A Confrontation

& a lesson in seeking satisfaction

Picture this: It’s a summer Saturday night, just after dark on Bedford Street. Everyone is scantily clad and slightly sweaty, everyone has had a couple of beers, everyone wants a slice at Joe’s. Myself included. However, unlike everyone else, I am also the careful and caring weekend guardian of my sweet, perfect nephew, Westley. My sweet, perfect, nephew, who is a miniature, long-haired, cream colored dachshund, three months old and clocking in right around six pounds.

Now, I admit! I am biased in my love for him, not only because we are blood relatives (don’t try to tell me we aren’t), but also because I am a card carrying member of the cult of dachshund fanaticism. That love actually is in my blood and can be traced back through the generations. Forget all that. I have it on the authority of hundreds of people, both friends and perfect strangers who stop on the street, that Westley is perfect. He makes peoples’ day by just existing.

I mean…look at him

So imagine my surprise, when having devoured my slice of pep, I strolled down a quiet block to let Westley stretch his legs, and found myself embroiled in a heated altercation centering…him. He was sniffing around the base of a sidewalk tree bed, when I saw a couple approaching from the other direction. Westley can be a bit slow (little legs), so I pulled us over and held his leash to keep him from darting out into the open walking ground. He does this sometimes because he loves saying hello to his fans, and reasonably, he assumes that everyone is a fan.

The couple passed by, and I stepped out to carry on my way when I heard the woman say something along the lines of “your dog.” I couldn’t completely make it out, so I walked on, figuring she was just pointing him out to her boyfriend. Then I heard her say it again, so I turned around to see if something was amiss. Maybe Westley had picked up a dead mouse and was trotting along with it in his mouth?

That’s when I realized she was angry. At Westley. I can’t stress enough how baffled I was. She was shouting at me now, “Control your dog!” I understand that there are people who don’t like dogs. I won’t even make a joke about how I think those people are insane. I know they exist. HOWEVER, Westley is not a dog. He’s a puppy, and I did ‘control’ him when I saw them coming down the block, so this was a bridge too far.

I don’t take kindly to being yelled at on the street at all, but particularly not when it’s for absolutely no reason. I was born and raised in New York City and I’m not afraid of a sidewalk confrontation. When barked at, I will bark back. I still kind of blacked out in the moment. From what I can remember, the interaction went something like this:

Me: “What is wrong with you?! He’s a three month old puppy!”
Her: “Your dog was in the way! You need to control your dog!”
Me: “No he wasn’t! I stood by curb to let you pass! How could you be mad at this puppy?! Look at him!”
Her: “I don’t care about him, I’m talking to you, bitch!”
Me: “Oh Please! I hope whatever is making you such a miserable person gets better soon!”

this is how much space he takes up on a normal sized paving square

As I walked away with my heart pounding, I tried to unravel what had just happened. I was certain Westley was not in the way, because I was holding his leash. I was not in the wrong. I acquitted myself well. I even managed to land my favorite line at the end! It’s not the first time I’ve used that one, and it’s satisfying every time. It’s taking the high road without actually turning the other cheek. After collecting myself, I scurried back over to Joe’s and related the whole tale to my people. We laughed, and that was that.

Except for me it wasn’t (and isn’t). I keep thinking about that moment. Not constantly—I’m not all torn up about it—but it keeps flitting back into my mind over and over, and so I figured I should try to find out why. At the very least, I could tell you this New York story, think a little, write a little, and see if anything interesting comes out of it.

As a jumping off point for my thinking and writing, I must say that I almost didn’t even bother with this. I don’t like to bring negativity into this space, and it feels sad that my sidewalk shouting match has been more on my mind than any number of positive interactions I’ve had on the streets of New York. Does the good just melt away, leaving the bad or uncomfortable for extended rumination? To cut to the chase, no. I don’t think so. I shared a genuine giggle with a couple on the street when we all overheard a scantily clad woman on a date turn to her man and giddily exclaim, “I can’t wait to be twenty-one!” On the bus, I complimented a woman who reminded me of my grandmother on her sparkly Tevas, and we chatted. She has them in two different colors.

