strangers

You go walk with your dog, and your dog makes friends, not always with ease, and you get to know first the dogs' names, their personalities, then the owners' names, because it gets silly not knowing what the humans are called. And you meet often, and you talk about allsorts, and the dogs. You laugh, and you slowly let out personal information, truths and situations, and without ever having sat down with those people, or knowing where they live, you learn about their parents, their children, their childhoods, their divorces, their pain. It's a little magic when you turn up at the same time, or meet half way round. The dogs are delighted, they frolic and tussle. You meet other dogwalkers, you know them, or they know the person you're walking with, and then you know them too.

You share things, you tell dog stories, you comfort, they reassure. You wish them well. You might even get a hug, one day, when you realise you have similar stories of autistic children, a generation apart. You stand in the car park and reveal that you're on an anti-depressant and they are surprised and half delighted to realise it's the same one as theirs and you both grin ruefully at the Americanness of the whole thing. And talk about what anxiety feels like - and a gigantic, sweet, laughing, strong man says that there are some days when he's terrified to walk out his door.

And all this without anyone knowing each other's last name.