Does your dog bite?

Does your dog bite is a important question made famous by Peter Sellers (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXn2QVipK2o ), and one that preoccupied me for decades after being bitten as a five year old while riding a tricycle. The dog and I locked eyes from across a street, he was on a high porch of a row house, and I was immediately off down the sidewalk toward home. He caught me just as I entered 15th and Buchanan, and I tumbled into the street. I see a group of people standing around me as I stare up into the sky.

This doesn't mean that I became indiscriminately anti-dog, I became very discriminately pro-dog. "Anti" the dogs that bark mindlessly at children on Halloween "because their owners are too cowardly to do it themselves," and "pro" the dogs who are friendly, well-mannered, at times amusing, and with interests of their own. In this category I would put my childhood friend's dog Sable, a german shepherd as well as, let me think...

So today is a big day. At the insistence of J (eighth grade), and despite a string of demanding and weird questions I asked the shelter staff, a little Bichon Frise-like dog is entering the house. At this point I will enter that huge society of dog owners who, like those who served in the military or went to law school, form some kind of non-obvious fraternity/sorority out in the civilian world, denying that their dogs bite, barking at them to be quiet.