Mini milk bones won’t protect us.

As the weather has been warming, I’ve been taking my golden doodle, Cody, for longer walks in the afternoons.

Sometimes, these walks stress me out. 

If you’re a human and know Cody, you probably think he’s sweet. But if you’re a dog, chances are, you think he’s a giant a**hole. 

It embarrasses me to be the person in my neighborhood with the a**hole golden doodle.

For a while, my walking-Cody-strategy was to avoid any potential conflict by turning around, every single time, I saw another dog coming our way. 

Oncoming labrador? Turn. 

Miniature poodle ahead? Turn.

Great dane on the horizon? Turn.

It was becoming time consuming. 

So I tried walking him at night after all of the dogs were asleep. But that’s not really a thing, because unlike birds, dogs don’t just go to sleep when it gets dark, and the only thing more awkward then managing a fired-up Cody on a leash in daylight is doing it at night with a headlamp beam bouncing in all directions. 

I decided to return to legitimately training Cody. On every walk, I strap on his prong collar and take along a pocketful of mini milk bones. We practice, and practice, and practice. He’s getting really good at coping with other dogs, but sometimes, if we pass a dog he really hates, he messes up. Other times, he’ll whimper while he waits for the other dog to pass- I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s anxiety, or maybe he feels like a huge baby being trained at 9-years-old. Maybe he worries that a passing pug might just full-on attack us, and he’d have to stand there, doing nothing about it. 

In the past week or so, as Cody’s skills have been improving, I’ve been branching out and leaving our neighborhood. 

Yesterday, I cut through to a bordering neighborhood, and was happily thinking about the blooming forsythia when a huge, angry dog came directly at us, barking aggressively and running full speed across an unfamiliar yard. In the split second I had to process my next move, I realized that I didn’t have a next move. 

Cody froze, and I all I could do was reach for my mini milk bones. I’m not sure if my plan was to give them to Cody, toss them at the angry dog, or stress eat them myself. 

At the very last millisecond, the dog stopped. It must have had an electric fence. 

My lungs expelled the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding, and my hands dropped the mini milk bones onto the pavement. I kept walking. Cody looked back at the fallen cookies, then up at me. I looked at him. “That was really scary,” I said to him, as if he were a kindergarten-aged human child. “That’s why I’m teaching you to be nicer to other dogs.” 

And then, I just cried. I was a full-grown woman, walking a golden doodle in someone else’s neighborhood, with involuntary tears plunking out of the corners of my eyes. I was sopping them up with my sweatshirt sleeve when a  pair of three-year-old boys came to the edge of their yard and waved to me and Cody. 

I waved back, but I didn’t fake a happy smile.

Because sometimes, the world is just really unexpectedly scary, and even when we’re doing our best, it’s almost always out of our control. 

Three-year-olds get that, probably better than anybody. So I knew they wouldn’t mind if I skipped the fake smile.