PRESENT: No Dogs Allowed

Ok, so I was told you could bring dogs to the Great Plains Nature Center. Wrong. As soon as I got Brody out of the car, and he was ready to mark his territory everywhere, including the parking lot, I see a sign: “No Pets and No Skateboards.” So, number one on my bucket list would have to wait.

To the dog park we went. . . . Location: BFE, aka South Hydraulic.

When I was five or six, I remember terrorizing my mother when she took my sister and I to the grocery store—asking if we could have anything and everything (especially the pink and white circus cookies), scraping the frost from the pizza coolers and eating it, and of course doing cartwheels down the aisle when she wasn’t looking. She’d always say, “Just wait until I tell your father, or wait until we get into the car.” Nothing happened in the car, and she usually forgot to tell Dad by the time we got home. At times, while we were in the store I think she’d tried to act like we weren’t her kids. I felt the same way with Brody when we first entered the dog park—that is not my dog.

Instantly after getting him inside the chain linked fence, he plowed into a rat terrier mix and two dachshunds as if he was trying to start a game of tackle tag. The women with the dachschunds tried to be polite and act like she didn’t care, but as soon as I turned my back on her, she was gone, along with her dogs. (She only lasted five minutes with Brody.) Immediately, I thought that it had been a bad idea, but luckily, the rat terrier owner, having a terrier himself, seemed to be more understanding. And Brody, for the first time, laid down and relaxed after chasing the rat terrier around for a good half an hour, a success. He didn’t even try to hump another dog once.

I wondered if my mother had taken us to a park and let us run wild for a good hour before shopping, she wouldn’t have hoped for a boy next.