Do You Want to See My Legs?

That question came from a lady who was a regular customer in a feed store I worked at in Alaska. The year was 1980 something. And the question seemed to come out of nowhere.

Um, AWKWARD! I fought back the gut wrenching panic that wanted to surface.

Something was way out of kilter in my universe. A lady who was substantially my senior, and who was normally all about her pets, should not be hitting on me.

I looked up. Yikes! She was walking toward me!

There was no where to run and no way to hide. I quickly tallied the odds of keeping my job if I had to jump through the window to escape.

“Look, here's the picture. Those are my legs.”

I'm a married man! My silent plea echoed in my head.

“And this was So-and-so, a such-and-such breed that won first place in …”

My blood pressure dropped back into a measurable range. My alarm was alleviated. The picture was in a book about show dogs, and the lady, whose name has long escaped my memory, had a winning dog in a show way back when. That her knees were visible in the picture was only noticed because she pointed it out.

“That's my claim to fame there,” the lady remarked with chuckle. She then went into great detail about what a great dog that was.

I don't really remember much of that monologue. My mind was busy being relieved to have the universe spinning in the right direction again.

Some days, I think it must be really weird for regular people to be around me.