Would You Care for a Doggie Bag?

Don’t you hate when people don’t clean up after their dogs? Of course you do, and so does everyone else. Everybody hates to see someone’s else dog’s crap sitting in their grass, but sometimes people don’t seem quite as bothered about seeing their own dog’s crap in someone else’s grass, which is why unattended piles of dung are a constant wherever there is a lawn and the potential for a strolling dog. Truly, it is up to each individual dog owner to do the right thing and pack in, pack out, as the outdoorsy types like to say.

In my neighborhood, filled with nouveau riche dog owner types, the popular way around being courteous is to have an underground electric fence, which is probably just as good at keeping out hobos as it is keeping in purebreds. Sometimes, however, those well manicured lawns and pristinely blown sidewalks are too tempting to resist, and out come the dog walkers, leashes in one hand, grocery bags in the other, at least the considerate ones do. They walk around the neighborhood and publicly toilet their dogs, pick up the poop, then continue on their merry way, that bag filled with crap like it were a stash of gumballs. One morning as I drove home from the gym, I counted no less than five women walking their dogs, each with a little bag of crap in their hands. It’s the must-have accessory for those who must have.

Recently, I visited MJ, who against my will has moved to another state. She is the proud owner of one crazy but adorable Papillion and the step-mother of a yellow lab whose lipstick is always half-cocked despite neutering. Ew. And yes, I felt the need to share that detail. If I have to see it every time, then you should know about it too.

Anyway, we decided that a morning walk with her baby in the stroller and her mismatched dog pack was a splendid way to start the day. She has moved to an extremely liberal and community-conscious area in the South, and in her overly planned neighborhood, they have actual dog poop stations like it’s a city park or something. Forest green metal kiosks house both a bag dispenser and a small trashcan, as well as a sign with a friendly but pointed reminder that every pet owner is as responsible for their dog’s feces as if they themselves were the pipe layers.

With two dogs in tow, I stopped at the closest bag station and grabbed two bags, hoping that the dogs would not require more than one each. I promptly put one on my hand like a puppet and began to talk to MJ.

“MMMJJJJJJ,” my talking poopbag hand puppet said, “Ohhh, MMMMJJJJJ? Hola, MJ. Que pasa?”

For some reason, my poop bag spoke with a really bad Spanish accent.

“MJ, I am hungry, MJ. Feed me, por favor,” my hand said.

MJ stopped pushing the stroller to laugh, which post baby requires a pause and crossed legs.

“You are crazy, girl,” she laughed at me.

“Si, MJ, si. I am loco. Muy loco!”

I continued with my piss poor Spanish speaking poop bag hand puppet as we walked the neighborhood, past other dog walkers who knew better than to put a dog crap bag on their hands. I tried to be discreet, although I am pretty sure I waved at more than one car with that tell-tale green bag on my hand. Then, when we were alone again, I would start up, “Oh, MMMJJJJJ?”

You know what else MJ does when she laughs now that she is post-baby? Yep, she lactates. We made quite the pair on that morning walk, me with a bag on my hand, MJ doubled over, eyes and boobs dripping.

Secretly, I wished the dogs wouldn’t have to crap because then our main source of entertainment would be gone, at least until we passed another poop station. But crap they did. Well, one of them did, the big one whose asshole is the size of a human's. I took the bag off my hand and said, “Do I have to clean that up?”

“No, of course not,” MJ kindly said, taking the bag from me and bending over to pick up the crap. After she had neatly knotted the end, we strolled back towards her home.

“Oh MMMMJJJJ,” I said in my bad Spanish accent, “I can’t talk with my mouth full, MJ.”

She rolled her eyes at me.

“Anyone you hate? Shall we set that bag on fire and leave it on someone’s doorstep?”

“Plastic doesn’t burn,” she answered.

“Even better,” I replied. “Or leave it in a mailbox? That would be good too.”

MJ ignored me and put it in the trashcan at the next poop station kiosk. “This is why you have cats,” MJ said.

“Exactly. I know where their poop is going to be, in a box, neatly buried in the sand, which I then scoop up with a shovel. I don’t have to feel it hot and fresh through my plastic hand puppet. Blech.”

Senior Wences is turning over in his grave.

Thanks for the Favor

Having pets can bring pleasure to your life if you concentrate on the good parts. The unconditional love is great, but the cleaning up puke and rushing around to find prescription dog food without a prescription and the never-ending poop scooping tends to take away a little from that enhancement of the quality of your life. It’s almost like taking care of pets is a concrete example of what life is really all about: picking up someone else’s shit.

