The day Tchoupitoulas got out.
I got up early this morning when it was barely light outside and walked Stella to the neutral ground. I’m still hobbling from having dislodged my hip from its socket but the fact that I could make it two blocks to the neutral ground was good news. As we were walking, a man went up on a porch and was entering the old Victorian house when a little white dog darted off the porch, into the grass and down the sidewalk, and before the man could whip around, a woman came barreling out in a bathrobe and started yelling at the top of her lungs:
“TCHOUPITOULAS! TCHOUPITOULAS! TCHOUPITOULAS! Get your ass back here right. Fucking hell, on my one day off, and I hate your ass! COME HERE! TCHOUPITOULAS! Come here right now. Get your ASS BACK into this HOUSE. I SWEAR TO GOD. I HATE YOU. DAMMIT. ON MY DAY OFF. GOD DAMN YOU, TCHOUPITOULAS. ON MY FUCKING DAY OFF!”
What was hilarious was not that she had named her dog after a major street here in New Orleans (pronounced chop ah too laz) but rather that the little white dog, who had been behind a shrub, came out and started running behind the woman as she stormed the sidewalk while yelling her lungs out.
It made my yelling DAMMIT STELLA! every time Stella tugged on her leash seem rather quaint. I haven’t come out to the neutral ground in the last two weeks, since I dislodged my hip, because I usually end of fussing at Stella the whole way and grimacing with each footstep. One wrong step and a radioactive current shoots up to my earlobes.
Alas, Stella has forgotten how to heel, while I have been trying to heal.