Maybe the Dingo Ate Your Baby

On a recent Friday evening, we made reservations at a restaurant in our neighborhood that we've been meaning to try for months.  We were immediately seated at our table adjacent to the very tiny, steamy, open concept kitchen and proceeded to wait about 6 months to be acknowledged by a server.  This left ample time for me to take in our surroundings, and I decided the vibe was "Movie set in the 90s in which Gen-X restaurant coworkers bond about their lack of success in their 'real jobs' aka creative pursuits, directed by Terry Richardson," if that makes sense.  Or like if Douglas Coupland wrote the copy for an American Apparel catalog.

So how was the meal, you ask?  I have no idea!  Did I black out after 3/4 of an aperitivo and forget that I had a totally tubular spinach salad with strawberries, candied pecans, and bleu cheese locally sourced from a time machine dialed in to 1997?  No, I did not, thank you.  I'm still on the wagon for now, but that's another story for another day (this magical Boregon Trail journey may have run its course, and although nobody's died of dysentery yet, we might need to ford another river before we reach the Willamette Valley and the oxen are getting tired).  

For the love of Chimney Rock, I could not tell you what food I ordered (it was Bouillabaisse) or whether I enjoyed it (it was okay but the whitefish was overcooked) because I was busy EATING UP the yarn of mind-boggling stupidity this woman seated behind me was spinning for her friends.  Just slurping up that yarn like it was a giant strand of spaghetti, Lady and the Tramp style.

This woman was most definitely named Karen or Trisha, and she had the kind of voice you couldn't tune out and would give you PTSD if you worked in an open-plan office with her, but THANK GOD for it on this occasion.  I never actually dared to turn around and look at her, but she definitely sounded very tan and very blond.  

OKAY, so what was her story?

She was explaining to her dining companions that she has this friend in Arkansas who has a passion for animal rescue.  She and her two small children have several rescue dogs and they foster dogs all the time.  They are a family of total animal lovers, and they 100% have a Who Rescued Who magnet on the back of their car.  

One day this animal loving woman, let's call her Sarah because she's the human personification of that weepy Sarah MacLachlan ballad, finds a very emaciated, wounded, clearly abused dog on the side of the road.  She swoops it up and takes it home, feeds it, cleans its wounds, basically acts like the canine Florence Nightingale.  At some point, she takes it to a vet to get checked out, which is the moment in the story where I feel like everyone at this animal hospital really um, screwed the pooch, and I have a hard time believe everything that follows, but here we go.

I guess this poor, wretched creature gets some medical attention, gets all its shots, does not appear to be microchipped, and is released back into this woman's care.  Sarah gradually introduces it to the other dogs in her house and lets it around her kids, but it never really seems to dig on children or labradoodles.  She figures it's a result of trauma, so she takes it to some type of rehab at the local humane society.  I didn't know that was a thing, but if you can take a dog to rehab for being socially backwards, my dog Charlie has a 12-step program in his future.

But I digress.  There's a fuzzy patch in my timeline here because our server ripped me out of the narrative to check on our meals.  Apparently months go by where Sarah is regularly taking this rescue dog to rehab until one day, someone at the rehab center with half a brain points out, "Hey lady, do you...realize this is actually a coyote?"

Record scratch.

They're so cute when they're emaciated and bloody!

And Sarah is like, "Are you sure?  He's so sweet?"  And they're all, "Has this 'dog' ever let you pet it?  Does it come when you call it? "

"Well, no, but..."

"Yea lady, we can't let you take this dangerous wild animal back to your home where you have small children and domesticated animals, I know this is Arkansas but we have laws here...if you were a man and instead of a dangerous animal we were talking about a semi-automatic weapon, it'd be a totally different story, but yea, bottom line, you gotta leave the coyote with us and we'll dispose of it."

Shockingly, none of that dialogue happened, but they ultimately confiscate the coyote from Sarah and she is devastated.

If you've been able to suspend your disbelief this long, good for you, but buckle up, because the ride gets bumpier.

Instead of accepting that a wild animal should probably not be sleeping on the pullout section of your 6-year old's trundle bed and eating your 3-year old's Melissa and Doug toys, and moving on with her life like a sane person, Sarah hatches a plan.  She does a little recon and discovers a coyote sanctuary somewhere in Texas.  Does she approach the people who confiscated the coyote and calmly and rationally request that the animal be transferred to the sanctuary instead of euthanized for its own good?  You bet she does, end of story.

Nope!

In the dead of night, Sarah breaks into the animal shelter, steals the coyote, and drives like a bat out of hell to make it across the state line to Texas.  I have no idea what part of Arkansas she lives in or where in Texas this sanctuary is located, but I like to imagine this was a real lady-astronaut-in-a-diaper affair where she drove through the night without stopping, popping bennies and sucking down Rockstars.  It also helps to picture Sarah and the coyote outfitted in full on Thelma and Louise drag, disguised with scarves and cat-eye sunglasses despite the darkness.

As the sun begins to peek over the horizon of Texas scrubland in Sarah's rearview mirror, she arrives at the coyote sanctuary and delivers her sweet rabid baby to the arms of an angel to probably some redneck with a tumbleweed-choked "ranch" littered with shotgun shells and rusty lawnmower parts.  There, the coyote can live out its days raiding chicken coops or ordering comically large wooden crates full of TNT to aid in the attempted murder of a road runner or whatever the hell actual coyotes do.

Life is such a rich tapestry.  I'm not sure if I believe a word of this story, but when our check came, on the line for Tip, I wrote, ask the lady behind me about the coyote, you won't regret it.