Sometimes you decide you need a break from it all, the routines and doldrums of everyday life, and so you plan a vacation. But oh crud, what about your pets? Who will care for them, nurture them, and make them feel loved while you enjoy a week on the beach of sidestepping someone else’s dog crap? Boarding is always an option, although not without its own drawbacks, especially the cost and inflexibility of hours. I have several friends who have called a trip a few days short just because the kennel closed early on the weekends. Plus, how stressful is a kennel for your pet, who is accustomed to licking food off your fingers and sharing your pillow? Suddenly, you desert them in a hostile environment with strange dogs barking at all hours. It could make even the bravest of pets have an upset stomach in the backseat of your car on the way home.

Cats are a whole other story. Boarding would really be a last resort kind of option for me, because it takes all my strength, and by that I mean actual physical strength, to force my cats inside the car for a five minute drive to the vet’s office. I cannot imagine the ordeal it would be for me to board them, let alone how they might feel about it. Hiring a pet sitter is the easiest way to keep them at home, but when you tack the expense for that on top of a vacation, even a cheap weekend getaway, it adds up.

So I prefer to have a friend come to my home and feed them when I go out of town. I like to ask a friend who also has pets so that we can help each other out by taking turns caring for our pets while each of us finds something better to do out of town. Plus, it’s free. But like all things in life, friends pet sitting for friends has a dark side.

My friend BD and I have exchanged pet sitting several times over the course of our friendship, but lately, it just doesn’t seem to be working out. She usually boards her dog, who on a good day, with her loving family at home, could still bring western civilization to its knees with her enthusiastic tail wagging and jumping and cushion chewing and shoe snacking and homework eating. When I go over to BD’s house, the dog is so excited to see me she bounds in front of the car and waits there excitedly where I can’t see her, so that I never know if that day is the one I ran over her dog.

The cat, however, stays home and does what he does best, which involves filling the downstairs toilet with unrolled toilet tissue and knocking things off the counter. I’m used to that part, but BD recently expanded her menagerie to include a turtle and a hamster, so they are part of the pet care package. BD gave me a crash course in turtle and rodent care before she left town, and I felt fairly confident I could handle the responsibility. Wrong, as usual.

The first day I went over there, I dropped the hamster’s water bottle behind the dresser on which his cage sits. I tried to move the dresser out from the wall to retrieve the bottle, but it was stuffed with ten tons of business cards and brochures for BD’s job, so it wasn’t budging. I next scooted the end table next to the dresser away from the wall and tried to shimmy myself between the two pieces of furniture, but since I am not two dimensional, it didn't work. I got down on the floor and tried to peer into the dark underneath the dresser so I could at least see where the water bottle went, with no luck. I had no choice but to summon Incredible Hulk strength and walk the dresser away from the wall just enough so I could contort my arm and squeeze it behind, blindly feeling for the water bottle. Which was leaking a little, and very full. Right when I thought my arm was going to rip out of its socket, I felt the bottle with my fingers, grabbed it, and squirted water all over the wall while trying to get my arm loose. I was able to get my arm free, and it took significantly less than 127 hours.

I fed the turtle his dried shrimp and pellets after I finished with the hamster. Turtle food, by the way, smells a lot like a store in Chinatown. The turtle's little plant had come loose from the gravel and was bobbing along in the water, but I had had enough of sticking my hands in places I didn’t want to for one afternoon.

I returned every day for more of the same, but a few days later, the filter on the turtle tank was making a horrible noise. Smoke wasn’t coming out of it, but I had this mental image that I would make the turtle into soup and then burn down the house. I texted BD, who was coming home the next day, and she said to just unplug it, which I did. The water level also seemed low to me, but I don’t know nothing about caring for no turtles, so I tossed him a couple of extra dried shrimp and got the hell out of there. BD came home the next evening. During those twenty-four hours, that damn turtle rearranged all of the props in his tank, stacking everything against one glass wall before making his great escape. Curiously enough, BD found him behind the dresser.

When BD sits my cats, she too gets to experience the same kind of fun. My kitties get quite distraught when I go out of town, and they soothe themselves by chewing up the houseplants and vomiting them all over the place, a little bit at a time. I can be gone for less than two nights and find at least three little puddles of puke. BD has told me that a visit to the cats always involves one such surprise.

