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How Much is that Doggie in my Sushi?

The Source

How Much is that Doggie in my Sushi? I’ll probably get in trouble for this one since it’s one topic that always sets people off, but I’m feeling feisty this morning. I was dining in Springfield with a couple of ex-students. One of the guys loves sushi and the other is a steak man so the choice of restaurant was obvious. There’s a buffet on the north end of town that is sort of a Food-Are-Us for hungry college boys. The place not only has miles and miles of Oriental fare to choose from, but it employs a full-time sushi maker and prime rib for the taking. The waitress put us in a side booth…then she came in. Mrs. Looney. When I saw her plop the baby carrier down in the aisle between us I joked to my dinner companions that God and I have this private joke: If there’s one crying baby in an entire restaurant, He’ll place the squalling little darling right next to me. God also pulls this trick on long-distance jet flights and on Amtrak. We were somewhere between the salad and the sushi when I noticed the blankets moving on the baby thingie. Up until now Mrs. Looney had kept the baby completely covered. Frankly, she looked too old to own this particular child so I assumed she was either the grandmother or had rented the kid for the evening. That’s when I saw the nose pop out from under the covers. A brown nose. A long brown nose. I thought, This poor child is suffering from something! Then the covers flipped off completely. It was a dog. A Jack Russell Terrier. The boy eating across from me said, “I can’t believe that! She’s got a dog in a restaurant! That’s wrong. That’s just wrong!” It’s always some comfort to have someone in your company who’s angrier than you are. It diffuses your rage a bit. Mind you, this was not a Seeing Eye dog, this was not a bomb-sniffing dog, this was not an Oh-My-God-Timmy-Fell-Into-The-Well-Go-Get-Lassie type of dog. This was just a plain old dog dog….right there just feet away from my sushi. Mrs. Looney (or her name may have been Idiot or Lamebrain or Nincompoop. …we weren’t wearing nametags) had brought a full-grown dog into a place where a hundred other people were paying to eat. She would not-too-discretely slip globs of General Tso’s Chicken to the creature. To the dog’s credit, he did not bark. Rover obviously knew this routine well and was a fan of Oriental food. He’d eaten here before. (By the way, I have proof of this. My friend Cory took a picture of both the lady and her buffet hound.) At some point during the meal a waitress stopped at the crazy lady’s table and bent down to rub the dog’s nose. She was our waitress (the lady, not the dog.) She was the waitress who’d just served us our drinks. She was the waitress who now had Jack Russell Terrier on her fingers. The dog-rubbing waitress said, “Oh. It’s a dog.” She couldn’t tell a Diet Coke from a regular, but she could differentiate dogs and babies. Mrs. Looney replied, “He doesn’t like being alone.” Okay, this is just a wild guess, but I’d bet my last Crab Rangoon that it was the Mrs. Looney who couldn’t to be parted from poochie. This dog looked perfectly capable of taking care of himself. The third member of our eating party was not bothered by the fact that a nose-licking animal was slobbering away just inches from our table, but Brandon’s a farm boy. Perhaps he’s used to munching with the livestock. Cory and I had more difficulty. I’ll admit that the chances of our catching some dreaded terrier-borne illness was remote, but dog-gone it this was a public restaurant. To quote my astute young friend, “That’s just wrong!” Yes, we all know people who consider dogs and cats as card-carrying members of the human race, just shorter and more hairy, and I have learned not to mess with people who not only love their animals as one of the family but who actually regard them superior to several of their cousins. But darn…in a public restaurant? I recently walked into an office in Jacksonville to get a needed document. The office manager had to remove a cat from atop the pile to hand me what I needed. Come on now! This is just wrong! Okay…send the angry letters. Tell me about how your dog is cleaner than most people you know and that your cat knows how to file papers before she wets on them. I’m tough. I can take it. But man…that’s just wrong!