You almost had me at Hello

Within 30 minutes of stepping inside downtown Santa Fe, this is what happened:

“I love the color of your legs. You’re almost the same color as me,” a man shouted from several feet away. “Come here. Let’s compare.”

“I don’t know,” I said, eyeing his dark brown skin. “I think you’ve got me beat.”

But he was insistent that we were the same color and he walked right up to me and pressed his hip next to mine so that our skin was touching and I laughed, because I looked positively jaundiced next to him but he was still impressed.

“How’d you do it?” he asked.

“Mexico.”

Wandering around the next bend, a man who looked like he could have been an extra in the movie Heidi, or maybe Indiana Jones, was walking towards me with a rather large dog, and so I did what I always do in such a situation: moved to the side, allowing the other person to pass me with a wide berth, so as not to allow Rennie to cause any problems.

“Oh, thank you. I was going to do that,” the man said as he got closer. “Six years ago, this one—”

But then I could not hear what he said regarding his dog, because both dogs started snarling at each other.

“He what?” I asked, turning back to the man, who had by now passed me.

“Treed. A. Bear.”

“Oh,” I said, and started laughing as I carried on down the street.

And then, not 10 steps later, a man sitting to the left with two pit bulls started admiring Rennie and he called him a girl, which I said happened all the time, because he is such a delicate young man, which is likely because he was only four months old when he got neutered, to which this guy responded that it was a shame he had been neutered, to which I responded that it was before I had adopted him but that I would have done the same, because you know, that’s what you do. But this guy said that it’s what lazy people do, because the alternative is to keep the dogs apart during certain times in their, er, reproductive phases. And I was just sort of quiet to that one, because it all sounded so New Age and outside anything that I wanted to know at that very moment. And then he almost convinced me to stick around Santa Fe for a second night, because the next night was when some of the galleries were open late for First Friday and the Georgia O’Keefe museum was free but then I kept walking, looking for dinner, and by the next morning, I had decided to keep moving, because the thing about traveling with a dog and staying at campsites during the heat of summer is that it’s hard to be a tourist. You have to do things during the day that are inclusive of your buddy, since you cannot leave him in the hot car, and I was pretty sure that I did not want to just wander the streets of Santa Fe all day, window shopping and sitting in shady spots, because Rennie is also rather intolerant of the heat, so even hiking somewhere in the area was out of the question. Basically, anything that did not involve air conditioning was out of the question.

But I liked the city. It had good vibes. It felt like a big small town, like the kind of place where you could just roll in one night, decided to settle down, get a random job at a random cafe, start making connections and find yourself still there, 10 years later. I had the feeling that if I did stick around, I would meet a lot of people and I would laugh a lot more than I already had in half an hour and that I might even stop getting my pets fixed, so I kept moving but not before having a lovely plate of mezze in a quiet courtyard on a side street that no one else seemed to know existed, and then waking up the next morning to take Rennie across the empty, four-lane highway in the early light of dawn, watching the sunrise over the mountains behind the city, which was nestled into the hills just like Easter eggs in a basket.