Scooter flies through tall, wild grass. It’s like a busy NYC intersection to him. Look at it all, bending to his body’s bounding. Grass. Common stuff. Meant to be gotten through.

Look at all those NYC people. Arms, legs, hips, shoulders, pushing, lagging, bounding, bumping, impeding, distracting, tucking packages, purses, phones or bags of peanuts close to bodies, never-minding, never-minding all the bodies pressed in the pack that moves along a crosswalk, supposedly with purpose. Common stuff.

Scooter Sublime stops. Scooter stops at one particular slender stalk of wild grass, one in a patch of hundreds of others like it. He’s paying no attention to anything around him now. Scooter is meeting a blade of grass. He starts at the bottom, his wet, black nose pressing dead-center against the blade, ground level. Slowly, and slowly is not his usual style, he slides his centered nose up the blade. Scooter. Takes. His. Time. To. The. Top. Scooter’s nose twitches a tad as it takes in information. 

I’ve said it before. Dogs are built to analyze scent. They think through smell; a thousand times better than we who hold the end of a leash. If his investigation of the blade of grass had to do with the scent of a dog, he will discover whether it was male or female, young or old, alpha or not. If I am to believe all that I read, Scooter knows nearly everything he does know first through his nose. I see a bunny hop on a nearby hill, Scooter “saw” it before I did, through his raised nose. The air carried “rabbit” to his brain. Research suggests that when Scooter meets you, say on a sidewalk near our home, or say crossing a busy NYC intersection where I haven’t a clue about people other than whether they might appear menacing or merely hurrying to beat traffic, Scooter can cross that street, step to the curb on the other side with the knowledge from millions of olfactory receptors in his nose of having met fear, anxiety, sadness, or an ill-temper. A fake smile might fool me, but it won’t fool Scooter. 

Scooter’s lucky. Long-nosed dogs are the best sniffers. And, while he does have a chip embedded just under his skin, we could ink the tip of his nose, take a print, and identify him by it. Like our fingerprints, dog nose-prints are distinctive. As, apparently, was that single blade of grass that Scooter Sublime stopped to investigate from bottom to top.

I will never know what it was he was learning, but I can tell you that whatever it was proved worth the time it took.

I wrote, in Life with a Capital ‘L’, that we can learn about people by bothering to linger a bit; as Scooter had, at a blade of grass; that we humans are apt to use labels to avoid the time it takes to gain knowledge about one another. Oh yeah, he’s the banker, she’s the one with inflated lips, they are far-right, and those, far-left. Oh yeah. That’s enough. Labels. We easily avoid the ground-up caring about discovery. 

I met a woman recently in an intersection of sorts. We ought to have run into one another before, we have lived in the same neighborhood for a few years, but we hadn’t met. I found her cold, maybe even a little off-putting. She wasn’t eager to engage in conversation. I sniffed the air, caught a scent of discourtesy. I slapped a label to her in my brain. 

Obviously, unlike Scooter’s, my nose isn’t long enough. He would have captured what I learned much later. The woman had recently suffered trauma. She was suffering emotional pain. She was working to get one foot in front of the other on the day we met. 

Page 8, ‘Life with a Capital ‘L’: “If we are courageous enough to discover that behind every label is an ordinary ‘I need food, comfort, encouragement, and a bathroom,’ sort of person, then intimidation by label ceases. Strangers, coworkers, family members, heroes, neighbors, or friends are people we can discover. Only we must dare a connection. We must stop the habit of hurry in order to show interest . . . .”

Ah, Scooter, what was it you learned by slowly sniffing what seemed to me so ordinary?

What did you learn?