We went to a science museum while on vacation, which I initially thought was going to be a disaster but which turned out alright in the end.
My father and I bought tickets to see a show in the planetarium on the history of spaceflight, and we had a half-hour to kill in the rest of the museum before the show started. The front hall was under construction and very loud, so we escaped to a wing filled with model planets and interactive solar system displays, and I was sitting at one with Poodleface on the floor beside me when he suddenly started to growl. I turned around and shushed him and found myself face-to-face with a very embarrassed-looking woman who was, I thought, ridiculously hunched over. She straightened up and hurried away, and my dad, who had seen the whole thing, explained that she had been very slowly and deliberately creeping up on Poodleface, which he had noticed and felt threatened by since she was acting more like an incompetent predator than one of the normal curious humans he was used to dealing with.
Honestly, you can just come over and talk to me. I won't get offended. You don't need to stalk my dog.
I was feeling really embarrassed and defensive and worried that we would get thrown out because my dog had growled, but nothing happened and we got to see the show in the planetarium. And they had handicapped seating! Some theaters don't, and in those I put Poodleface on my lap and suffer through the show with fifty-two pounds of disgruntled poodle curled up on my legs, which is why I absolutely love it when I get a special seat with lots of room around it and he can just stretch out on the floor.
The show was projected onto the curved ceiling overhead, and the animation was done so that it changed perspective with each shot and made the audience feel like we were hurtling through space. Poodleface watched very intently, occasionally tilting his head or glancing at me to show just how much he didn't understand, but he was polite and well-behaved and very adorable.
After the show we looked at the dinosaur bones and walked through a mock cave and the glowing inside of a plaster volcano, and while we were in the ocean life wing and I was admiring a tank of manta rays (Poodleface didn't understand what they were and has his head sideways again) a woman came bounding over, squealed at Poodleface and held out her arms as though she wanted to hug him, then told me very seriously that I didn't have to worry; she knew all about service dogs and understood that they couldn't be petted or talked to. I wondered aloud to my dad if she thought knowing the rules made her above them when we weren't quite out of earshot, which felt good in the heat of the moment but was really pretty mean of me. Sorry about that.
We went out through the gift shop, where I discovered that astronaut ice cream is manufactured on equipment that also processes peanuts (It takes some of the novelty out of a thing when you realize it's made in a factory and not some top-secret NASA supply room, so I wasn't all that disappointed) and where my dad bought a tube with a spring in it that sounds like an alien ray gun every time it's jostled. Poodleface once again didn't understand, and this time he was a little afraid and stood behind my legs. He warmed up to the tube on the walk back to the camper, which sounded like we were being shot at every step of the way. Fortunately, no one was wearing red.
No comments:
Post a Comment