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| Aquinnah, aka The Quinn Man |
Sometimes, first impressions can be grossly misleading.
Our house is fronted by very tall hedges that parallel the city sidewalk. The only opening in the hedges is at the end of our walk. So if I head out the front door, I can hear, but cannot see, anyone who’s passing by our house on the public sidewalk, until they reach that narrow break in the hedges. Then, I catch a glimpse of them as they walk by.
When I took our 85-pound chocolate lab Aquinnah out for his final pee of the day at 8 p.m. Sunday, I could hear people approaching on the other side of the hedges, but I could not yet see them and they could not see me. I held Aquinnah in check on our walk, waiting for the pedestrians to pass by, so we wouldn’t bump into them.
As we stood there, with Aquinnah straining quietly at the end of his leash, the first of two very young women, possibly teenagers, looked our way when she passed the opening in the hedges.
“Oh my God!,” she shouted to her friend, who was trailing some distance behind her. “There’s a friggin’ huge, scary dog on that sidewalk!”
“I’m not looking! I’m not looking!,” her friend replied as she passed by at a trot.
At this point, Aquinnah and I headed down our walk and turned right on the city sidewalk, which placed us behind the young women as they hurried off. The first woman turned around, saw us coming up, and said to her friend, a note of relief in her voice: “Oh, it’s just a black lab.” She couldn't accurately identify Aquinnah's color in the dark, but she got the breed right.
Then she looked at me. “You’ve got a really cute dog,” she said. Now, that's more like it.
