Turns out two of the younger ambassadors of the opposite gender were on a moderately vigorous walk, and as they made their less than stately progress shoulder to shoulder, they were shouting at each other. A friendly sort of shouting with smiles during the brief hiatus before the shouting started again.
Islay took it in and turned back to her perpetual search for that one squirrel with a really bad hip who can't get to the nearest tree and might become the first quadrupedal mammal to satisfy that ancient lusting after varmints which is her first right as a full- and hot-blooded terrier.
Being a guy, I couldn't understand what the hell the shouting was about. It was a perfectly decent morning - not much traffic about, birds twittering, the occasional boat on the lake buzzing along - and then two Wagnerian sopranos determined to include the world in their observations about the challenges in their lives.
I got that same feeling of primitive hostility which overwhelms me when some adolescent of whatever age turns up the damn boombox he's driving (it's always a he); the thump-thump-thump overwhelms my autonomic nervous system, and I understand why crimes of passion occur. I close all the car windows and turn up the volume to public radio to maintain what equilibrium I have left.
This experience was another in a continuing set of examples which explain why males persons of a certain vintage find the adjective "grumpy" somewhere in the avocational descriptors which an ignorant world uses to put them in an all-too- convenient category.
If the world knew what we know to be true....
