Dog People. Dog Person.

The rain this past weekend transformed Mill Valley’s residential dog park into a muddy and treacherous cesspool. Since weather conditions were less than ideal for a Saturday afternoon, it seemed that most of the dog-loving patrons who normally frequent the park had opted out of what was surely a disaster waiting to happen. Any dog at the dog park on this particular Saturday afternoon would have been covered in mud, nose to tail, within minutes. Still, one tiny middle-aged man and his equally tiny dog decided to live life on the edge.

The Mill Valley dog park is, in all fairness, just like any other green and scenic park in Marin County. A paved path lined with bushes and small trees ran the outer length of a large field. Half the field was secured with a chain-length fence where the dogs were set free to socialize.

I watched the tiny middle-aged man and his dog from one of the two benches inside the fence. He was dressed in a dark, hooded raincoat and had brought an umbrella with him even though the rain had stopped a several hours before. He was broad and squatty; I remember thinking that if I’d stood close to him for any reason, I would’ve surely towered over him. A few pieces of shaggy, salt and pepper colored hair had loosed themselves from under his beanie. It looked as if he might have once had a head of very dark hair, but whatever his age, there was now a lot more salt than pepper. He wore rectangular black-rimmed glasses that, combined with his squatness and goofy beanie, made him resemble a good-natured toad.

His dog, which also sported silly outerwear of some kind, had a tan, wiry coat and looked too much like a Chihuahua. It never ran or chased a ball or even bothered to socialize with the decoy dog I’d borrowed from my friend as an excuse to be in the dog park.

The man walked slowly around the inside of the gate with his sausage-like fingers laced behind his back. Every now and then his gaze turned toward the sky as if he were expecting the rain to start back up at any moment. Then he looked back down at his bug-eyed dog. It trotted along a few feet ahead of him with its tiny nose to the ground, giving one of its paws a skittish shake every couple steps. The man smiled faintly at his dog whenever it did this as if he found it amusing.

The pair circled the inside of the gate twice before finally retiring to the bench next to mine. The wiry little dog jumped onto the bench and wiggled its way onto its owner’s lap. Despite its seemingly delicate steps the dog hadn’t done very well avoiding the mud and, as it crawled into the man’s lap, little smudgy paw prints began to appear on his raincoat. He smiled faintly at this too, but never said a word.