I am a celebrity among the neighborhood dogs.

By now, I have been giving out dog treats on my daily walk for several months. If you think this has gone unnoticed among my town’s dog population, you would be very much mistaken. If Gwyneth Paltrow or Brad Pitt were to walk down the street, I am quite certain the dogs in my town would be completely unimpressed. Their owners might behave foolishly and start jumping up and down and salivating, but for the dogs, it would be a non-event.

With me, it’s another story.

There is an old black lab I see occasionally on my hike. She is always glad to see me, and her owner and I exchange pleasantries. But then several weeks will go by before I see her again. I saw them not too long ago.

“I have to tell you what you have done to my dog,” the woman said.

Oh no, I thought.

“You walk by our house on your hike every day.”

I have no idea where this woman lives, but I walk a few blocks along the sidewalk before I pick up the trail, so I figure she must live on that stretch of road.

“Every day she sees you walk by, she goes crazy. She barks and jumps up and down in front of the picture window when you pass.”

I had no idea.

There is another dog I see named Cinder. Cinder is very small and sometimes small dogs can have a little attitude. But Cinder’s diminutive frame consists of nothing but love and fur. When she sees me, she appears to lose her tiny mind.

“Cinder!” I yell (not making things easier for her owners). Cinder throws herself on the ground in front of me, belly in the air, tail wagging frantically. I imagine this happens to Brad Pitt with his fans all the time, but it is new to me.

Another time, I saw a dog off-leash, many yards in the distance. The dog saw me and came running -- barreling toward me -- then stopped at my feet and stared at me. I did not recognize her. I could not remember ever seeing her before.

“Where is your owner?” I inquired.

“Who cares?” she replied. She kept staring at me adoringly until I gave her a treat. Eventually, her owner arrived.

“She said you wouldn’t mind if she had a treat,” I told him.

“She’s right,” he told me.

The same thing happened with a pair of dogs I had only seen once, a long time earlier. “You’re like the ice cream truck,” their owner said. “They hear your hiking poles in the distance and come running!”

I’m betting Gwyneth Paltrow has never been compared to an ice cream truck. I was deeply flattered.

Just like the ice cream truck driver, I know how many treats I’ll need on my route. Seven dogs is a good day. Two is a little disappointing. Four to five dogs is about average. Occasionally, I give out half treats if the dog is the size of Cinder and it looks as if a treat would comprise a full meal.

When I get home, my husband, Peter, always asks me, “How was your hike?”

I could tell him about the beautiful blue bird I saw, or how the sun made the pine needles shimmer, or that my legs ached by the time I climbed the final hill. But Peter doesn’t care about any of that.

“It was a good hike,” I tell him. And then I tell him all about my fans.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

This has been a year that defies explanations.

I spoke with my parents a week or so ago. We have used Zoom and other types of video to communicate but, more often than not, I just call up my dad, he puts me on speaker, and we chat as we always have.

My parents were about to go skiing.

They live in the north, but they don’t live on the North Pole. It was much too early to cross-country ski, but they’d had an early snow and my mom decided they should give it a try.

“You know what is going to happen,” I told them.

“Uh-huh,” my dad said.

“First the snow is going to stick to the bottom of your skis, then the leaves are going to stick,” I told them. “You are going to be stuck in place!” I felt like the voice of doom, truth-telling to my very experienced 80-some-year-old parents.

“Yeah,” my mother admitted, “I’m sure you’re right!” I could tell this would not deter her for a minute.

My husband, Peter, and I were preparing for a visit from my former brother-in-law, Jason. This is the first visitor we’ve had in eight months, and his visit precipitated a lot of housecleaning. There are places we just don’t get around to cleaning until we are confronted with the prospect of company.

“The baseboards in the bathroom were filthy!” Peter informed me.

“Your desk is covered in dust!” I told him.

We cleaned places we hadn’t looked at closely in three-quarters of a year so that we could entertain Jason, who spent almost the entire time on our patio, which Peter swept for the occasion. Peter made his famous enchiladas, and I made my Aunt Betty’s apple squares, and it was a lovely evening. Peter built a fire and we sat around and talked until much later than I usually stay up.

