It was one of those fight scenes that goes viral on the internet, but happening live, in person, in the Martinsville Walmart on Wednesday afternoon.
Finally, a chance for good ole MHC to make the news for something other than moonshine and opioid overdose rates.
“Don’t you WORRY about my DOG!” Came a shout from a few aisles down.
“It is UNSANITARY and AGAINST HEALTH CODE,” boomed another woman’s voice
I was in the coffee aisle, and the shouts were coming from several aisles back. Other shoppers, like me, paused in their tracks momentarily. Some looked up as if we could see over the shelves.
“Ma’am,” the scream sounded across the store, “don’t you WORRY about my dog. My dog can go wherever I want her to.”
“Animals are not supposed to be in places where food is served or sold!” the other voice screamed. “And it’s just plain nasty!”
Pulled by a morbid curiosity, I started to walk in that direction just to see what was happening. However, conscience and decorum returned to me, and I stopped myself. How tacky of me.
The shouting showed no signs of abating. The shrieks were getting louder. This is the type of thing you see all the time now on the internet, such as TikTok or those Facebook Reels – witnesses who film such craziness and broadcast it for the world to see. Those videos really take off, with tens or hundreds of thousands of views, and some of the top ones make it onto the real news shows (as real as TV news is anymore, considering its slide into showing viral cat videos and silly stuff like this).
Coffee in my buggy, I made my way for the next ingredient on my list: vanilla extract.
Oh, what luck. It was in the direction of the fight.
As I turned the corner, I nearly collided with a woman, perhaps in her 60s, with a sleek little black dog in her buggy.
Ooooh! Here I was after all. What luck. I could see the fight just accidentally, which is not as tacky as running right over to watch it like a fool with nothing better to do and no good taste. Perhaps I’d just catch a glimpse of the action out of the corner of my eye as I reached for some vanilla.
All those thoughts ran through my head in a flash, much faster than it took you to read them, because at the same time I turned the corner, I was nearly run over by the dog woman.
I jumped back and gave her a wide berth as she leaned out from the edge of the aisle and screamed to a man looking through the meat section on the far wall: “Come get her! It’s that woman over there!”
Oh my goodness, was the dog woman trying to sic her husband on the sanitation-concerned woman?
Was that man going to really come over and get the sanitation-shouting woman, or was he shriveling up in embarrassment that his wife was making a huge scene in the Walmart and wishing he had been far enough away that she couldn’t point him out as being with her?
I didn’t stick around to watch, since I was busy pretending I wasn’t watching. Once I got the vanilla – the same shouts with little to no variation continuing to zoom about – “It is UNSANITARY and AGAINST HEALTH CODE!” “Ma’am, don’t you WORRY about my DOG!” — I made my way down the aisle.
Well, THAT was asking for trouble. I found myself between the two shouting woman, one at the edge still hollering to her husband for backup, and the other around the middle of the aisle, where her husband was reaching for flour.
What was this second husband thinking? Was he embarrassed, too?
The sanitation-concerned woman suddenly turned on me in a fury: “Did you see that woman with the dog? That is unsanitary. People are going to put their FOOD in the buggy right where the dog is sitting. They will get germs all over their food.”
“Oh, gross,” I said, and scurried off. There were other people in the aisle, too, but I didn’t see any taking a video. I thought back to the 20 years I spent in local journalism. As a journalist I probably would have felt obligated to videotape that, in case anything more happened to make it a valid news story, such as an escalation and an arrest. As a shy person, I was really glad in that moment that I’m not a journalist anymore.
“She says it’s an emotional support animal,” the woman was hollering to my departing back. “Anyone can say that. It is clearly not an official trained and identified service dog.”
As I got away from the women, another man pushed his buggy around the aisle corner and met my eye.
“Did you see them?” he asked in an excited whisper. “They’ve really been going at it. They even gave each other the finger,” and he demonstrated, holding up his middle finger yet shielding it from me with his other hand, presumably so as not to insult me.
I picked up a few other items and went to the checkout line. When I saw who the cashier was – my neighbor – I was going to tell her all about the craziness I had just witnessed, that she’d surely be hearing about later from other people too.
But the next person to get in line behind me was an entirely new woman with an entirely new dog in the buggy.
I just kept to normal greetings, paid for my order and went home.
