy it would have been for me to have just walked away with the boy if I had been a bad person. Maybe this was my pay back for the same thing happening with my daughter when she would have been the same age when my ex lost her in the middle of town and a stranger stopped and held her until her parents turned up. Who knows what could have really happened if I had just turned back home like I usually do.