One time this summer, the cats took it a step further than the usual chew and spew. I had left their large container of cat food on the counter near where their food bowl is in my laundry room. BD came one evening in a rush, only to discover that one of the cats had knocked the very full container off the counter, causing the lid to pop off and kibble to scatter all over the floor. It wasn’t just a pile of cat food; it was fifteen pounds of dry cat food from the far wall to the doorway, like a rug of food. In fact, you couldn’t even see the rug underneath because of all the cat food. BD spent the next thirty minutes sweeping up as much of the food as she could, from under the washing machine and near the littler box and by the attic and every other square inch of laundry room floor. Teeth marks were visible on the lid to the container.

Maybe it just seems like pet sitting for each other is a favor, but in reality, it is more work and a bigger pain in the ass than just a simple “come over and feed the cat” or “all you have to do is count out twelve turtle pellets.” Our pets, like us, are rife with quirkiness and a tendency for melodrama. Maybe next time BD or I go out of town we should dress up the cats and the hamsters and the turtle as dogs and try for a group rate at the kennel. I am sure they have a contingency plan for animals hiding and frequent hysterical vomiting. And they work for a fee, not a favor.

Cock of the Walk

Tell me, is there anything as peaceful or relaxing as a house on the lake? To look out the window and see the calm water? To sleep in without the interruption of texting or phone calls? To lie in the hammock on the deck and feel the cool breeze? To hear the crowing of the rooster in the forest?

My husband and his brother in law recently purchased an older lakefront house at an absurdly low price, without the blessing of either my sister-in-law or me. While that is certainly an issue for more than one session of marital counseling, the fact remains that we are now part owners of a lake house, which means that occasionally, when we have nothing better to do (and believe me, I always try to find something better to do), we tootle down the interstate and spend a day at the lake. Our house is rundown and dated compared to the rest of the houses on the street, which are occupied full time by their owners. For us, it’s an investment/recreational property, so we are only there on the weekends, if at all.

My husband and his brother in law have spent the better part of six months slowly, and I do mean slowly, renovating the house, mostly without the assistance of professional craftsman. They have installed the hardwood floors, tiled the bathroom shower stall, and even hung light fixtures and window treatments. It is coming together, and in an effort to be civil, I occasionally go out to the house to see what needs doing and provide lunch and make sure our children don’t drown.

The truth is, I don’t like lakes. I grew up a beach person, and I am still a beach person. I like sand and salty water and waves and sitting under an umbrella to read a book and finding shells and spotting dolphins breaching in the distance. I like seagulls begging for crackers and sea oats and long walks with my bare inner thighs rubbing together. When it comes to the beach, I even like the patently unlikable parts.

But the lake? Well, I don’t like any of that business. The way it goes from twelve feet deep to sixty feet deep. How the water smells and feels and if you get any up your nose or down your windpipe, chances are good a brain-eating bacterium has just entered your bloodstream. And don’t get me started on the fish. You can’t even tell them apart; they all look the same and none of them are going to be a shark or a jellyfish or anything even remotely interesting or edible. Everything is slimy, and you have to wear life jackets, and did I mention snakes? Plus it’s boring. Get in the boat, ride around, jump out, tread water, sit on a tube, repeat. You can’t even go crabbing, and I am allergic to crabs!

One thing, however, does make the lake house worthy of the occasional visit, and that is the potential for wildlife. I am always optimistic that I will see deer when there, although it has yet to happen for me. Last time my husband took our daughters, they saw a deer swimming across the lake. A deer, swimming! Who knew they even knew how to swim? It’s not like he was doing the breaststroke, but he was in fact deer paddling his way from one shore to the other. Instead, I have seen woodpeckers, which are ordinary birds with extraordinary names, and hawks, and more than a handful of frogs. And I have seen the rooster.

Our lake house neighbors have a rooster that patrols their yard. He was a gift from some friends of theirs who raise chickens, but a coop only needs so many roosters, and he was a surplus rooster, so the neighbors took him to the lake as a pet. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite as odd as walking down a path to the dock and having a rooster, feathered ass and coxcomb waving in the breeze, cross your path. He has taken it upon himself to patrol not only his owner’s property, but ours as well, so you never know where he will pop up until you hear the tell-tale crowing.

One time, when we took some of our daughters’ friends with us to the lake, the rooster decided to join us on the dock. Well, he did need a little coaxing. The girls were both delighted and terrified to see him strut down the path, and I foolishly enticed him to walk onto the dock by making a trail of pumpernickel pretzels on the ground. It turns out that roosters like pumpernickel pretzels as much as chicken feed and worms and bugs, and before we knew it, he was all the way on the floating dock, high stepping and turning his head sideways in that weird way that chickens do. I thought if we were lucky, we could get him all the way on the boat, then maybe abandon him on the shore of another part of the lake so we didn't have to worry anymore about him attacking anyone near the house.

