Tested by the Gods

Tonight, around 8 p.m., I started to take the dogs for their last walk of the evening. Yo-Yo and I always go first. We don't really walk; we just go down the street so that she can smell the four corners at the end of the block. Like a wine connoisseur, she evaluates with real concentration single blades of grass, the sign posts, the bases of the big oak trees at the edges of lawns. If the weather is really rainy or cold, she just pees in the front yard and wants to come right back inside to her warm spot on the sofa.

We noticed an old black guy pushing a shopping cart. This sight was odd as I live in a residential neighborhood, not downtown. It is an old neighborhood, so it is more readily accessible than all of the new subdivisions farther from the city center, the ones with a single entrance where all the streets end in cul-de-sacs. But my neighborhood is suburban residential, so we don't see homeless guys. As the night was chilly, Yo-Yo wasn't interested in more than a quick pee, after which I took her inside to get Bug. When Bug and I got outside, I noticed that the homeless guy had made his way up my street and was in Elizabeth's next-door yard picking grapefruit off her tree.

Bug was inspecting the spot where Yo-Yo had peed, so I just stood there watching the homeless guy. Elizabeth wouldn't have minded the man raiding her tree; a couple of well-off yuppies who live in the neighborhood routinely trespass in her yard for fruit. This tree produces so many grapefruit that even with robbing neighbors and bags picked for friends and family, the tree leaves plenty to rot on the ground. When Bug was done inspecting Yo-Yo's pee, he headed for the street, and his jingling tags alerted the homeless guy that we were out.

"Ma'am?" he called. "Ma'am?"

When I realized he wanted something from me, I pulled Bug back into the house and locked the door.

Having been kidnapped from a 7-11 parking lot several years ago, I just don't deal with strange men at night. But as soon as I heard the deadbolt slide into place [noting, as any college composition teacher would recognize, that my life had become a Brent Staple's cliché ], I felt bad. I am well schooled in Greek mythology and know the code of hospitality. I have read of one poor mortal after another ignoring someone in need only to discover that the person was actually a god testing the human's good will.

I guess last night I failed.