Daily Prompt <3 The Kicked Dog
12 February 2019
Once when I was a little girl, with my mama, we encountered a particularly grumpy, difficult person. As we moved away from the angry man, under her breath, Mama murmured in her lilting Southern accent, “Mmm, somebody kicked that dog.”
Being the mouthy kid I was, and an animal lover 🙂 I immediately asked, “Dog? What dog, Mama?”
She smiled, saying, “Not a real dog, Mary. That man.”
“The mean one?” I asked.
She nodded, and explained, “When we meet a dog that seems mean, or aggressive, growling at us, we never assume the dog was born vicious, right? We assume that something has happened, that the dog has been mistreated or hurt in some way that made it mean. But we don’t give difficult people the same benefit of the doubt, do we?” She smiled. “Maybe we should.”
Make art about compassion, about a moment you learned compassion, or recognized that you needed to respond with compassion.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
Recent Comments