My husband came down to join us and chastised us for encouraging the rooster to strut on the dock, but I mommed up and admitted I was the one who got him there by feeding him pretzels. Really, pumpernickel pretzels are tasty, so it was a shame when my husband picked up the stray ones and threw them in the water, where they instantly grew waterlogged and sank before the ugly boring fish could even nibble them.

The rooster roaming on the dock and in the woods is the only good part of the rooster. The bad part is four in the morning, when the loud crowing starts. It’s one thing to hear a rooster crow on the Mattel See N Say, but it’s quite another when you are trying to relax at the lake. And this rooster seems to think he is more like a church bell or a grandfather clock; on the hour, every hour, he cock a doodle doos loudly and annoyingly. It’s quaint for one night, but if I lived there full time, that rooster would not.

My brother in law reported that the neighbors recently invested in some hens of their own to give that rooster something better to do than nose his way around the neighborhood, waking everyone up and snacking on pumpernickel pretzels. Maybe next time I go to the lake, I can get some fresh cage-free eggs to go with my four A.M. wake up call. If I’m going to be up that early, I might as well make an omelet.

A Doggone Lie

A few years ago, I wrote an essay about a woman at my gym and her helping dog who is always by her side while she exercises. I have seen that dog for years now, the same yellow Lab in his hunter green vest, alerting any friendly folk that he is working and not to pet him. He would stay close to her, resting on his belly while she used the treadmill or elliptical machine, which made me admire her for staying active and healthy in the face of some disease that required her to need the assistance of that sad eyed canine.

Well, last week, the lady was at the gym with a new dog, a beautiful but serious looking Golden Retriever. This new dog takes the job more seriously than the last one, staying very alert by her side, never making eye contact with humans, not even smiling a subtle dog smile. I didn’t think the other dog looked particularly old, but I suppose at some point even helping dogs need to retire.

I commented on the new dog while walking on the track with my friend DK, who like me, is both a regular at the gym and nosy enough to be aware of things like a new working dog.

I said something along the lines of “Hey, look, she got a new dog.” DK said she hadn’t noticed, so we took a moment to stare at the dog in all its splendor.

“What’s wrong with her, anyway? One of the instructors told me she’s blind, but she doesn’t act blind,” I said.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” DK told me. “She is perfectly healthy.”

“Are you serious? What do you mean there’s nothing wrong with her?”

DK looked thrilled to be able to share a little gym gossip. “She has a disabled daughter. That dog is her daughter’s, not hers. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

“Pardon my language, but are you fucking kidding me?” I said to her.

“I kid you not,” she answered. “There is nothing wrong with her. Here, I’ll show you.”

Now, this part sounds like it’s going to lead to one of those moments like on The Brady Bunch, when Mrs. Brady was in court for a traffic accident. Remember that one? The guy who was against Mrs. Brady had a neck brace and was claiming whiplash, but he was really fine, and Mr. Brady tricked him into revealing his lie in court by throwing his briefcase loudly on the floor, which caused the man to turn his head to see what made that noise, thus showing a full range of motion in his neck and how could anyone try to set up Mrs. Brady anyway? Well, it was nothing like that. Except for the fraud part, to which Mrs. Brady could relate.

DK walked up to the old lady with the dog, bent down to stroke the dog’s head, and asked her what happened to the other dog. I don’t remember what the woman said since I was still in shock over the part where DK touched a service dog who was working, which on the scale of things you don’t do is somewhere between throwing your gum on the sidewalk and using the N word. The next part I remember well though and it went something like this:

“Oh, this is my daughter’s new dog. She’s on vacation right now, so I have him with me while she is out of town,” the old lady said.

“Well, he’s really beautiful,” DK said, “and so serious.”

“He takes his job very seriously,” she said.

"Enjoy your workout!" DK said cheerfully.

As DK and I walked away, continuing on the track, she turned to me and smugly said, “See?”

“I cannot believe that! I feel so violated.” I was outraged. “Who takes a service dog who isn’t even their service dog to a public place and passes him off as hers? What a fraud!”

“I told you,” DK said. “Nothing wrong with her.”

The next time I see that woman and her service dog who isn’t even servicing her, I am going to walk right up to him and scratch him behind the ears and maybe even give him a treat. Then I am going to follow her out to the parking lot when she leaves and see if she gets into a car in a disabled parking space, because if she does, I am going to report her to the police or something, because that is just wrong.

Okay, I am not going to do any of that. But I am thinking about making a little vest with a badge on it for my cat and taking him with me to the grocery store. If anyone asks me, I will say it’s my daughter’s, because that makes everything okay.