Before I became a parent, I could get hung up on the smallest things. Take dog poo, for instance. As the person who often walks the dog, either early in the morning or late in the evening, I pick up a lot of it. As a Bachelor of the Arts and a Certified Professional, picking up dog feces seemed beneath me for the longest time. We never had a dog when I was young. Pappy had been raised on a farm, and he had had enough of being obliged to the care of animals. Despite occasional entreaties, and the infiltration of some cats, we never managed to get him to believe we would care for a dog without parental supervision.
Not only that, but we lived on the edge of the suburbs with our backs against 64 wooded acres owned by Pappy’s pappy. The houses near us all sat on at least an acre of land. Nobody was picking up their dog’s doo in this neighborhood. There was plenty of room to spread it around. My Sweet Lady, on the other hand, always had dogs. Her parents maintained an Irish Setter (named for my Mama, whom they did not know) in a bohemian apartment in New York City. Dogs and dog mess were no strangers to her.
Being a parent gives one a new perspective on poop. Or perhaps one’s senses are dulled by the constant exposure to and occasional contact with the stuff. It is a function of parenthood that poo, vomit, urine, and snot stop being reviled and become routine. True, these are all products of one who is love made manifest, but they are poo, vomit, urine, and snot nonetheless. Whether their sources are human or canine, these substances remain remarkably similar. I am similarly immune to them all.
So this is how it came to pass that, on a sub-freezing October morning in the land of the Suwaree, I bent down to retrieve a steaming pile with more thought being given to the astral show presented in the waning night sky than the substance separated from my fingers by mere millimeters of plastic. That is until the warmth and surprising weight of the bolus in my hand became distracting. Around the time Gerald Ford died, the story circulated that he did not want the Secret Service to have to walk his dog. He thought it was a man’s obligation to clean up after his own dog. Someday, I hope to be a man as noble as Gerald Ford, and I have somewhere to start.