Bonheur...

Everyone knows how much happiness my frenchie brings to me but I had no idea that my little Macbeth could bring so much happiness to a total stranger. Every morning around 7:45 a.m. Macbeth I head out on our morning walk about downtown. We take off down 9th street past Hill, on any given day there will be about 10-15 people, mostly men, standing outside waiting to go inside the building. Usually I am running late in the morning and there is always someone that cattle calls or whistles at Macbeth and he can't resist, he wants attention from everyone. Annoyingly, I tug on the leash to distract him so that we can just go about our business but on this particular morning, a nice man standing in line and stopped me to ask if he could pet my dog, "sure" I said. He plays and pets him and of course Macbeth just rolls over and exposes his belly. He then goes to the next guy in line looking for some attention but he wasn't going for it. I always try to "explain" to Macbeth that not everyone wants to pet him but he doesn't want to listen.

2 Weeks went by and we didn't see the man I didn't really think anything about it. Finally one morning we hear this voice "Macbeth! Come here buddy!" It was our friend (I couldn't believe he remembered his name), we stopped and I said "how are you?, it's been a while, we haven't seen you" He said "well you know just trying to make it all happen". He said to me that he had been waiting in this line for weeks and no luck. The line he had been waiting in was the unemployment line. As he played with Macbeth he told me his name was Howard and that he had been out of work for over a year and that thought of seeing Macbeth made waiting in that unemployment line a lot less dreadful.

He said thank you to me and I said good luck to him as we parted ways. In that moment I realized that the happiness our pets bring us is expected but the happiness that our pets bring to others may be that of hope.