Sometimes she stops at the bottom, reaches up one paw as if to tap, then just puts it down and nervously leans back and forth, staring at the step. Then she’ll look up with pleading eyes just peeking under her big bangs and eyebrows.

If you answer the plead and start down the stairs meaning to carry her up, about two-thirds of the time she’ll run off, thinking you came to play with her. She’ll come back when called, but throws a little glare and a huff to let you know she doesn’t like it.

She doesn’t care for laps or having arms around her, but she’ll amble close and bump into your leg over and over for neck scritches.

She likes eggs and has to be lifted into her favorite chair.

And she’s a good girl.

My significant other has been housesitting. As a result, I’ve spent much of the weekend hanging out in the Bungalow Belt with an aging dog named Zoe.

It’s been a remarkably domestic weekend. Cooking, doing crossword puzzles. Zoe and I watched a Godzilla movie on Svengoolie. My significant other didn’t seem to care for it, but I could tell from the way Zoe slept on the other side of the room with one ear flopped backwards over her head, that she really got what Toho was going for.

I took a walk for a bit, sans Zoe, around the neighborhood.

The area around Mayfair and Albany Park is a weird statistical blip where the world seems to work. Women in hijabs walk by Korean signs near men chattering in Spanish. Storefronts look tattered and empty, just like any place in 2017 without a multinational conglomerate backing the show, but less so than in other places. The title “owner” still exists here, even if it doesn’t exist as often as it did.

An award shop’s window proudly displayed a trophy shaped like forceps and another shaped like praying hands, the latter clad in Korean writing so I’ll never know if it is in fact a medal for praying really well. A Korean-American Senior Association was having a rummage sale I’m still kicking myself for not checking out. I didn’t have cash and didn’t want to enter their world just to gawk.

And beyond, behind, backing these streets where diversity actually seems to work for once, little houses. Happy little bungalows with backyards, neighborhood watch associations and an aging dog we call Zo-Zo who lifts her head up and wags her little butt when she sees you.

I’ve been making some plans lately of the type that can get sort of scary, but I know I’m not scared until I start imagining I was a storied lover.

When I start pretending women cooed and swooned at my presence, when I imagine all eyes were on me 10, 20 years ago, when I mentally transmogrify past smooches into great passions like an old man rehashing peewee football wins, then I’ll know my feet are cold.

Right now, I’m fine. I ran around a planet looking for novelty. Right now, I can only think how nice it is to have four walls and both a good girl and a good woman to come home to.

It’s a place where posters for accordion-drenched Mexican Norteña bands get taped to the sides of Korean-language newspaper boxes. The walk west along Lawrence brings Ecuadorian restaurants, Indo-Pak grocery bazaars, barbershops with signs that say both “Se Habla Español” and “Free WiFi,” travel agencies with hand-painted signs promising low-cost trips to “India, Pakistan, Europe, Middle East, S. America & Africa.”

It’s a place where people work, live, breathe alongside each other.

El-Jeeb Hijab & Gifts has a window full of head coverings two doors down from the Admiral Theater, where women take their clothing off. One door down from El-Jeeb, a roomful of middle-aged Hispanic Christian men sit eating around a table at Sala Evangelica.

The smell of fried chicken wafts in from nowhere.

It’s a walk, a simple walk west. No reason, rhyme or campaign finance paperwork on this one of the 1K1 afternoons in the city. On a cold, bright day, taking sidewalk footpaths worn or chipped into wet ice, it’s just a walk west on Lawrence Avenue in Albany Park, Chicago, Illinois.

Across Pulaski, the signs blare into English with the arrival of a large, corporate chain plaza of Starbucks, Chase Bank, Petco. This side is called Mayfair, large orange metal pillars placed along the roadway say.

There’s the same diversity in Mayfair, the same mixture of Korean, Spanish and Arabic writing on the walls, of hookah bars and taquerias and State Farm and American Family Insurance agents with Asian last names.

But the streets seem wider here, the storefronts further spaced. It’s more suburban. Fewer businesses are shuttered.

It’s still the bungalow district, metal plaques shoved in the concrete claim. But the houses and families and increasingly large yards are back among the side streets. Developments start to line Lawrence farther west. Minty fresh apartment complexes and suburban-style townhouses that claim the neighborhood is the much more marketable Jefferson Park.

Chicago is a town of invisible barriers, where one side of the street gives friendly welcome to a person of your age/class/race and another seems angry and cold. Winding on worn paths in the sidewalk ice past lumberyards and jam-packed car washes, another barrier has been crossed. And another.

The walk continues past two highways and then past Cicero into the actual Jefferson Park, where the signs I can’t understand are once again in comforting Polish.

On this small side trip through Chicago, I saw a Plexiglas cow in the back of a pickup slathered in the Spanish names for cheeses. I saw a bakery with a massive Korean sign and a small English translation in the Gothic calligraphic font usually reserved for either “Thug Life” or “Chicago Tribune.”

An old Asian woman in a walker missed the bus. A young black man smoking a cigarette told me to watch the ice beneath an underpass. A white man with long strands of gray hair peeking from his wicking fabric ski mask waited for transit by the highway.

These are all people I will never see again.

On Feb. 22, 2015, I walked 2.6 miles from the Kimball Brown Line stop to the Jefferson Park Blue Line. I took the train back to write these lines in my own hipster haven of young artsy types where we tell ourselves we’ve found Chicago.

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