Guess What I Saw Today?

I was driving down the West Side Highway, minding my own business, and glanced in my rear-view mirror (as I am wont to do every 15 seconds or so) only to find myself being quickly overtaken by a motorcycle. Not just any motorcycle. This was a two-passenger motorcycle -- and one of the passengers was a dog.

How does a dog ride on a motorcycle, you may be asking yourself. Well, first of all, he rides in front of the driver, not behind. The gas tank had a cozy lamb fleece on top of it and then another cushy pillow and on top of that, the dog, whose paws were placed securely on the handlebars and of course he was wearing sunglasses so no bugs would get in his eyes. It was a midsized dog, a Boxer or something. He looked good in shades. Not like Peter Fonda, but appealing enough.

I’m not sure how the driver kept the dog from falling off. Even my own limited knowledge of biology and physics tells me that to steady oneself on a moving motorcycle, one really needs opposable thumbs.

I was on the phone with a friend when the bike passed me and I had to stop my conversation and describe the spectacle in vivid detail. My friend was as astonished as I was -- maybe more so. He actually considered it “animal abuse.”

“The dog was smiling,” I assured him. But he wasn’t convinced.

“It’s hard to tell with a Boxer,” he said.

And I guess that’s kind of true.