When I was like 12 years old my violin teacher owned this peculiar music shop, and I would go there weekly for lessons. It was a narrow old pioneer house whose ground floor had been converted into a storefront and lesson rooms. After a while, a luthier had also moved in upstairs and set up a studio for making violins.
So, one day I'm going into the shop for my lesson. I head in the front door, and before I turn into the living room area where the main shop is, I look down the dark hallway at the rickety wooden stairs that lead up to the luthier's studio. The air smells like sawdust and lacquer. Just a little bit of light filtering in from the window behind me.
Something's on the stairway. A huge black animal is making its way down these steep, narrow stairs. I've never seen anything like this, I genuinely did not know an animal like this exists, and it comes right up to me, click-click-clicking slowly over the floor, long and tall and dark. There are wood shavings peppering its coat. It lifts its head up and its massive beast-face is virtually level with my child-face and I realize this is a gotdamb bizarro dog of some kind. It looks impossible but it's real and it's there, staring at me in total silence with a face the length of my arm. Then it does a 3-point-turn in the tiny dusty hallway and goes right back upstairs.
Turns out this was just the luthier's dog Seamus, a black borzoi of incredible height and length. anyway i'm just trying to say it was a disturbing set of circumstances under which i discovered what a borzoi is and everything in my life has felt very complicated since then