You say I'll get tongue cancer. You smoke too.

I take my late night walks through the parks and woods that stretch along York Road from the covered bridge to the Lionsgate pool. Yesterday I had mine planned out to carry one of those Wellington Imperial Russian Stouts along with me, along with a cigar, to stand and sift through the snow while I watched our boy trot around, bounding somewhere and then back to me to check in.

There is usually no one about the area when it is dark. But while I walked and sipped from the can of beer, I noticed that the young man had disappeared. I turned to see him scampering with a little Italian mastiff, and tucked the open can into my coat pocket just as the owner appeared from out of the bushes, and I don't really know why she was in there. "Hi-i," she said, with that throaty, drawn out pronunciation that drifts up and then downwards again. "Now since our dogs are playing, we have to talk to each other," she said, apologetically. "I'm Jacie." I returned her greeting, and she said, "Now we have to talk about our dogs, since that's what people do." And we did, of course. It's what people do. Her dog is two years old.

I asked her if she lived in town and what she did. "I'm a brewmaster," she said, and in my thoughts some hasty reasoning pointed towards that slow slur in her speech. I told her that is an excellent title, and asked which company she worked for. "For Sleeman--well, I'm not one yet, but maybe in five years I will be. I'm working towards it." I was listening too closely now, but I remembered, too, my own tremendous discretion that I was the one who was trying hard to keep the open drink in my pocket from either spilling or being noticed. Except she threw her hands out next, saying, "It's all so secretive you know, the recipes and all that kind of stuff," and her hand knocked against the can to make that recognizable tinny ping and the liquid jostle. I coughed.

"Anyway, it's good. Yeah. I'm Jacie, by the way, we already introduced ourselves." She forgot and remembered this a few more times while we walked, back towards the covered bridge, and she talked about her dog. And as her direction split towards her car, she said, "You know, dog owners have to talk to each other, it's just the thing, even if they're not nice," and I said yes, that's a part of it all, though sometimes it's fine. "Anyway, I'm Jacie, but we said all that before. Have a good walk home to wherever you're going." I started home again and pulled the drink from my pocket.