Seen on the Street

I saw the man first.  He rode his wheelchair in the street the way people do when there aren’t adequate curb cuts in the neighborhood.  His state-of-the-art wheelchair looked like an elliptical machine, and he sat in its midst like Captain Kirk in his captain’s chair.

I put his age at close to 70.  He wore his hair in a crew cut, and that, along with his horn rimmed glasses, evoked another era.

He rolled along the street, and eventually he moved into my full view – at which point I realized he was walking a dog.  The dog he walked, however, was not the dog I would have imagined for this large, rectangular man.  Rather, moving with the perkiest trot imaginable in front of the wheelchair on a nearly taut leash pranced a toffee-colored West Highland Terrier.

If ever a gait could communicate sheer delight in being alive it was this dog’s.  Watching them together, I felt happy.