A Ramble With Hal

Every Dog Will Have His Day

All the world’s a stage, so it’s said, and what an ironic place to encounter real-life drama than at that very famous West Coast thespian venue, which let's call Ye Olde Shakespeare Festival.

It’s been years since I’ve attended a live musical, so for a mini-vacation, I chose the 1990s musical sensation “Rent,” which I hadn’t previously seen. After a three-hour drive and checking into the hotel, I walked downtown for a café latte and some street-side people watching. With that activity checked off, I headed to an OSF map kiosk to locate the stage for that night’s show. Tied to a stanchion was a happy-looking German Shepard, lazing away in the shade. After I found the theater on the map, I stepped away and that’s when I felt the dog bite my right ankle. That chomp came from out of nowhere.

Startled, and glancing around, I found the shepard’s scruffy owner. “Does he have rabies shots?” I asked. The guy said sure, but the papers were back in San Diego. Not very reassuring! With dog in tow, he quickly left. Rattled, it took me a few seconds to find the camera icon on my phone and snap a picture of the departing duo. Still rather fazed, I walked away—I couldn’t think of what to do next. Just then, a police SUV drove by, and I flagged down the officer. I told him what happened and pointed to the back of the man as he disappeared down a small hill. The officer asked to see the bite and then told me to stay put. He immediately took off, and by flashing lights soon after, I saw that he had stopped him. Another police unit zipped up to the man and dog.

I sat down on a storefront window ledge and rolled down my white sock, now stained with blood, to examine my wounds—two punctures the size of peas. “I need to get back to the hotel to clean this,” I thought—still so discombobulated that I forgot I had a small bottle of hand sanitizer (never leave home without it!) in my cargo shorts pocket. When the police officer came back, he took a picture of my ankle, and asked me my side of the story. The officer had a nearly empty bottle of sanitizer that I used—and that’s when I remembered mine, and I liberally doused my leg with its contents.

In a subsequent phone call, the policeman explained he gave the owner 24 hours to produce the rabies certificate or else the dog would be taken into quarantine for two weeks by Animal Control. As a dog owner, I know how cherished are pets, so the thought that the dog would have to be quarantined had actually bothered me, as separation anxiety can happen in both dog and owner. I, myself, had just left my little guy, Bodie, with my sister that morning and was already missing him.

After a phone chat that evening with an advice doctor, the next day I visited a nearby urgent care clinic to have the wound checked. At the clinic, the physician’s assistant gave me a prescription for a dual-acting antibiotic and explained that in his 20 years of work, he’d never had seen a case of rabies from a dog bite—thus assuring me that I would not need a course of rabies shots myself.

The day after I returned home, the very kind police officer texted a photo of the dog’s rabies certificate. The vaccination was given in San Diego by a group called the Street Dog Project, based in Colorado, which activates volunteer veterinarians to provide care to homeless folks’ pets. I am most grateful to SDP for this valuable service.

Now, I could say that all’s well that ends well. Except. Except. Let’s start at the very beginning: That musical, “Rent” contained a storyline about unhoused people. I know that because homeless characters crowded the stage. In one song, they sang about not being able to afford rent, but what else the musical was about was murky. The problem was that all of the actors were miked with those cute little headsets that wrap around their face and make them look like rock stars. But an over-amped sound system distorted everything spoken and sung. The dialogue and lyrics—and all of the production’s modern day angst—were lost in an excruciating electronic blastiness that actually hurt my ears.

How pleasant it would have been to wrap up an upsetting day with the open-minded experience that theater can provide. As an English major, I enjoy how literature can reflect life. But “Rent” was indeed rent—audibly broken. Even though I had a great seat, I walked out at intermission and didn’t go back. I had enough pain for one day.

Shakespeare once said that “every dog will have its day.” That made me wonder what other words of wisdom he had about canines that could be relevant after my experience at Ye Olde Shakespeare Festival. And I found this in “Timor of Athens,” one of William’s more obscure plays. Shakespeare wrote, “Grant that I may never prove so fond as to trust…a dog that seems a-sleeping.” Yes, indeed.

A native Californian, H.A. Silliman grew up in the Gold County and currently lives in the northern outback. He is author of Where Two Rivers Meet anthology, which also appears in this newspaper. © 2023 H.A. Silliman.