What Next....!?

The other day I saw something that shocked me so much, I haven't been able to forget about it. It's one of those things that filled me with astonishment and disbelief, all at the same time.

My favorite store for shopping is The Bay in downtown Vancouver. It's an upscale department store, and it has everything. If I can't find an item somewhere, I know I'll find it at The Bay. Last Sunday I needed some new pillow slips, and where else to get them but at my favorite store. They were 300 count Egyptian cotton, marked down 65%, and in the color I wanted. How could I go wrong? When I shop at the Bay, I like to take the elevator to the top floor and make my way down through the various departments. As I stood waiting for the elevator, a woman with a stroller came past, and everyone -- including little old ladies and little old men with canes -- graciously stood aside so she could enter the elevator first. She pushed her stroller past everyone and into the elevator. Once we were in the elevator, we glanced down at the woman's stroller to have a look at her baby, and in unison, we all gasped.

Inside the woman's stroller was a dog. The woman was receiving preferential treatment from everyone, for wheeling a dog around in a stroller. She was talking to it as if it were a baby, and she gingerly pushed the stroller the way mothers do with new-borns. I didn't know whether to be disgusted or to burst out laughing. I looked at everyone else, and all I could see on their faces was amazement. Has the world really come to this? The next day when I was chatting with my brother, I told him about the doggy stroller, and he said he had seen quite a few of these around the city, and it shocked him too. He said he used to see lots of dogs on the beach, chasing sticks and being dogs -- but now they're being wheeled around in strollers, completely sedentary. I looked on the Internet, and you can buy strollers for 50 lb. dogs. My gawd, that's insane. People don't even put 50 lb. children into strollers.

This is Bailey -- a real dawg dog. Bailey would probably laugh at you if you tried to put him into a stroller and wheel him around like a baby. "Whaa ...? Who ... me? Yah, okay, I'll sit in your stroller. Just hang on a minute while I go over and roll in this raccoon poop first, and then I might chase some cats for a while."

Dogs in strollers ... Oh, goodness, just when I thought I had seen everything.