Alek Dog was walking me on Hudson Street near the West Side Trail when we were overtaken by a cluster of undersized humans and 2 adults. I assume people of that age have always been about that much undersized but over the past couple of years I've forgotten. During the pandemic I haven't seen as many 11 year olds and most of those I did see were not gathered into groups with each other.
The last group of pre-teens that I worked with were much larger when I last saw them. That's mostly because they were no longer of that age anymore. The complexity of actual reality is unjustified. Not only do people continually get older with the passage of time but they ALSO change physically! Quite possibly they change in other attributes in parallel. How is a deeply introverted, face-blind, geriatric observer to keep up?
This particular group of undersized people were preparing to run along the trail. Perhaps it was to alternate running with walking; I heard some of the instructions on adult was giving.
Alek was very respectful. At 50 pounds he is slightly lighter than the median of over 70 pounds for humans of this presumed age but Alek is more stably based for horizonal displacement. And he really does like to jump. It was probably better that the smaller humans declined to interact directly with him even though Alek was perfectly willing.
As his second choice activity Alek proposed stopping on the sidewalk to watch the humans run off along the trail. Accordingly we stopped several times and looked back at the group. They never started running. Instead they spent the time waiting for a full-sized male human to finish talking. (Some of the undersized ones may have been listening to him but we couldn't tell for certain.) Eventually Alek acquiesed in continuing to walk with me without seeing any running humans.
The lesson I would take from our adventure is that in actual reality kids of this age already have sufficient experience in waiting for full-sized people to talk.