Gone Dog

I stopped off at home, petted the dog, then took off for Home Depot. When I got back an hour later, Diego was gone. He’d been penned up in the kitchen with a doggie door to the backyard, where I discovered a gap under the fence — he must have wriggled under and taken off.
I spent a hour running around the entire neighborhood searching, where I encountered helpful people… and not so helpful. A woman was standing on the sidewalk talking on a cell phone. I walked up to her, obviously panic stricken, and tried to ask her if she’d seen my dog. She made a little finger gesture and mouthed “I’m on the phone.” I tried to ask her again, telling her it was an emergency; she swiveled around and pointedly ignored me. That’s when I lost it, and right there on the street told her what a f**king selfish b*tch she was talking on her cheap piece of s*it phone.
I began to fall apart worried about Diego, screaming his name until my throat was raw. Finally I went into the house to make some “Lost Dog” flyers. When I came out, I saw a car on the street slow down — and then a school bus went by and the kids in the back started to scream and point — my heart stopped and I ran over to the street where more cars had come to a halt… and there was Diego, in the middle of the busy street, running around between the stopped cars. I screamed at him and he tried to jump up into one of the cars. Finally, he came to me and I scooped him up, shaking with fear and anger at him.
I couldn’t breathe. My heart was pounding and my chest was hurting. It still does.
I had thought that I’d come home, finish cleaning and wait for the lockbox to be put on. Instead, it was another day of the unexpected. And scary.

Oh, and there’s this annoyance: I needed a bunch of color copies of the flyer for my house, and you’d think that Kinko’s would be the place to go. Nope. Turns out that they have a two day waiting list for copies. Um, doesn’t that kind of invalidate the whole point of Kinko’s?

Oh, and my house is finished and on the market. There’s a sign and everything.