Dog Lady

I went to a pizza parlor last night for a fundraiser event and ran into an old woman that I used to see in my neighborhood when I was a kid. She was known for having an unusual amount of greyhound dogs. Oddly enough though, my fondest memory concerning her was when my favorite public transit bus driver told me that he had seen her take the dogs for a walk to go to the bathroom and she'd wiped their butts with some baby wipes she'd taken out of her purse.
I asked her how she was doing and how her dogs were. I knew she wasn't doing too well before she answered because she was eating dinner alone at a very lively pizza restaurant, overly involved with her lasagna. She said that she was fine but that most of her dogs had died. She opened an old black flip phone that she was wearing tied to her neck by a string and showed me the pictured of her youngest greyhound, Jingles, that has now died as well. It became clear that if I didn't make my exit at that moment, I would be stuck at her sad table, hearing stories about the lives of her deceased pets. So I politely excused myself and went to join my friends, only to look up and see that she was right beside me.
"You know what I liked most about Jingles?" she asked. "He could smell eggs through the shell. He was the only dog I knew that could do that."
"Really?" I asked.
"Yeah I would put the eggs in my hands and he would sniff them."
She told a few more tales about her dogs before abruptly saying, "Thank you for listening to stories about my dogs," and racing back to her table.
This is what loneliness looks like, and it scares me, because I hate dogs! What would I show the nice young woman who approached me at dinner, pictures off an old iPhone of friends that have moved on? Or maybe paperback books? I love books.
"See this picture of my first edition print of The Coldest Winter Ever? See how strong the spine of the book is? They don't make books like this anymore, not even in hardback."
I'm not sure when I became super aware of time and age in regards to other women and what that means for me, but I am assuming that it happened around the times when all my friends made a mass exodus to the altar. I don't want to be a lonely dog lady and I'm sure my friend, The Lonely Dog Lady didn't want to be either, but things happen, or better yet, don't happen. Before you know it, you are eating Lasagna alone at a pizzeria.
I wanted to ask her where she went wrong to avoid that mistake, but even someone like me knows that that is rude. She did tell me that she is considering getting an Italian Greyhound. At least she won't be alone much longer.