The Explanation

Remember my post a week or so ago about the guy who went all crazy at Greg at the dog park? Well, I’m here to tell you the rest of the story today.

Yesterday afternoon Greg took the girls to the park. They always go to the big open area first so the girls can stretch their legs and then wander the trails looking for bunnies. It gives the girls a chance for a good run and Greg gets some exercise too. So after they got in to the park and were in the open off-leash area Greg came upon the crazy guy (Greg just told me his name was Charlie) and his dog (Buddah). Greg went over to talk to him about the “incident” not to start a fight or anything, but just to clear the air. "Are you the gentleman I ran into about a week ago?" he said. Charlie said, (I’m paraphrasing here, these aren’t his exact words), “Well, I wasn't any gentleman. I owe you an apology for acting like I did last week.” Talk about taking the wind right out of Greg’s sails! “How I acted was uncalled for, out of line and very rude. I totally over reacted, but I didn't know what happened until later. I’m deaf as a post and didn’t hear you ask me to grab my dog, I only heard you say ‘well don’t hurry or anything’ and thought you were just rudely trying to get us to hurry up to our cars to get out of your way so you could go down the sidewalk. I talked to my buddy about it later, and realized what you had really said and I felt bad that I had acted the way I did.”

Of course, Greg is totally taken aback by this, since in our experience people never seem to apologize for stuff. He said he didn’t even remember saying “well don’t hurry or anything” and I didn’t until he told me. So he says “Hey, I appreciate that. Both of my dogs have been attacked at this dog park and they feel very vunerable and are very defensive when they are on leash and around other dogs that aren’t. They were feeling threatened by your dog and protective of me and the car and I was just trying to stop a problem before it started.”

I guess Charlie apologized all over the place and they came away good buddies. Isn’t the world a crazy place? Here we thought this guy was totally wacked and it turned out he just misunderstood the situation. He told Greg to be sure and apologize to me for him, too.

I think my faith in people been restored just a tiny bit. It was nice of Charlie to apologize and clear the air. He could have just been a jerk about it and ignored us if we met up at the park, but he didn’t.