Those interactions do stay with me. They’re just not as interesting to mull over (and over and over), because at the core of them is something pretty simple: human connection. It’s no less beautiful or important for being simple, but there are only so many ways to rephrase or reframe the central emotion. I am the same as that person, and they are the same as me, and we can share a word, or a glance or a laugh, and understand each other. It’s when things don’t go that way, when the complex mechanisms behind that simple connected feeling aren’t firing properly, that we (royal) are left with something to think and write about.

Having justified why I’m still turning this unpleasant interaction over in my head, we can continue with that thinking and writing. What makes this particular misfiring so ripe for extended rumination? Could it be as simple as the fact that it felt good to stand up for myself? Why should I let some unhinged woman yell at me on the street without giving a little back? Am I just reminiscing and patting myself on the back for giving out what she had coming? Well, yes and no. More yes at first, more no now—the initial feeling of victory hasn’t lasted.

What would have happened if I had just apologized—even knowing that I hadn’t done anything wrong—and kept walking. I would have denied that woman the satisfaction of getting the fight she so clearly was looking for. The un-fun and un-funny truth is that truly turning the other cheek does produce a longer lasting sense of gratification. None of that instant stuff. In addition to being un-fun and un-funny though, ending my thinking and writing by saying, “turn the other cheek, no really you should,” would be a cop out. Pearl of wisdom though it may be, it’s not the one I’m trying to reach today.

If I want to get at anything interesting, I’m going to have to go a little further, or maybe a little closer. I never know quite where to draw the line when it comes to personal revelations when I’m writing about myself instead of the books I read. I simultaneously want to put myself in a test tube like a specimen to be studied, while also acknowledging that not all my self-reflection belongs in a public forum. Which doesn’t even touch on the fact that overzealous self reflection can become a real trap when what you really need to do is live in the moment. But I’ve always been a self-reflective person! And many times, puzzling over small interactions like this one leads me to good places. I’d like to bring you to those places, so please bear with me while I learn to toe the line.

I have historically viewed myself as someone who is not afraid of confrontation. To be honest, I don’t know for sure where this view came from. Maybe a bit of it is the native New Yorker thing, the very fact that I don’t shy away from sidewalk showdowns. Maybe another bit is my appreciation for justice—my feeling that when someone does wrong, they should be made to face it. The more I think about it though, the more I realize that my willingness to confront is more nuanced than first meets the eye. It actually comes from an intense protective streak.

Nothing gets my hackles up like finding out that someone I love and care about has been mistreated. I showed up for my freshman year of high school with daggers already loaded in my eyes for my older sister’s ex-boyfriend. I didn’t care that he was a junior or that no one knew who the hell I was. I unabashedly looked at him like he was the dirt under my shoe every chance I got for several months. There may also have been a couple of insults muttered under the breath in hallway passings, I couldn’t possibly confirm or deny. When they started dating again, he admitted to her that he was scared of me.

By then, I had sort of built up this little image of myself—and as a result a reputation too—for being unafraid of confrontation. However, for all my memories of the defenses I staged, funny, not funny, and at times so fierce they became offensives, there are just as many, more painful memories of arrows that I let pass right through me without as much as a peep. The difference is that the things I let slide almost invariably pertained to me alone. I was the one who was hurt, or treated unfairly. I was the one who needed something, and I failed to find the words to say or the courage to say them.

The fact of the matter is that on the grand scale of ease, standing up for yourself and saying what you truly feel is the hardest. Standing up for someone else, when your own skin isn’t really in the game is easier. Yelling at strangers on the street is the easiest. When you yell at a stranger on the street, you can maintain the illusion that you’re the girl who takes no shit, when in reality, you have historically taken a lot of shit. When in reality, you have taken your sweet, sweet time learning how to effectively stand up for yourself and have the difficult conversations that actually matter—the ones where your skin very much is in the game.

So where does all this thinking and writing lead us in the end? Maybe where I’ve landed is obvious to some of you. All the same, I have exposed a part of myself—the passive and shrinking part—and thus taken away a bit of its power. Though the learning is slow, it is happening. When I call to mind the times that I did bite the bullet and say what needed to be said, I experience a weightlessness that’s hard to beat. A freedom of mind. I’m happy to be becoming the type of person who doesn’t get my satisfaction from yelling at strangers on the street, but instead looks elsewhere, to deeper and more honest places.