A Happily Ending Poop Saga

For about a month, the dog liberally used every inch of our front yard (and our sidewalk and stepping stones, when the yard was covered with snow) as its defecatory palace.

“I think there’s the culprit,” my dad said to me once, when he and Mom were visiting (M was in labor at the moment). We were looking out the window from our study, where my parents were arguing about which band member was who on a YouTube flick of a Beatles concert. A small dog was waddling up the sidewalk.

Then N came along, and other pooping took priority over the dog’s misdeeds.

However, the dog poop problem kept getting worse. I eventually grew certain, through occasional sightings and the quantitatively expansive evidence, that the dog belonged to the family on the end of our row of townhouses. I contemplated kicking the dog next time I saw it, or buying a bb gun to give it a reason to poop elsewhere, or calling the police, or other frantic measures, just to preserve our territory.

Just this past Sunday afternoon, then, I had a dream. I dreamed that I talked to the son of the household (in my dream it was actually one of my students) about the poop, and he cleaned it up. When I woke up, I figured I was obsessing enough over the situation that I should maybe do something about it, and so I grabbed the shovel and, fifteen minutes later, buried a paper grocery bag full of crap out behind our shed.

But finally, my friends, the outlook brightened, for just as M brought N out in the stroller for our afternoon walk, down our sidewalk came the dog, waddling. I headed straight for him, and in a firm but pleasant manner encouraged him to go home. He turned around (the poor dog was elderly and whimpered with every step) and I followed him all the way to his front door, where we were greeted by His Owner.

We conversed pleasantly, His Owner and I, and I told His Owner that I’d just spent fifteen minutes cleaning his dog’s poop out of our yard, and then praised his son’s middle school choir. His Owner, in turn, apologized profusely, told me that his son’s choir sang at the White House earlier this fall, and said that if we found any more suspicious piles of poop in our yard, to let him know.