Jason’s father, my former father-in-law, is 94 and failing and Jason is driving all the way from California to Wisconsin to see him -- even though he knows he’ll have to visit his father through a window, even though he’ll have to drive through places with a lot of illness and some early winter storms to get there.

“I didn’t think I was going!” Jason told me, just before he left. He sounded a little surprised.

But he ended up renting a car and is driving to see his dad, who now weighs only 100 pounds, who may or may not recognize him when he gets there, and who is no longer able to converse.

“I wasn’t going to go,” Jason repeated. “But now I’m going.”

For quite a while, I’ve been trying to let go of expectations. People say that holding too tightly to our expectations only leads to unhappiness, but I’ve always had a hard time letting them go. I like the idea that I have some idea of where my life is headed and what is going to happen next.

A few hours after I spoke with my parents, I saw a photo posted on Facebook of my mom on her skis in the woods. Their house was nowhere in sight so they must have made it some distance. I’m sure it wasn’t great skiing -- but that wasn’t really the point, was it?

If this year has taught me anything, it’s that maybe I need to let go of some of my expectations of how things work. This isn’t the year for them.

I looked again at the photo of my mom. She’s skiing in the early snow and smiling.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

It’s the season for all things scary, and I found myself wondering how many people are actually looking for more things to frighten them this year.

There is a new horror movie about Zoom that is supposed to be terrific ... and I won’t be watching it. I’ve never been a fan of horror movies. On the very few occasions I’ve tried to watch a scary movie, I end up both covering my eyes and plugging my ears (the ominous music is the worst part of it) and I emerge with a pretty limited experience of the film.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about my husband Peter’s war with the rodents, and a friend sent the lyrics to “Ben,” a song recorded in the early 1970s by a young Michael Jackson. It was the theme song for the movie “Ben,” which was a sequel to “Willard,” which Peter then decided he had to see. The movie has only recently become available on DVD and so, when it arrived in the mail, we sat down together to watch it.

“This isn’t a horror movie, is it?” I asked Peter for the second or third time.

“No! It’s about rats!”

That didn’t really answer the question, but I agreed to watch until it got too scary and so I sat with him through the opening credits. The movie starred Ernest Borgnine as the mean boss and Elsa Lanchester (who played the bride of Frankenstein a few decades earlier) as Willard’s mom, and a 19-year-old Bruce Davison as Willard. But the real stars of the movie were a lot of rats playing themselves.

And Peter was right, there was nothing remotely scary about the movie until the last fifteen minutes when Willard turns homicidal and enlists the rats to help him. Then the rat named Ben reads the word “pesticide” on the box that Willard is pouring into the rat’s dinner bowl (or possibly recognizes the skull and crossbones?). That’s when Willard is killed by his little rat friends.

Afterward, I watched a few interviews about the making of the movie. This was before the days of computer-generated imagery and to get the last scene, Bruce Davison was covered with peanut butter and had 600 rats poured on top of him. They said they shot this scene last because they weren’t quite sure how it all would work out.

I didn’t learn how much the young Mr. Davison was paid for his role, but I’m guessing it was not enough.

The movie was a huge and unexpected success when it was released, and a slew of killer animal movies followed. There were movies about snakes and killer ants and, of course, “Jaws,” a bit later on. The movie also apparently prompted an uptick in pet rat adoptions.

The idea of horror fascinates me. There are movies and books about dolls and babies and clowns and all sorts of things that wouldn’t, under normal circumstances, be scary. I can read horror novels only because I can put the book down and reassure myself that I am still in my home, no monsters in sight.

And maybe that’s why we need scary stories right now more than ever.

It’s good to leave a scary world and realize that everything is not as terrible as the book or movie. Real life might be less certain than usual, but I can take comfort in the fact that I’m not covered in peanut butter with 600 rats swarming all over me.

Sometimes, you have to take what comfort you can get.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION