Guardians of Dogs

The boy had been talking to me for nearly a month about a Japanese lunch date with a friend of his. His plan was to try several different items from the menu. He said his friend was quite serious about Japanese food. It's kind of a grown up event. I left them at the restaurant and walked around the depopulated campus of Mount Holyoke College. I imagined there serious, studious, young women from around the world living there in community self-developing, seeking mastery, strategizing to save or to conquer the world, falling in love, discovering their sex. I walked across the bridges and around the pond and wondered what poets, luminaries, artists and suicides had done the same. I watched the chipmunks and squirrels, not bothered much by my presence, a swimming muskrat, the sweltering geese and ducks clustered in the shade of broken trees, manic dragonflies enacting indecipherable ritualistic behaviors. Placarded pin oaks, red maples and littleleaf lindens (that last one I adopted as my own name for the outing) towering like majestic art installations around the campus. Someone might use the words pastoral or bucolic. There is almost a hallowed feel to the place when it's deserted like this. I am talking to myself walking in the shade of the treeline along the edge of the lawn of one of the empty dormitories when a young woman comes up the walk carrying bags and boxes, walking upright, chin thrust forward with an air of official interest. She must be a Resident Advisor, I guess. When she sees me, she thinks psychopathic or psychotic. Presented with those options, I try to influence her toward concluding the latter. A psychotic just walking the path of lesser static, harassed but harmless. I felt shame to be the other option in her imagined perception. The psychopath stalking the campus. Seeing a girl alone. Hunting. Those are not thoughts I want to think and I shake them from my head with a short bark. I smell the dryness of the cut grass, almost hay in this drought, and also the humid green of the flowers and bushes when I pass. I sit on a shaded bench among empty chairs and fresh cut lawns and no students and think about the intention of community.